About one third into Guo Xiaolu's novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers , a man at an English pub says to the confused protagonist, a young Chinese woman named Z, "English is a bloody nightmare, isn't it?"
Yet the author, who writes in her second language, is capable of turning a nightmare into muse. Have you ever talked to someone who did not speak your language very well and wondered about their innermost thoughts? By narrating those thoughts in semi-expressive broken English, Guo Xiaolu has brought us some insight into that. In what might be called stream of expressiveness writing, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers makes fun of English, the second language Z is studying in London. This is precisely what makes the book so enjoyable to read. To borrow a line from the reputed literary critic James Wood, who describes English as a wan cousin of French, in Guo's novel English becomes a wan neighbor of Chinese.
Guo has intentionally broken from the eloquent flow of Yiyun Li's stories or the dogged correctness of Ha Jin's latest novels to present something that is both fresh and at the same time awkward. It is awkward for precisely the reason that people that are different from us are awkward; they speak a different language, have a different culture or simply have had different experiences. Reading, of course, is all about bridging those gaps and arriving at an understanding, so the question becomes how far should the reader stretch to achieve that understanding. Guo, in a sense, meets us half way, as demonstrated in those lines that open the book:
"But I at neither time zone. I on airplane."
"I not met you yet. You in future."
This is the way Chinese sentences are formed. Though Chinese, with its many complex square pictographs, is one of the oldest and richest languages and might make Westerners step back in apprehension, its grammar is remarkably simple and non-confusing. No tense, no pronoun-based verb inflexion, no "to be" verbs before preposition words to worry about – the Chinese language is actually a more natural form of speaking. One piece of evidence that those English grammar elements are non-essential is that, even when they are omitted in a sentence, it does not prevent one from understanding.
And that becomes the legitimate basis of Guo's language game in the novel, and she plays the game well. When her protagonist Z comments that "We bosses of our language. English is boss of English users", or makes fun of the plural grammar rule by saying "everybody know jeans or trousers always one thing, you can't wear many jean or plural trouser," or taunts English as a "sexist language. In Chinese no gender definition in sentence", or observes the sensibility that in "Chinese we starting sentence from concept of time or place," while in English the person is always first, Guo demonstrates cultural differences in a playful manner. What can one do but laugh fondly?
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