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A young Chinese girl
moves to London to learn English, and sits down to write a novel
that reflects on this experience. Writer and film-maker, Guo Xiaolu
wrote her seventh novel in English, to tell the story of a ‘Z’ who
finds herself lost in the freedoms of London, until she falls in
love.
Owing
a lot to diaries she kept during her own time in London on a
film-making scholarship, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for
Chinese Lovers has just been shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize.
Justin Hill caught
up with her at the Hong Kong Literary Festival to talk about her new
book, China and
issues that are exciting young Chinese writers.
…you were just
talking about the young generation of Chinese writers. Do you sense
that there is a movement of young people, and what makes them
passionate to write?
Chinese people
think in terms of family, not individuals. Older people in China
they talk about collective memory, like the Cultural Revolution for
example, or a certain kind of story that belongs to the collective
memory. And they’re not sure how to bring in the personal point of
view, which for me is crucial when writing about your life as a
Chinese person. For me it’s important for my personal voice to be
heard.
In the west I’ve
noticed a lot of newspaper stories about China in the abstract, but
there is a lack of personal stories and that is what I am writing.
I don’t try and represent a group of people. I just tell my own
story.
And I’m
thirty-something, which means I fall between the two generations.
Kids in China capture new fashions and products much faster than
English children, which is scary! They have the best ipods, the
best computers, they are being sent to study English or French by
their parents. I’m always curious about them because the young
people are so different, and I wonder what kind of future are they
going to bring with them.
These children are
the product of the One Child Policy.
Yeah.
It strikes me that
the one-child generation are fundamentally different from other
Chinese: they have their own rooms, their own TVs, they have
disposable income, and most important they have their own rooms: a
level of privacy that people of your age could not dream of.
Yeah, I fall in the
gap between the collective background and the modern life. When I
was in university, for all seven years there were six people in my
dormitory. We had three bunk beds and my entire youth was spent
with five other people. We shared secrets, but we also have to be
careful what we talk about because we live as a group. This was
like the past, but at the same time I was living in politically open
times – from the 90s to now – and then I came to the West, which is
overwhelmingly individual, and the challenge that gives is partly
what the book is about, the individual idea of freedom and love.
How did that level
of individuality feel after spending so much time as part of a
group?
A lot of people
think I have culture shock, and I didn’t have it at all. It’s a
truth of the modern times that there’s so much information on the
media and the internet and TV and radio, and I don’t know what is
culture shock. It doesn’t exist any more. But instead of culture
shock I had identity confusion, because I no longer felt Chinese,
but I lived in a subconscious way, and do the things I’m supposed to
do.
There’s a process of
losing and finding, and I played with my identity but at the same
time I started to realize that I am a Chinese person. It was
a process of creating an identity but also getting away from an
identity and that was how my book started.
I wanted to explore
this idea in a funny way. And all my other novels were painful,
trying to figure out pain, but I wrote the whole of this book in
pubs around Hackney, one very rough pub on Hackney Road, and some
chippies.
Those places were a
mix of working class and artists and I just entered because I wanted
to know what those people talked about, and the humour in the book
came from being in
England.
Before I came to England I didn’t know what is humour.
In China we make
great jokes, but I don’t think we have great ‘humour’. Humour is
different because the English detach yourself from the situation and
make a joke about yourself, and the Chinese don’t have that. They
don’t detach themselves like that.
People have been
talking about freedom for writers in China. What has been your
experience?
Freedom is
essentially an illusion. For example in the West, some of the books
I submitted but the publishers said no one will buy it, and is even
worse than that just having to change a few sentences, but here it
is worse, it is a form of commercial censorship. And it is even
grander than other forms, and if you’re not aware of that then
you’re being fooled.
I see you’ve been
appearing with Sid Smith to talk about China. Have you read his
books and how do you feel about foreigners writing about China?
Yes. I haven’t read
his books, but I thought it was quite interesting that he has
written three books about China but has never been there. Because
for a fiction writer it is all about your writing, I don’t care what
kind of reality an author lives in. And at one point I said to Sid
Smith: don’t go – never go to China! Just keep that idea in your
head. It might be the end of your Chinese story if you go.
What he is doing is
not new. There are a lot of European writers who write about
America but never go. For example Boris Vian, who wrote L'écume
des jours (Foam of the Days) about a black jazz musician in
New Orleans
and he had never been there. I really admire his work. And that is
the key, a book is not necessarily true, it is all an author’s
imaginative work.
Yesterday you and
Su Shi and Xu Xi were talking about the different types of Chinese –
the violence of Mainland Chinese, and the beauty of Taiwanese
Chinese, and the hip Cantonese in Hong Kong, and you said that you
felt freer writing in English. Do you feel Chinese culture and
history is a weight pressing down upon you?
Very much. But
there is part of you that doesn’t want to admit that. But what is
important is the independence of your thoughts and how you write
about it.
You’ve just been
calling for more good translators to bring the works of young
Chinese writers into English. Can you recommend any of your
favourite Chinese novelists for translation?
Zhu Wan has only
just been translated – ‘I love Dollars.’ Other’s I couldn’t talk
about because I don’t read many young Chinese novelists, because
most of them are publishing on the internet. It’s sad because
Chinese publishers only look at the commercial values of a book, so
most of them publish on the internet.
Why did you switch
to English to write this book?
My book my other
six books were all in Chinese but I was twenty-four when I arrived I
was fascinated in how English people speak. They speak in a very
weird and wonderful way. In a pub there were lots of rough men use
fascinating language, so whenever I went to a pub I couldn’t
understand anything, but after about six months I thought I would
use the language as a starting point. And I was worried that it
would be very dry, and I didn’t want that.
One thing that
struck me was the English passion for weather reports. This is the
weather now, and this will be the weather this afternoon, and then
the weather tomorrow will be like this. And it was great fun for me
to write about these kind of things in a novel.
Links
Read a
review of Guo
Xiaolu Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lover's
www.guoxiaolu.com Guo
Xiaolu's homepage, with poems, film and tour details
Podcasts from the 2007 Man Booker Hong Kong Literary
Festival
Read an extract from Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for
Lovers
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