Cute pidgin pie
Jonathan Mirsky A CONCISE CHINESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY FOR LOVERS: A NOVEL by Xiaolu Guo Chatto, £12.99, pp. 353, ISBN 9780701181147 © £1039 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Slight. A slight story, slightly poignant, slightly drawn characters, occasionally slightly funny. It also has a grating aspect that is not slight: its language. The central character, a young Chinese woman in London, tells this story, I don't know why, in fractured English. So there is a lot of this: 'Patty Surly' for Patisserie, 'Queue Gardens' (get it?) and when she is in Italy talking to a lawyer, he is described as an 'Avocado'. Enough already. In 50 years of listening to Chinese learning to speak English I never heard this kind of thing: 'I not meet you yet. You in future.'
Astoundingly, half way through this book there is a passage in a different typeface, signed 'Editor's translation'. It confesses, 'I am sick of speaking English like www.spectator.co.uk this. I am sick of writing English like this.' This is a misdirected torpedo below the waterlines of readers trying to suspend disbelief while coping with the cutesy narrative.
Here is the story. Zhuang Xiaoqiao, born into a poor Chinese peasant family made well off by manufacturing shoes, comes to London to study English. Lonely and aching for love, she meets a young Englishman with whom she has terrific first sex. She loves him madly and at first he loves her, too. But he is a footloose, bisexual 'drifter' who tires of her desperate need for commitment. She is baffled by him, by England, and by her own inability to secure him completely. He sends her on a mildly interesting trip around Europe, she has a bit of casual sex, and is baffled some more by the cultures with which she has fleeting contact. She returns, mad to win back his love, he is more absent than ever, she flies back to China, which she seems to dislike, he writes her a slightly affectionate letter, and the book ends bitter-sweetly.
Sex is a preoccupation for Zhuang. She spends quite of a lot of money in London porn shops watching peep-shows, reads the instructions for putting on a condom, and learns to masturbate from a self-help manual. 'And I scream. On my own. With myself. I did it. It is like a dream.'
There is one slightly amusing bit. A friend gives Zhuang a dildo. She has no idea what it is. 'It comes out a smooth plastic thing look exactly like a small cucumber Is it a toothbrush machine?' Her friend tells her what a vibrator is for. The thing is made in China, but nothing on the box says so. 'It might become a big scandal if somebody from his village know his neighbour making plastic cocks everyday in a factory.'
One passage strikes me as painfully true. He says, 'I don't want anybody.' She: 'Really? I think I don't understand you.' He: 'Really. Look, you need me, and your love is a need. But I don't need anything, and I don't need you. That's why I can be on my own.' This passage shows that Xiaolu Guo, born in China in 1973 but now living in London, has an ear for feelings and, perhaps, even language. I look forward to her next novel, written in grown-up English.
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