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World Book Club: Xiaolu Guo: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Discussion & Talk

Xiaolu Guo

04/11/2023 GMT

Xiaolu Guo: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

BBC World Service - World Book Club, Xiaolu Guo: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

A romantic comedy told across the barrier of language and culture

A romantic comedy told across the barrier of language and culture.

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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