A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

by Xiaolu Guo

  Afternoon. We are in your white van. We are driving to the southwest of England, to Lower End Farm, the place where you grew up. The road towards the countryside is so quiet. Like a road nobody knows, as if nobody has driven through it before. It is getting darker. It is grey. The houses beside the road are all lighted. Ah, others are all happy, with their family. I hate Christmas.

  I start to cry.

  You look at me one moment, then look at the road. You know why I am crying. You keep quiet. Only the noise from the engine carries on.

  “It will be all right,” you say.

  But I don’t know what all right even means.

  I stop crying. I calm down a bit. It’s only four in the afternoon, but the sky in countryside is already deep dark, and the rain comes with the chilly wind. The wind blows the pine trees, the grass, and the oaks in the fields. The leaves are shivering, and the branches are shaking. There must be too much wind in English’s blood.

  Dim and muddy, it is the road leading to your childhood…

  That evening, you show me around the farm with the flashlight. It is a big farm, extended to the horizon. Some sheeps or maybe cows in the distance, mooing.

  There are four old womans in this house: your mother, your grandmother, your two sisters. Three cats live in this old farm house too. I wonder if these cats are all females? No man. Your two sisters, one is 42, another is 48. You told me they never get married. Maybe they get used to this old-girl-life, so they don’t need or want a man anymore. Your father died long time ago, and so did your grandfather. But all womans survive.

  These womans, in your family, they are all farmers. They look like they have had a hard life. Their faces, reddish on the cheeks from the chilly wind. They are simple and a little tough. They are very straightforward, and have very strong impression towards every little thing. Their questions are like these:

  “Zhuang? What kind of a name is that? How do you spell it?”

  “Do you watch TV, Z?”

  “Z, how many hours does it take to fly from China to England?”

  “Bloody hell! One billion. Are there really so many people in your country?”

  They talk loudly, and laugh loudly, and chop the meat loudly in the kitchen. They remind me of my family. They are very different from Londoners.

  There are about twenty silver and golden badges on the wall of dining room. These badges are hung under the photos of sheep and cows, the winners of some farming competitions. Several local newspapers are pinned on the wall, with pictures of your sisters hugging her award-winning cow. And the cow has a big badge hung on its neck too. I don’t understand this competition between cow and cow.

  In TV room is a huge poster about sheep. Every sheep has its different name, and they do look like very different. The one on the left is called Oxford Down, look like a big fat dog, but with burnt black nose and ears. The one on the right is called Dartmoor, with messy curly wool like a woman in hair salon having an electricity perm. The bottom one is called Exmoor Horn with curly horns and short body like a snow ball…There are no pictures of human beings. It is like a sheep museum.

  I walk into the kitchen. Your mother is preparing Christmas Eve supper. I see the plates with drawing of sheep, and tea cups with the picture of cow, and the tea pot is the shape of a little goat.

  Everything in the house looks aged, as old as your grandmother. Your grandmother is ninety-seven. She lives upstairs. You take me to say hello to her. She is skinny. She is too old to move around. Also she is too old to talk. She doesn’t seem to recognise who you are.

  I try to understand these four womans, with their strong accent. I can’t tell if they are tough or friendly. There is a certain kind of brutal feel from your sister when she chops the meat that makes me timid. Is that one of the reasons you left your hometown, came to London, and didn’t want to be with any womans when you were young?

  After the supper, everybody is tired and goes to bed. We sleep on a sofabed in the living room. It is midnight. The whole farm outside is covered by a big piece of silence. No neighbours, no pub, no shop, no car, no train. It is a place far away from civilisation. It is even worse than my hometown in China. So quiet, like it’s on the edge of the world. Occasionally, one or two fireworks blow in the distance. But rest of the world is as frozen as ice in the Arctic Ocean.

  On Christmas morning, it starts snowing. The farm has a layer of light snow. I hope the farm is happy to receive the snow on a very special day. After a big brunch, we watch the Queen’s speech on TV, then we say goodbye to your family, and hit the road again. Your mother and your two sisters are waving their hands in front of the house. When I look at them from the van I feel sad. Maybe we should stay more time here, eat the Christmas turkey they prepare all day. But you say you can’t stay in there any longer. Not even one more afternoon, you say. We leave Lower End Farm behind. We leave the mud, the sheep, and the winter grass behind.

  We drive all the way back to London. There is nobody in the street, not even a ghost. It is surreal. Almost too perfect.

  The snow is like feathers gradually covers dirty London. The snow knows its own power. It understands how to make a city less bleak and more gentle.

  We stop in a local café on Hackney Road, probably the only one open. The café owner is a foreigner, maybe from Middle East. I guess he prefers to work in café at Christmas rather than spend a lonely day on his own in his rented east London basement. There are beautiful red flowers on every table. It is a kind of green-leafs-turn-to-red-flowers. I am having fish and you are having chips. We look outside. The snow is falling from the sky. The café owner says “Merry Christmas” to us. He must be so happy to see eventually two customers visit him on such lonely day.

  betray v. 1. to hand over or expose (one’s nation, friend, etc.) treacherously to an enemy; 2. to disclose (a secret or confidence) treacherously; 3. to reveal unintentionally.

  betray

  I don’t know if time takes us into its fast whirlpool, or we suck time into our inner world. It feels like Christmas just yesterday, but now here comes New Year’s day. Last night we made love like desperate people. And we made love again this morning. It feels everything so empty. Desperation. Or fear. We need make something unforgettable in our memory.

  The only thing I love completely, without any doubt, is your body. I love it. Temperature. Softness. Forgiveness. Maybe I can let you go, but not your body.

  Kissing. I hug your warmth. I think of other bodies I encountered, which I never really in love with. I start to talk.

  “You know lots of things happened in that month.”

  “That month?”

  “Yes, that month.”

  “…When you went Inter-Railing?”

  “Yes.” I look into your eyes. I really want you to know. If we don’t have much to talk anymore, maybe we can talk about that month, when you were absent with me.

  “Are there things you didn’t tell me?” You put out your hand touch my face.

  “But you never ask me! It’s like the newspaper is more interesting to you than reality. You would rather read the paper every day than talk to me.”

  “So, talk to me now,” you say.

  I’m annoyed again. Why everything has to be like this? Why I am always demanding? Why there is no curiosity inside your heart anymore?

  “OK. I met some mans on the trip, you know.”

  “What do you mean you met some men?”

  “Yes, one in Amsterdam, one in Berlin, one in Venice and one in Faro…” I suddenly can see all these faces. I can see that Portugal man with the missing teeth walking beside with me down to the dirty rocky beach under the highnoon’s sun…And I can see Klaus standing in a street of Berlin waiting for the bus. Probably now he walks into a shop to buy a bottle of mineral water with red star brand.

  “And?” You become serious.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing serious. Just, I had sex with a man who I only met for half an
hour.”

  You stare at me. Your face is frozen. There is only four centimetres between my face and yours.

  “But I didn’t like that experience, actually…” I am a little worried to carry on this story.

  There is no specific impression on your face.

  Suddenly I remember a sentence I read from the bible on your shelf recently: Father forgive them for they know not what they do.

  “I thought I should let you know, even you don’t ask me,” I continue. “And in Berlin, I was very much attached to a man, whom I met on the train. He was ill at that time…”

  Now I’m upset, but at the same time I feel relieved.

  You get out from the bed and walk to the kitchen, naked. You add some water into the kettle, without any words. You put some dry mint into the tea pot. Then you stand there and wait for the water to be boiled.

  “So if you didn’t like it, why did you do it?”

  Finally, you are angry.

  “Because…I don’t like distance.”

  “So you have to have sex with a stranger?”

  There is silence between us.

  “Every time I thought you might be with another man,” you say, “I thought we should leave each other.”

  “Why?”

  “I mean I should let you go.”

  “Go where?”

  “When I was your age, I was like you. I wanted to experience everything, and wanted to try all kinds of relationships, all kinds of sex. So I know what’s going on inside you. If you stay with me, and I see you going with other men, I will be lost.”

  Those words, I don’t want to hear. You are afraid of being lost, but I am the person in the relationship being lost first.

  “But you wanted me to travel alone!” I am crying.

  “Because you are young…too young to be so serious with me,” you say. “When you were away I often imagined you with other men, but then I stopped thinking about it. Even when you told me you were pregnant, I didn’t think about it.”

  You stand there, let the water boiling in the kettle, without move.

  I feel your coldness covering this house. I am afraid of you. I am afraid of this kind of manner. It is the coldest manner in the world.

  You start drinking your tea. A vegeterian shepherd pie is in the oven, the kind of English food I hate. Such a sad food. A kind of food shows how boring the life is. A kind of food without any passion.

  We don’t talk rest of the day.

  You are doing something with your sculptures. Pouring hot wax into the mould. The shape is obscure. I am watching a New Year’s TV programme, an animation about a nightingale. Oscar Wilde again, but this time it is visual and vivid. The nightingale is bleeding and dying, and the red rose is abandoned by the young man. “Love is better than life,” the nightingale says.

  Love is better than life! Even love brings death. Is this our New Year’s wish?

  infinity n. an endless space, time, or number.

  infinity

  When I was in the primary school, the mathematics teacher taught us to count until we were too tired to count anymore. The teacher said that the last number is “infinity.” It is a number but numberless. One can count and count until the numbers become uncountable.

  Infinity, it is an uncountable future.

  Here, in our kitchen and bedroom, our battle is an infinity.

  “Listen,” I shout. “This is serious. I need to know if I should give up my job in China to stay here with you, or if I should go back to my country.” I look at my passport on the table.

  “What is your job there?”

  “Did you never know my job?”

  “I never understood when you talked about a government work unit.”

  “Well, I worked in a welfare office.”

  “And what’s that got to do with a government work unit?”

  “Everybody in China has a work unit, and I don’t want to lose that if I have to go back. It is a lifelong paid job. It is safe, you know. If I lose that, I have no choice except making shoes with my parents.”

  “OK, whatever. You can’t make decisions about a relationship just because you don’t want to lose a job.”

  Indecision, that’s the term belongs to you. Is that why you are unhappy with your life?

  “Do you want live with me for ever?” I start again. I have to. I’m too worried.

  “I cannot say that. Nothing is for ever.”

  “You don’t believe in that concept?”

  “No. Because I don’t know the future, do I? I don’t know what the future will be like.”

  “But don’t you wish you will be with me in the future?”

  You are in silence for three seconds. Three seconds is very long for this question. Then you answer: “The future will decide for you, not you for the future. You’re from a Buddhist country, I would have thought you would know that.”

  “OK. From now on we don’t talk about future. All I know is: our Chinese live in the expectation. Expectation, is that the word close to Future? The farmers grow their rice in the spring, and they water it and expect it grow every day. The rice sprouts turn into green and the rice pole grow up taller. Then summer comes and the farmers look forward to grain growing bigger. Then the autumn harvest, and the grain becomes golden. Their expectation is nearly fulfilled, but not complete. After the harvest they separate the straw and millet. The straw goes to the shepherd’s pens or the pig’s yard, and the millet goes to the market for sale. All this is so that a family can have better life in the winter and in the coming Spring Festival. In the winter they burn the roots and grass on the fields to nourish the soil for next year’s re-plant. Everything is for the next step. So look this nature, life is about the expectation, but not about now, not about today, or tonight. So you can’t only live in today, that will be the doom day.”

  You stop listening. You are busy pouring hot wax into a mould. There are three different moulds, one is like a brain, and another one look like an eyeball, the third one is a big nipple. After wax pouring, you are waiting for it is cooled down, so you can pull the mould away from the wax.

  Your pencil drawing is on the kitchen table. A drawing, lots of human organs, lie inside of a bath. Human bone, a leg, ears, lips, eyeballs, arms, intestines…it is almost ugly. Actually, very ugly. But also very strong. Once you said to me you think youself are ugly, though I don’t feel like that. You said you are always fascinated by ugliness, ugly people, ugly buildings, ruins, rubbish.

  I raise my eyes, contemplating the plastic bath you made. It sits there, silent, holding something vague, holding something heavy.

  expel v. 1. to drive out with force; 2. to dismiss from a school, etc., permanently.

  expel

  Today, my government work unit calls me. Suddenly, I am dragged back to that society.

  The officer in the phone say seriously, in the Communist way: “You have a contract with us. We have to warn you to come back before you do wrong things there. Don’t break our rules. Return back in one month according to the rule in our work unit, otherwise you will be Kai Chu (expelled) from our organisation.”

  Kai Chu!

  Expelled!

  I am so angry that I want to throw my phone away. A year in this country, I had almost forgotten how stupid those Chinese rules are. An individual belongs to the government, but doesn’t belongs to herself. Yes, I want to be expelled. Please expel me. Please. But I also know they just threaten me. They always threaten the little people, in the name of the whole nation. And you don’t have a chance against it. It is like Mao’s little red book, it is written in the imperative tone.

  dilemma n. a situation offering a choice between two equally undesirable alternatives.

  dilemma

  I read this word so many times on the paper and never understand it. Now, when think about whether I should stay here or go back China, I understand this word totally.

  It is a difficult word just like what it means. Dilemma. Knowing this word, I also learn
these words: paradox, contradictory, alternative.

  “If I leave this country, or say we split up, what you will do?” I ask.

  “I don’t want to be with another woman.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why you don’t want another lover?”

  “I just want to be on my own.”

  ‘“Really? And you don’t want to be with a man lover either?”

  “No. I don’t want anybody.”

  “Really?” I think I don’t understand you.

  “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.”

  You say: “I’d like to be a monk. I want to give up everything: the city, desire, sex. Then I can be free.”

  “We should let each other go,” you say to me.

  “But we still love each other,” I insist. How can two lovers just decide to separate while they still in love with each other?

  “We should leave each other.” You look at me, as it is said by a priest, a sober priest in the church.

  Suddenly I feel that you have already made up your mind. And nothing can be changed. But I still remember that love song you sang to me before, under your fig trees in the garden. The lyrics and the melody are still wandering around in my ears:

  It’s the heart afraid of breaking

  that never learns to dance

  I think you only want the joyful part of love, and you dare not to face the difficult part of love. In China we say, “You can’t expect both ends of a sugar cane are as sweet.” Sometimes love can be ugly. But one still has to take it and swallow it.

  I start to deal with my immigration papers. I have to apply for an extension of my visa. It is frustrating. I need to show my bank details to the Home Office that I have stable income to live here, but certainly I don’t have any income. Everything is family supported. How much money I left in my bank? Two hundred pounds? Or one hundred and fifty pounds by tomorrow? Most importantly, I don’t have any reason to stay here, except for you. And I feel confused. I want to stay but I don’t know if it is the right decision. My parents’ opinions now seems don’t bother me very much like before. Plus, they know nothing of my life here.