by Xiaolu Guo
“Here, take these.”
I turn back. I see you pulling out a small bunch of snowdrops from the soil. You hold out those little white flowers and walk towards me.
“For you.”
I take the snowdrops. I gaze at the flowers in my hand. So delicate, they are already wilting in the heat of my palm.
epilogue n. a short speech or poem at the end of a literary work, esp. a play.
epilogue
Day 1
It’s a big aeroplane, with so many seats, so many passengers. Air China, with the phoenix tail drawn on the side. This time, it takes me east. Which direction is the wind blowing now, I wonder? Coming to England was not easy, but going back is much harder. I look at the window and it reflects a stranger’s face. It’s not the same “Z” as one year ago. She will never look at the world in the same way. Her heart is wounded, wounded, wounded, like the nightingale bleeding on the red rose.
The lights are on again. A Chinese steward smiles at me, and serves my second meal: rice with fried pork and some broccoli. It is hot, and sticky. As my body slowly digests the rice, I understand, deeply, in my bones: we are indeed separated.
People say nowadays there are no more boundaries between nations. Really? The boundary between you and me is so broad, so high.
When I first saw you, I felt I saw another me, a me against me, a me which I contradicted all the time. And now I cannot forget you and I cannot stop loving you because you are a part of me.
But, maybe all this is just nonsense, Western philosophical nonsense. We can’t be together just because that is our fate, our destiny. We have no yuan fen.
Thirteen hours later, we touch down in Beijing. I spend day walking around the city. The sandy wind from the Mongol desert drags through bicycles, trees, roofs. No wonder people are much stronger and tougher here. The whole city is dusty and messy. Unfinished skeletons of skyscrapers and naked construction sites fill the horizon. The taxi drivers spit loudly on to the road through their open windows. Torn plastic bags are stuck on trees like strange fruits. Pollution, pollution, great pollution in my great country.
I call my mother. I tell her I have decided to leave my hometown job and move to Beijing. She is desperate. Sometimes I wish I could kill her. Her power control, for ever, is just like this country.
“Are you stupid or something?” she shouts at me in the telephone. “How will you live without a proper job?”
I try to say something:
“But I can speak little bit English now, so maybe I can find a job where I use my English, or perhaps I will try to write something…”
She strikes back immediately: “Writing on paper is a piece of nothing compared with a stable job in a government work unit! You think you can reshape your feet to fit new shoes? How are you going to live without government medical insurance? What if I die soon? And what if your father dies as well?”
She always threatens to die the next day. Whenever it comes to this deadly subject, I can only keep my mouth shut.
“Are you waiting for rabbits to knock themselves out on trees, so you can catch them without any effort?! I don’t understand young people today. Your father and I have worked like dogs, but you haven’t even woken up yet. Well, it’s time you stopped daydreaming and found yourself a proper job and a proper man. Get married and have children before your father and I are dead!”
As I keep silent and don’t counter her, she throws me her final comment:
“You know what your problem is: you never think of the future! You only live in the present!”
And she bursts into tears.
Day 100
During my year of absence, Beijing has changed as if ten years passed. It has become unrecognisable.
I am sitting in a Starbucks café in a brand new shopping centre, a large twenty-two-storey mall with a neon sign in English on its roof: Oriental Globe. Everything inside is shining, as if they stole all the lights and jewels from Tiffany’s and Harrod’s. In the West there is “Nike” and our Chinese factories make “Li Ning,” after an Olympic champion. In the West there is “Puma” and we have “Poma.” The style and design are exactly the same. The West created “Chanel no. 5” for Marilyn Monroe. For our citizens we make “Chanel no. 6” jasmine perfume. We have everything here, and more.
At night, some friends take me to a Karaoke. The place is not made for me. It is for Chinese men who seek freshness when they have grown tired of their old wives. In empty rooms, young women in tight miniskirts with half naked breasts wait for loners to come and sing. The dim rooms remind me of the pubs in London: smoke, leather seats, low tea tables, loud voices and crazy laughing. I sit and listen to men singing songs like “The Long March” or “ The East Is Red.”
I feel out of place in China. Wherever I go, in tea houses, in hotpot restaurants, in People’s parks, in Dunkin Donuts, or even on top of the Great Wall, everybody talks about buying cars and houses, investing in new products, grabbing the opportunity of the 2008 Olympics to make money, or to steal money from the foreigner’s pockets. I can’t join in their conversations. My world seems too unpractical and nonproductive.
“But you can speak English, that alone should earn you lots of money! Nowadays, anything to do with the West can make money.” My friends and my relatives keep telling me this.
Day 500
I think I have received your last letter. The last. It arrived a month and a half ago and there has been nothing since then. I don’t know why.
I think maybe I will never go back to England, the country where I became an adult, where I grew into a woman, the country where I also got injured, the country where I had my most confused days and my greatest passion and my brief happiness and my quiet sadness. Perhaps I am scared to think that I am still in love with you.
But all these thoughts don’t matter too much anymore. Only sometimes, when I am alone in Beijing in my flat, an obscure night, noisy construction sites outside my window, I still can feel that pain. Yes, the geography helps a lot. I know the best thing to do is to let each other go, to let us each live on a different planet, parallel lives, no more crossing over.
Dear Z,
I am writing to you from Wales. I’ve finally moved out of London. The mountain behind my stone cottage is called Carningli. It is Welsh, it means Mountain of the Angel…
I brought some of our plants and the old kitchen table here. I think the sunflowers are missing you. Their heads have bowed down in shame—as if they have been punished by their school teacher—and their bright yellow petals have turned deep brown. But I think your little bamboo tree is very happy because we have had Chinese weather for the last month. Last week I planted some climbing roses outside my cottage because I thought it would be good to have more colours around.
Every day I walk through the valley to the sea. It is a long walk. When I look at the sea, I wonder if you have learned to swim…
Your words are soaked in your great peace and happiness, and these words are being stored in my memory. I kiss this letter. I bury my face in the paper, a sheet torn from some exercise book. I try to smell that faraway valley. I picture you standing on your fields, the mountain behind you, and the sound of the sea coming and going. It is such a great picture you describe. It is the best gift you ever gave me.
The address on the envelope is familiar. It must be in west Wales. Yes, we went there together. I remember how it rained. The rain was ceaseless, covering the whole forest, the whole mountain, and the whole land.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Rebecca Carter, Claire Paterson, Beth Coates, Alison Samuel, Rachel Cugnoni, Suzanne Dean, Toby Eady, Clara Farmer, Juliet Brooke, Audrey Brooks, Nan Talese, Lorna Owen, and all the others who have followed this book on its journey.
Xiaolu Guo
A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers
Xiaolu Guo was born in the Zhe Jiang province of southern China. After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy, she wrote several boo
ks published in China. She has written and directed award-winning documentaries, including The Concrete Revolution; her first feature film, How Is Your Fish Today?, was an Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 International Women’s Film Festival. Since 2002 she has been dividing her time between London and Beijing.
www.guoxiaolu.com
ALSO BY XIAOLU GUO
Village of Stone (translated from the Chinese)
Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
Praise for Xiaolu Guo’s
A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers
“By turns hilarious and poignant. Xiaolu Guo has given us a fresh and bittersweet addition to the literature of cultural displacement.”
—The Oregonian
“Funny and charming…more than a love story; its psychology is politically acute, and things noted lightly in it linger in the mind.”
—The Guardian (London)
“Xiaolu Guo has written an inventive, often humorous and poignant story of a woman’s journey over cultural and emotional borders.”
—Gail Tsukiyama, Ms. Magazine
“Xiaolu Guo’s novel, her first in English, is smartly absorbing. Grade: A”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers cleverly courts our assumptions about the chasm between Chinese and Western cultures, only to upend them. It is an utterly captivating, and disorientating, journey both through language and through love.”
—The Independent (London)
“As absorbing as a peek into a diary.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“It is impossible not to be charmed by Xiaolu Guo’s matter-of-factness…. It is equally hard not to be impressed by Guo’s vivacious talent.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers is original, humorous, and wise. Within imperfect language one can find many perfect truths of the human condition. The misunderstandings are really the understandings of the differences of the heart between men and women.”
—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
“Xiaolu Guo is a fabulous writer, fresh, witty, and intelligent. She handles language in an astonishing way. I don’t think I have enjoyed a book as much in the last twelve months.”
—Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2008
Copyright © 2007 by Xiaolu Guo
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Random House Group Ltd., London, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2007.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher gratefully accepts permission from Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., to quote from “The Rose” by Amanda McBroom, © 1977 (Renewed) Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. and Third Story Music, Inc. All Rights Administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.
Dictionary definitions reproduced from Collins English Dictionary—Pocket Edition, with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2005.
“Just the Two of Us,” words and music by Ralph MacDonald, William Salter, and Bill Withers, copyright © 1980 Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc. (ASCAP), Antisia Music, Inc. (ASCAP), and Bleunig Music (ASCAP). Worldwide Rights for Antisia Music, Inc., administered by Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition as follows: Guo, Xiaolu, 1973–
A concise Chinese-English dictionary for lovers / Xiaolu Guo. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Chinese students—Great Britain—Fiction. 2. English language—Study and teaching—Fiction. 3. Intercultural communication—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9450.9.G86C66 2007
823'.92—dc22 2007003118
www.anchorbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-45563-5
v3.0