The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Sex is as important a subject as death’
Novelist Xiaolu Guo tells Helen Brown about giving French theory an eastern spin – and why our alphabet bores her
‘Wu Yu!” says Xiaolu Guo, “It means: feeling wordless, like you have lost your language.” It’s a sensation that can still overwhelm Guo, a 46-year-old Chinese novelist and filmmaker, even after living in Britain for two decades. “Sometimes,” she tells me, pouring tea in her east London flat, “I feel I am lost in translation. Even after writing seven books in your language. My pen just floats above the paper and none of my languages – Mandarin, English, Zhejiang dialect – comes out.”
In 2008, the shifting, cultural gulf between East and West became the theme of Guo’s first, erotically charged Englishlanguage novel, A Concise EnglishChinese Dictionary for Lovers. She returns to it in her new novel A Lover’s Discourse, named after the 1977 text by French philosopher Roland Barthes, about the relationship between an English architect and a Chinese PhD student who has moved to London in 2016 and is unable to find the word “Brexit” in her phrase book.
While Guo’s Australian partner, philosophy lecturer Stephen Barker, herds their talkative seven-year-old daughter Moon from the room, she tells me she finds it “very natural to note down the conversations between a man and woman, especially if they speak different languages and have different cultural backgrounds. I was also inspired by Barthes’s work on language and love and wanted to write my own version from a woman’s point of view, from a foreigner’s point of view, and from a different linguistic background.”
Guo’s book opens with a quote from Barthes: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words. My language trembles with desire.” But her work contains at least as much frustration as desire. Missing the “tangled forests of meaning” embedded in her native ideograms, she finds the Roman alphabet lacking in poetry. She also struggles with the limits our language places on romance.
In A Concise English-Chinese Dictionary for Lovers she complained that: “‘Love’, this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved’. All these specific tenses mean Love is a time-limited thing. Not infinite… In Chinese, Love is ai. It has no tense. No past and future… If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last forever.”
Her new book deals less with the grand concepts and more with the practicalities of modern cohabitation. Her unnamed heroine is baffled by the “sad” word “flat” for a living space. She is also unapologetically blunt about the physical disappointment of sexual intercourse: “After penetrative sex I felt lonely, and a little empty,” she says. “Once you were out, my incompleteness came back to me even more powerfully.”
Today Guo tells me that writing about sex “does not come naturally to me. But the subject is as important as death. Women’s sexuality is so undiscussed in literature and cinema. Where’s our female Georges Bataille? Where is the female Pier Paolo Pasolini?”
suspect Guo’s straight-shooting has its roots in her brutal upbringing. Born in Zhejiang province in 1972, she was given away by her abusive mother and artist father (broken by the 15 years he spent in a prison camp in the 1950s for daring to paint) to a peasant couple in a remote mountain village. After two years, this couple returned her to her paternal grandparents, claiming they could no longer afford to feed her. Three years later, her violent grandfather committed suicide by drinking pesticide.
In her 2017 memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, Guo recalls squatting beside his corpse feeling “a deep sense of shame. My grandmother told me that dead people became ghosts but I didn’t see any… All I felt was a searing anger, and an icy-cold loneliness somehow emanating towards me from the shrivelled body.”
More horrors were to come: as an “isolated” girl, Guo was sexually abused by a well-respected local man who would take her to the dump and pull down her knickers.