Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-born British novelist and film-maker whose work deals with themes of migration, alienation, feminism, translation and trans-national identities. She spent the first 30 years of her life in China, first in the coastal province of Zhejiang and then in Beijing, where she studied sociology and film making at the Beijing Film Academy. She went on to study Documentary Directing at the National Film and Television School in London, where she is now based. She has also lived in Zurich and Berlin.

A Lovers’ Discourse is written from the perspective of a young Chinese woman whose arrival in London coincides with the run up to the Brexit referendum. After completing her MA in sociology and filmmaking in Beijing, she knows she does not want “to work in an office” nor does she want “to stick around in China”. She leaves with “too many unanswered questions” about herself but also a firm conviction — after reading a biography of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead — that further education, in the form of a doctorate in visual anthropology at King’s College London would give her the tools to be in the world as a woman.

I wanted to be a woman in the world, or really, a woman of the world — I wanted to equip myself with an intellectual mind so that I could enter a foreign land and not be lost in it. I would have a stance or mission, a way of navigating as an outsider. (p.7)

The idea of research as a safe, controlled framework within which to first experience being a stranger in a new environment is one that resonates with me.

There are many things I could say about the book (the narrator’s being a stranger to Western culture brings into focus differing notions of freedom, privacy, authorship, and time) but I will stick to language here. Throughout the book, the protagonist feels outside language or language-less, struggling to understand and to be understood.

Every day I hear some new English words. I hear them but I don’t register them. As if I was half deaf. (p.19)

I felt like a fish swimming in a new part of the ocean, unable to recognise the seaweed. (p.26)

The following is an extract from a conversation with her partner:

“I am feeling wordless. I call it wu yu. It’s like I have lost my language.”
“Why lost? If you have really lost one language, aren’t you gaining another?” (p.43)

When Chinese terms find no translation into English, the narrator exposes the limits of what can be imagined and perhaps even lived in the English-speaking world. Her attention to the gender of nouns, absent in Chinese — mother tongue as opposed to fatherland, for instance — spotlights some largely unquestioned associations in English and in her partner’s German. (p.93)

Xiaolu Guo herself started writing in “broken” English as she puts it shortly after arriving in Europe in her early thirties. I find it curious to think of language as “broken”. Is it something that can or should be fixed? We would not speak of a young child with a limited command of their native language as speaking in a ‘broken’ manner.

When the narrator and her partner take a trip to Italy, it is the structure of languages more broadly speaking that asserts its boundaries:

This language was not too foreign for you, and you could make out many words, especially from food menus. But it was foreign to me. Even though this culture uses the same twenty-six Latin letters, just like most European languages — the same alphabet. But I didn’t come from this alphabet. I came from the non-alphabetic. I came from ideograms. I came from 50 000 characters. Each character is composed with many symbols and strokes, like a tangled forest of meanings. (p.198)

In counterpoint to the narrator’s initial emphasis on the intellect, the novel is very sensual. Wordless at times, she feels her way around her foreign environment. She is feeling for where her new home might be. In London, Germany or in China. In a flat, a house or a houseboat.

As I originally thought about it, doing a PhD was a way of finding a place in the real world — with a set of specialist vocabularies and methods I would have more chance to compete: but I didn’t find myself engaged in most of my seminars, nor was I inspired by talking to my supervisor: Why was that? I asked myself. Perhaps I didn’t find anything real in that environment. (p.57)

Referring to her reading of The Lover by Marguerite Duras, I found it notable that the narrator places gender above nationality as a source of belonging.

But why did I not identify with the Chinese man, since I too am Chinese? For me, being female trumped everything else. I felt everything that French girl felt. Absolutely everything. Even though I had first read the book at university in China and had never travelled abroad at that point. I hadn’t felt any cultural barrier between my life and the French girl’s life. Strange. But there it was. (p.91)

I always had problems readying Balzac, Dickens or even Hemingway. Somehow, I found their tone pompous, and their unbending masculinity was impossible for me to penetrate. Only when I found paragraphs that carried a sense of the defeated, the ignored and the dying did I feel connected. Only then did I feel at last there was something in their books that I could get closer to. (p.92)

A final idea that I would like to pick out from A Lover’s discourse is that of the ‘transplant’, term employed by the narrator to refer to her need to put down roots in England. Below is an extract of an exchange between her and her partner.

“You knew I felt the need to make a family in the West. The need to put down roots. But the big decision had to be made: where were we going to live?” (p.204)

“I read that in China, people would transplant large numbers of trees and bring them to the newly developed cities. Chinese people seem to be very adaptable, like their trees.”
“Yes, but once the trees grow older, you can’t transplant them again. The roots are too embedded into the ground”. (p.205)

“How many times could one restart a life?” (p.206)

This certainly echoes with my deeply felt desire to put down roots in France, where I am making a life for myself as an adult. Mixed with this desire is however a certain unease around the finality of this process. Exchanging with others that have moved away from their place of birth or from another place they once called home, I have come to believe that this possibility of leaving again probably never disappears. It is simultaneously a gift and a burden.

It’s about leaving and not returning. But why did I keep thinking about leaving? Was it the fear that you would leave me one day? Or was it the despondent feeling of my having left China for the West? (p.73)