2023-11-04
50 分钟Xiaolu Guo talks about her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. The book was her first written in English and made prestigious fiction shortlists on publication in 2007. Twenty-three year old Zhuang – or Z as she’s called in England because no-one can pronounce her name – arrives to spend a year learning English. The loneliness and strangeness of the city are overwhelming, but as she struggles through the challenges of nouns and verbs and the oddities of English speech, she meets and falls in love with an older English man. When he invites her to ‘be my guest’ she brings round her suitcase and moves into his house. Written in broken English that subtly improves throughout the novel, with perfectly funny insights into English cultural quirks and her own Chinese background, this is a romantic comedy about two people who neither speak one another’s language nor understand one another’s culture. (Photo: Xiaolu Guo. Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images)
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Welcome to the World Book Club podcast.
I'm Harriet Gilbert and this month we've been reading a novel called A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers.
It isn't a dictionary, although it does have dictionary qualities, as we'll see.
Essentially, it's a love story about a young Chinese woman and a somewhat older British man trying to bridge the enormous gap between their languages and their cultures.
And joining us to answer questions about it from BBC listeners around the world is its Chinese born British author, Xiao Lu Guo.
Xiao Lu, welcome to World Book Club.
Thank you.
Since leaving China, you've lived in the usa, in France, in Switzerland, in Germany.
Where are you living now?
Are you actually based here in Britain?
Yeah, I'm mainly in East London.
Actually.
I've been commuting between Berlin and London because teaching.
I've been years teaching cinema filmmaking in Berlin and then since last year actually creative writing, really Literature department.
Well, as well as having wanderlust, Xiao Lu Guo is multitalented, a poet, published while still in her teens, an award winning filmmaker, a novelist and the author of two memoirs, of which the most recent, called Radical, was published just this year.