Xiaolu Guo’s long road to freedom
Chinese writer’s memoir details her past, explores pull of family and loneliness of the immigrant
“A wanderer, uprooted and displaced. A nomad in both mind and body.” This is how internationally-acclaimed novelist, filmmaker and new mother Xiaolu Guo describes her life in the West as she begins Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China.
Guo’s memoir is a strange mixture of harrowing stories combined with the steely determination of a desperate youth. She is raised by her impoverished and illiterate grandparents after her birth parents adopt her out to an even poorer family (who then gave her back). Guo finds life in the village to be miserable, except for the small kindnesses her beaten down grandmother can offer, even after her grandfather commits suicide. One day, around the age of six, she hatches an escape plan: she will become an artist like the student painters she comes across one day.
Perhaps it’s a life she was destined for. The title refers to a Taoist monk’s prophecy for the young Guo, predicting she would travel far beyond her near-feudal fishing village of the 1970s. Today, Guo is one of the bright lights of the British literary scene. The magazine Granta included her as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in its last list in 2013. Her previous novel,
I am China, was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. And her films have shown at film festivals in Venice, London and Toronto.
Written in short scenes, Guo details a difficult life at home after she goes to live with her parents in town where she meets a surly brother she never knew she had. She is resented by her mother, a former Revolutionary Guard-turned-factory worker, but loved by her somewhat distant artist father, an “intellectual” who was rehabilitated during the Cultural Revolution. He encourages her love of writing, introducing her to Western authors in translation such as Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway.
Despite being repeatedly sexually assaulted from the age of 12 and recovering from a love affair with a teacher gone badly wrong, Guo is determined to escape her stifling life for Beijing. She decides film will be her calling because in her eyes, it is the newest type of art form; it takes her two tries, but Guo is able to win one of seven spots at the country’s only film school (“Beijing! I’m coming! Independence! Freedom!” — she recalls the hallowed cry of youth from almost anywhere).
The world of the Big City is truly excit- ing — the ghosts of 1989 and Tiananmen Square have just passed — she encounters avant-garde artists, gains new boyfriends (Chinese and American) and writes her first novel while studying the films of the French New Wave. But postgraduate life is frustrating as censors turn down her film scripts and she has to turn to writing for TV soap operas to make a living. Eventually, she wants more and comes across a scholarship to England.
London turns out to be a disappointment as Guo misses the “pulsating, human energy of China.” But she never lets her broken English and isolation hinder her and decides to tough it out. She finds herself accidentally choosing exile over censorship (after a passport mix-up) and writes her first novel in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, based on her own experiences of learning her new home’s language on her own.
Yet Guo is never able to leave China or her family completely behind: not when she finds out her father has cancer, and not when she gives birth and finally calls her emotionally distant mother to give her the news.
Nine Continents is a compelling and often startling read, written in a direct style with a few moments of sentimentality. Guo intersperses scenes from a Buddhist folk tale throughout the book, providing a dreamy feel to an often hard-edged story. While she does discuss the many influences on her artistic life, Guo does not really reflect on her practice. It feels strange that a prolific novelist and filmmaker would exclude discussing her many works in English and Chinese.
What Guo does detail is the quest for freedom in a changing communist China, the anguished pull of family and the loneliness of a new immigrant. Ultimately, the memoir is a feminist meditation on the yearning to balance individuality with belonging and find a home.