Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers

7th June, 1978

Breakfast: tuna. Supper: tuna, I try to eat as much green veg as I can, but the fridge is well guarded (a tomato went missing yesterday)

Panama , Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. These are the central American countries which we have passed, although some we have not seen because the boat has been too far out to sea.

Next page, you arrive San Diego and San Francisco.

You not really write about love. Was love not in your nineteen-year-old life? Is really only blue sea in your brown eyes at that time? What about your dreams?

After that long voyage, you longing for something you can do with your hands. Twenty years old, you go art school. You studying sculptures there by making your hands dirty. A photo between the pages. I guess was that the sculpture you made. Enormous naked man, lying down and taking over whole floor of big studio. A giant, but naked giant. That the main subject of your sculptures. Then you writing you have sex with several boys in that art school.

First I think I reading wrong and you mean girls not boys, but then I look again. Matt, Dan, Peter. These are boys names.

“I don’t feel any real love in my heart,” you write.

When you move London, you go squat in old houses and meet mans in street every night. You talk to the strangers in the park and you go to home together. You say you feel warm by touching other’s body, by having sex with mans. You think you a homosexual, you call it Gay . But you even can’t remember faces and names the second day.

Then there is another diary. Is some years later. You feel empty that kind of hunting-boy-life, so you become campaigner, a demon-strator. You for campaign against the capitalism, against the McDonald developing, and you go India stopping mining companies doing developmenting there. You go with young demon-strater group to everywhere, Delhi, Calcutta, Mexico, Los Angeles…Always drifting around. But I thinking maybe you not know what want to do in your life. Or why you travel so much? In those squatter ’s days, the sculpture you made are all destroyed. Nothing left. You don’t have a woman lover being with you (or maybe you never want to?), and you don’t have a man lover being with you either. Only thing you had, you wrote, is “ sex and seduction. ”

You wrote about days you work as youth worker. I didn’t understand what this job about. You wrote about holiday trips with children. There photos between pages: you with teenagers laughing in front of camera. You love those teenage boys. You work that for ten years. But how come you stop a job which you really like? I don’t understand. Maybe because your gay life? Maybe kind of scandal as homosexual teacher. I never know…Anyway you left your job, and what happening next?

My eyes becoming sore. I am tired of reading, all these words, my brain is just too full by your past. Everywhere is you, and you are everywhere, every sentence, every page.

I put back all these old diaries, old letters. My hand covered by dust. I wash my hand, under cold tap water. I thinking probably you never read these things for long time. Maybe I am first person opening these boxes in last twenty years.

Night is long. Quiet outside. Cars passing sometimes. I sit on your chair. I feel bit heavy. I feel bit difficult to breathe.

I sleep on your bed alone, which we slept every night together since I move in. Actually is single bed supposed be for one person. I realise this again. I am awake. I trying draw map of you, map of your past. But is difficult. I see the morning lights outside through the garden, through fruit tree without flowers. Is fourth day you away and is the day you will be return. You said you be here in the morning, about half past ten.

Nine o’clock now. I get up, and I brush my teeth, and I make some tea. I put my cold hand on teapot to get warm. I wait for you to return. But now I scared about you to return. You will drift with your Chinese woman, in boat on the ocean. No seashore in distance. She floating away and passing in your life like piece of wood on the sea.

One hour going by, and waiting is painful. I try study singular and plural from textbook which Mrs. Margaret give to us.

child-children

mouse-mice

tooth-teeth

goose-geese

wolf-wolves

ox-oxen

fairy-fairies

thief-thieves

foot-feet

larva-larvae

I don’t like plural, because they not stable. I don’t like nouns too, as they change all the time like verbs. I like only adjectives, and adverbs. They don’t change. If I can, I will only speak adjectives and adverbs.

A quarter past eleven, you come back with a cold wind through door. You put down dusty bag on floor then you kiss me, you hug me. You are pleased to see me. I ask how is your friend, you say everything is fine. You smile and you are excited and you want make love. Like nothing happened. You say you miss me. But how I can miss someone easy coming easy going?

“Did you have a nice time?” you ask.

“No.”

“Why not? Did you go out to see people and make friends?”

“No. I don’t want make friends.”

“So what did you do?”

What to say? I feel the sea inside me too big, too never-ending to speak.

bisexual adj. sexually attracted to both men and women.

I am a woman and you are a bisexual. Both love beautiful mans so much. But beautiful young mans is always living in our imagination. He is daily life’s fantasy. The reality about him so fragile that is easy to be broken, like delicate Chinese vase.

You have so many books to do with naked mans. On your shelf: The Nude Male, Gay Writings from India, The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing, Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography …How I know you not going to go with the beautiful gay man again and ruin my life? How I trust you stay with me? Maybe I ruin rest of my life to be with you.

Is there lots of free love in gay’s world because they not produce children? No children then no serious weight. They not need considering responsibilities of next generation, and they not need worry about the pregnancy/abortion. But how that work if far-east foreign woman fall in love with West gay man?

When we see beautiful mans in street, or when we talk to beautiful mans in pub, we have very different view. You always wondering how he will look like when naked, just like you look at good painting carefully with magnifying glass. But my first question to that man more practical: will he possible become my husband? If so, will he having stable incomes and be able buy house for his family?

cabbage n. a vegetable with a large head of green leaves.

slug n. 1. a land snail with no shell; 2. a bullet; 3. a mouthful of an alcoholic drink.

chinese cabbage + english slug

Hardly days is absolutely sunny, sunny until sun falling to the west. Sky in England always look suspicious, untrustful, like today’s. You see me sad but don’t understand why.

Standing in the garden, you ask me: “Do you want to have your own little plants in this garden? I think it should be a woman’s garden as well.”

“Yes. I want. I want plant Chinese cabbages, some water lily, some plum tree, and maybe some bamboos, and maybe some Chinese chives as well…”