Xiaolu Guo（在线收听）

BBC Learning English
 People and Places
Xiaolu Guo

Amber: Hello! Today, we meet a young and highly-successful

Chinese writer and film-

maker, Xiaolu Guo. She talks about learning English, and

about how she had fun trying to find the right kind of

English for a character in her best-selling novel, A

Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.

Xiaolu’s own life is a fascinating story. She grew up in a

small ‘fishing village’ in rural China. (‘Rural’ means

to do with the countryside.) Then, she went to study film

in the huge city of Beijing. She describes this as a big ‘

clash’ (a shock, or conflict). It was a very different

experience from what she was used
to as a young girl.

We’ll listen a couple of times to Xiaolu describing her

early life. The first time, try to catch what made her time

in Beijing a new and different experience.

Xiaolu Guo

I stayed in this fishing village until I was 18 and it’s a

really rural village in the South East China Sea – it’s a

fishing island. So that kind of life is a completely

physical way of living. Every day is about (survival). So

when I came to the film school in Beijing – it’s a very

big art academy, and I studied there, I studied French

cinema, European cinema, for 10 years. It starts from a big

clash because I couldn’t even speak Mandarin because in my

village we speak local dialect. So in Beijing, I spoke

Mandarin and I started to write poetry and make films.

Every day, we discuss something but very far away from our

life, for example, we would talk about Jean-Paul Sartre or

American 1930s cinema, but I think I managed to write

novels, fictional stories, to represent that clash between

a little person and that environment.

Amber: So Xiaolu says that living in Beijing was a shock

for her because she couldn’t even speak the language,

Mandarin, and that she and her fellow students would talk

about subjects that were far removed, or ‘far away from’

their lives – subjects like the French existentialist

writer Jean-Paul Sartre, or American
1930s cinema!

Listen again and notice Xiaolu explains how her life gave

her a subject to write about in her novels! She says her

stories could ‘represent’ the clash she was experiencing

as ‘a little person’ in a strange, new place, or

‘environment’.

Xiaolu Guo

I stayed in this fishing village until I was 18 and it’s a

really rural village in the South East China Sea – it’s a

fishing island. So that kind of life is a completely

physical way of living. Every day is about (survival). So

when I came to the film school in Beijing – it’s a very

big art academy, and I studied there, I studied French

cinema, European cinema, for 10 years. It starts from a big

clash because I couldn’t even speak Mandarin because in my

village we speak local dialect. So in Beijing, I spoke

Mandarin and I started to write poetry and make films.

Every day, we discuss something but very far away from our

life, for example, we would talk about Jean-Paul Sartre or

American 1930s cinema, but I think I managed to write

novels, fictional stories, to represent that clash between

a little person and that environment.

Amber: But it didn’t stop there. Xiaolu left China five

years ago and moved to London.

She didn’t know very much English. But, only last year,

her first novel in English, A Concise Chinese-English

Dictionary for Lovers, was short listed for a major

literary prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction!
She explains that she wanted to write the book in a kind of

broken English to show that the character was learning to

understand a strange, new place. But, she says it was

really fun to write. Can you work out why?

Xiaolu Guo

I want to use this kind of foreigner’s, strange English to

represent that character come from another nation, (she

tries) to plug herself in and to communicate with this big

room … It was a difficult novel to write but it was also

the most fun of what I have ever written in my life, I

think, linguistically. I had great fun with the linguistic

side which I was using my second language, which I only

started to speak during my writing. So in a way, it’s a

kind of easy
process I should say, because it took 3 years to finish

that novel. In my third year, my English
 
more or less resembled the character in my book - she could

speak nearly, nearly fluent English. And in the end of the

book, she speaks English after 3 years of living in

England. So that was kind of in tune with my own personal

life.

Amber: Xiaolu says she had great fun with the linguistic

side of her first novel in English because the character’s

story was ‘in tune with my own personal life’ – if

something is in tune with something else, it means is very

similar. So as Xiaolu’s English improved, so did the

English spoken by her character!
Well, we hope you find Xiaolu’s story inspiring – perhaps

YOU could write a best-selling novel in English! Why not

try?