Good book, very tender and up-beat. ( )

Written in the form of dictionary entries musing on unfamiliar English words by Zhuang (call her Z), a young Chinese woman who has come to London to study English for a year, this is tells of immigrant alienation, misunderstandings, and the small and large cultural differences that govern relationships between people from very different countries. Z's sadness and longing for human connection echo throughout her early entries as she tries to understand this very different place in which she finds herself living. She can't even communicate with the Cantonese family living on the other floor of the cheap, marginalized house where she finds a flat.

Then a chance conversation with the man seated next to her at a movie theater leads her to move in with the much older man, eventually falling in love with him. Her English improves and her dictionary entry musings become less pidgeon English and more properly colloquial but the disconnect between cultures remains and perhaps even widens as she comes directly up against the gulf that separates a more open and communal China and the privacy-obsessed, individually focused England. She stops relying on her little Concise Chinese-English Dictionary when she discovers that it lacks so much of what she wants to look up. But no dictionary can possibly detail and explain adequately all the freight of so much of what she learns.

Her English lover remains enigmatic to the reader, as he seems to to Z as well although we Western readers understand him at least slightly better than Z, seeing clearly how her year must end long before she does. His absence as a meaningful character makes Z's lonliness and sense of alienation even greater and her melancholic sorrow is oftentimes palpable during the novel. There are comedic instances to offset the pervading air of sadness though, such as when Z is completely baffled by the inappropriateness of buying and displaying pornographic magazines at her lover's home and when she disinterestedly continues feeding coins into the peep show slot in order to watch more and more of a graphic sex show.

Naive or just culturally unaware, Z doesn't come across as a victim, except, perhaps, during the beginning of her European tour, but she is an excellent tour guide to life as an outsider, one who doesn't speak the language well, doesn't understand the cultural context of things, and has no community to fold into for safety, companionship, and happiness. Her excursions outside the English language institute point out not only attitudes that we take for granted but also shine a non-judgmental but accurate light on those parts of our culture that we allow to flourish only in the seedy alleys and back streets.

I really enjoyed the structure of this novel, finding it to be more than a gimmick. And Guo's mastery in presenting the evolution of Z's language and vocabulary was nothing short of impressive. Z was the only character to receive a thorough handling but that helped to highlight her solitariness, even when living with her aimless lover. There was a feeling of emotional distance in this that is generally less marked in books written by Westerners but which seems in keeping with other Chinese authors I've read (Ha Jin comes to mind as a comparison in tone), even in those who spend time in the West as Guo herself does. I found this a thoughtful book, slow moving and serious, so it may not be for everyone. But as a look at cultural misunderstandings and relationship drift, I thought this was a good read. ( )

It is not, in my opinion, up to the standard of her other works but has merit. ( )

Interesting perspective on European culture and love. ( )

This novel was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Zhuang Xiao Qiao is a 23 year old woman from a small Chinese village, who is ordered by her hardworking parents to study English for a year in London, so that she can use these skills to further the family's business. She is completely on her own, and has to negotiate the bustling city using her concise Chinese-English dictionary, as she does not speak Mandarin fluently. Her narrative is in her broken English, and is both humorous and painful:

I worry I getting lost and nobody in China can find me anymore. How I finding important places including Buckingham Palace, or Big Stupid Clock? I looking everywhere but not seeing big posters of David Beckham, Spicy Girls or President Margaret Thatcher. In China we hanging them everywhere. English person not respect their heroes or what?

She finds a cheap flat in north London, and attends an English language school. The writing in her narrative progressively improves as she becomes more fluent in English. However, she continues to be lonely, as she cannot even communicate with the Cantonese family that lives in her building.

She meets an Englishman who sits next to her at a movie theater, and within a week she moves in with him. He is older, and quite different from her, yet she discovers herself through her love of him and her exposure to Western culture mainly by him.

The author deftly uses Zhuang's words to express her conflicted feelings about the freedoms she experiences in London, with its associated loneliness, in contrast to the sense of family and community but associated lack of freedom and individuality in her Chinese village:

But in the evening, you cook a fish for me. Not cod, not seabass, not any typical English fish. It is
a silver carp. It is like my hometown's fish. It smells of the river nearby our house. I remember I
studied a word before, and I remember how to pronounce this word. No-stal-gia. Eating carp causes my nostalgia.

The wording of the last sentence made me think of "nausea" in addition to "nostalgia", and I had a sense of her psychological nausea, as the relationship begins to fray.

At the end of the year, she is faced with a dilemma: should she stay in London with this man who loves her but cannot guarantee that he will be there for her in the future, or should she return to the mundane security of her home village?

I thought that I would enjoy this novel, but I liked it even more than I had expected. Through Zhuang's narrative we are provided with a somewhat skewed view of her lover's thoughts and desires, which makes it somewhat difficult to sympathize with him. However, this is a minor criticism, and I definitely recommend this novel. ( )