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5/14/2019 (PDF) Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, in The Tapestry
pestry of the Creative…
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Language, Eros and Culture in

PDF Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-
English Dictionary for Lovers, in
The Tapestry of the Creative
Word in the Literatures in
English. Forum Editrice, Udine,
2013, pp.267-279.
Annalisa Oboe
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 A Concise Chinese-E…
Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s  D O W N LO A

https://www.academia.edu/17876879/Language_Eros_and_Culture_in_Xiaolu_Guo_s_A_Concise_Chinese-English_Dictionary_for_Lovers_in_… 1/17
5/14/2019 (PDF) Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, in The Tapestry of the Creative…
Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu

Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English
Dictionary for Lovers
Annalisa Oboe*
This essay looks at the formation of a thoroughly idiosyncratic idiom, an

between language which is a daring experiment in transcultural communicat
and an elusive but creative tool of self-construction in Xiaolu Guo’s Con
Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. It also proposes a reflection on erotic lo
and how language and Eros are entangled with questions of personal and c
tural identity – singular and plural – as they unfold in the meeting of China
England in an unusual Bildungsroman. Shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize
fiction, A Concise Dictionary is Guo’s first novel in English, or what she refer
as her “immigrant English”1, and is structured formally, thematically, and ling
tically,
Guoaround the movement
was selected as one between languages.
of Granta ’s Best of Young British Novelists
2
2013 , having been acknowledged as an exciting artist figure in the contempor
British panorama, though the Chinese-born novelist was already an establish
film-maker, writer and critic in China before moving to London to take u
British Council film-making scholarship in 2002. She has since published Eng
revisions of her early novels written in her mother tongue, and more work
English, while keeping cinema always in view. Her filmography includes over
films as a director/producer or screenwriter, for some of which she won pres
ious awards3.
What I am going to say about A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary is rela
to a larger project, which has to do with discourses on love, time and the fut
across late modern Anglophone fiction, where I am trying to see h
contemporary novels engage with the notion of love, and whether by lookin
it they can begin to define a space for the subject as an ethical being.
contemporary fiction we do find earnest attempts to engage with love a
*
University of Padua.
1
See Rahbek, 2012.
Language, Eros and Best
2 Granta 123: Culture in Xiaolu
of Young Guo’s A Concise
British Novelists. Chinese-E…
2013, 4 (Spring).  D O W N LO A
3 Information about Guo’s production can be found at http://www.guoxiaolu.com/.
Information about Guo s production can be found at http://www.guoxiaolu.com/.
268 Annalisa O
regulative idea, as a notion enabling moral decisions. And I am also interested

love as a political concept – whether the degree of utopianism and hope tha
embedded in love can be used to move from ‘the self in love with the other
discuss social coexistence and a wider engagement with a good and
community, which is indeed a political matter and requires something lik
‘macro’ ethics for public life.
From the point of view of this project, A Concise Chinese-English Diction
for Lovers is a particularly dense text. The book follows a year in the London
of a young Chinese woman from a family of peasants become prosperous sh
makers, who is sent to the West to learn English, as a kind of future investm
for her family business back home. During her stay the protagonist – “unp
nouncable” Zhuang Xiao Qiao who soon becomes “Z”, like the last letter of
English alphabet4 – goes through a process of language learning which is inse
rable from the unfolding of her love for an older Hackney man, a frustra
sculptor and unwilling Pygmalion, who slowly moves from passionate love m
ing and language teaching and translating into dryness, solitude and silen
while Z acquires more experience, more confidence, more words.
Defined as a kind of “feminist Bildungsroman of migration” 5, the stor
about language, about translation, and about the probably unbridgeable g
between China and England, between growing up Chinese and growing
English, and what this does to one’s own way of thinking and feeling; it is a
about what can and cannot be understood and shared in love talk and throu
body language across vastly divergent cultural experiences. The book regis
the development of Z’s English, from the faulty expression of an absolute beg
ner to a very recognizable, fluid personal idiom able to convey both her be
taken by storm by English (as by love) and her own taking possession of a fore
culture (and of a man) while shedding all sorts of taboos along the way.
The paratextual elements surrounding and introducing the book immedia

Language, Eros and
capture the Culture
reader’sinattention
Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise
and need to be Chinese-E…  DOW
briefly surveyed. Some N LO A
unnu
bered pages at the beginning of the text contain:
bered pages at the beginning of the text contain:
– a dedication to a man;
– a disclaimer on the content that says, “Nothing in this book is true, except
– the love between

a fragment her dialogue
of typical and him”;between man and woman stating that “usu
the man says a thing, and the woman questions it”;
4 Guo, 2008: 18. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
5 Thomas, 2007: 1.
Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
– and a solitary piece of crooked handwriting saying sorry of my engli

which occupies a whole page.
This paratextual framing constitutes a threshold that dramatically affe
the book’s interpretation and reception, and certainly seems to be an imp
tant aspect to the actual writing itself. Guo is manipulating the paratext of
book on purpose, to lead the reader to its focus – love, gender relationsh
men and women speaking and thinking differently, and its use of ‘b
English, which is the only indicator of ‘cultural’ distance in this frame, and
which she apologizes.
Far from being bad, Z’s mixed Chinese-English voice is a captivating exam
of linguistic creativity in the hybrid form of a diary+dictionary, which I beli
invokes Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977) as a hypotext. To descr
his own lover’s discourse, Barthes proposes a portrait of “the lover at wor
caught in action, which he says “offers the reader a discursive site: the site
someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the lo
object), who does not speak”6. This description fits closely the basic structur
A Concise Dictionary, in which Guo produces a one-way dialogue between Z
her loved one, who is unnamed and always addressed as ‘you’ or ‘him’. The bo
presents a sort of “dialogic monologue” contained in fragments scattered ins
the entries of a rather chaotic and personal dictionary, compiled erratically
sifted through the distorting lenses of linguistic and cultural translation.
Guo’ lover in action is of course produced in language, and because langu
is the target of a fierce comparative cultural critique in the novel, the act of lov
itself – sex, desire and eroticism – become sites of ethical reflection and po
Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A
negotiation.
negotiation.
Language
Old saying in China: ‘ Birds have their bird language, be
have their beast talk’ ( ). English they to
another species (10).
The novel’s unique trait is Z’s narrative voice, which has rightly been descri
as “an astonishing literary performance of Chinese ‘learner’s English’”7. At
beginning, her language is positively uneven and full of examples of loan tran
tion (in which her thinking in Chinese deeply affects her work of word-for-w
conversion into English), malapropisms, showing how complex the process is
6 Barthes, 2002: 3.
7 Gilmour, 2012: 218.
https://www.academia.edu/17876879/Language_Eros_and_Culture_in_Xiaolu_Guo_s_A_Concise_Chinese-English_Dictionary_for_Lovers_in… 10/17
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5/14/2019 (PDF) Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, in The Tapestry

pestry of the Creative…

Language, Eros and Culture in

Download with Google

Download with Facebook

or download with email

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu

This essay looks at the formation of a thoroughly idiosyncratic idiom, an

regulative idea, as a notion enabling moral decisions. And I am also interested

The paratextual elements surrounding and introducing the book immedia

– the love between

Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

– and a solitary piece of crooked handwriting saying sorry of my engli

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

Language, Eros and Culture in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-E…  D O W N LO A

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