A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
by Xiaolu Guo
Chatto & Windus, HK$208
When Chinese writer and filmmaker Guo Xiaolu moved from China to London on a British Council filmmaking scholarship in 2002 she began a diary, written in English. That diary was to become the inspiration for a novel.
Five years on, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, the incisive, affecting story of the year 24-year-old Zhuang Xiaoqiao spends in London as a language student, written in the style of a journal, has become Guo's second novel to be published in English and the first she has written in English.
Village of Stone, Guo's first novel published in the west, a tale of a young orphan's upbringing in a poor fishing village, was a story that mirrored her own. Although it was a work of fiction it drew strongly on her childhood experience, with Guo telling an interviewer that her protagonist was her 'double in real life'.
Now Guo says that, although all writers draw from what's in their hearts, her new novel isn't autobiographical. Still, this acutely observed story is clearly grounded in the experience and observations of Guo, who lives in a council flat in Hackney, the suburb where her fictional language student goes to live with the older man who becomes her lover.