A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've purchased this book twice and read it many times. It makes me sad to give it away, but I can't keep carrying it around the world.

This is a story about love, but it's also a story about culture clash, and language, and misunderstandings. The cover copy tells me it's a comedy, but I mostly found it sad, and it left me longing.

The story itself is about Zhuang Xiao Qiao (she calls herself Z), who begins by arriving in London for a year-long study abroad program to learn English. She's very quickly overwhelmed by information and the confusion of live in the UK after growing up in rural China - I suspect the humour is supposed to come out of the culture clash, and her confusion of words. After feeling increasingly lonely and isolated, she meets a man who, through a misunderstanding, she ends up living with and falling in love. The rest of the book is detailing out their complicated relationship, with the clashes between Western and Eastern ideas, and Z's increasing self-awareness and maturity.

I think part of why I like this book so much is because of the narrative of being a stranger in a strange land. Certain I haven't experienced anything like the confusion that Z does in the book, but that feeling of being in a place where everything is backwards and upside down, and people do things that leave you completely confused, and even time itself seems to run differently, is something I can completely understand. I think the author manages to capture that quite well.

I also find Z herself a very interesting character, and I enjoy seeing London, Whales, and then parts of Europe, through her experiences.

The writing style, I think, could take a bit to get used to. The novel is written through Z's point of view, and part of that is that her English is very poor at the beginning, and improves throughout as she learns new words. As well, her lover is never named - he is just "you" throughout, but not in a way that reads as though the reader is who she's addressing. It's like you're reading Z's diary, in a way, the diary she addressed to her lover.

There is a sex scene later on in the book that would probably be labelled "dubious consent", but it's not written in a way that's exploitive. It's also very quick - I think it lasts less than a paragraph.

As I said, I hate to let this book go, and I have a sneaking suspicion I'll come across it again sometime and end up buying it for a third time. It's satisfying to read when one is feeling at loose ends about identity and where one belongs in the world, and I don't think those feelings are going to go away.

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