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. ( )

Zhuang doesn't want to go abroad to study English, but her newly wealthy parents are determined to send her. Her first months in London are achingly lonely, but her life changes when she meets a stranger in a movie theater. Thanks to a linguistic misunderstanding, she's soon living in his small East London flat.

This set-up sounds like a lot of cliched chick lit and a lot of cliched East-meets-West stories, but luckily, the novel transcends both genres. Unlike a lot of Chinese heroines, Zhuang isn't instantly enlightened or liberated by Western culture; in fact, she is baffled by Westerners' seemingly endless appetite for individuality and privacy. Reading her meditations on the English language, and how it reveals the differences between English and Chinese culture, is one of the most fascinating parts of the book. We see how linguistic barriers complicate romantic relationships, like when she fails to comprehend that her boyfriend's previous "love of men" refers to a series of homosexual relationships.

As Zhuang's English improves, her first-person narration matures from stilted, childish prose to eloquent exploration of sex, freedoms and relationships. She emerges as a unique, quirky character who quietly imbibes a few English values while holding onto her Chinese culture. I found this book eloquent and insightful, and would recommend it particularly to people curious about Chinese culture. ( )

A breathe of fresh air from the usual oriental themed books. The story is humorous, the main character is fun-loving. It is not packed with heavy chinese traditions / beliefs / rituals but instead the author dotted the book with examples the "chinese" mindset, keeping it light and funny.