Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers

You start to eat salad, and the room goes quiet. The white cabbage is very crunchy, and the red carrots are hard too. Your teeth are trying to grind them into pieces. Your face looks uneasy.

In my hometown, we don’t use these two words:

Physical work / mental work

All the work is called “

”-scavenge the living. Making shoes, making tofus, making plastic bags, making switches…All these works rely on our bodies. And bodies earn our living back. Now I come to abroad studying English. And I do that with my brain. And I know in the future I earn living from my brain.

You insist physical worker better than intellectual.

“An intellectual can have a big brain, but a very small heart.”

I never heard before that. Why you think of that?

“I want a simple life,” you say. “I want to go back to the life of a farmer.”

Intellectual: “

”(zhi shi fen zi)

“

” mean knowledge, “

” mean molecule. Numerous molecule of knowledge will make up man knowledgeable.

In China, intellectual is everything noble . It mean honour, dignity, responsibility, respect, understanding. To be intellectual in China is splendid dream to youth who from peasant background. Nobody blame him, even in Culture Revolution time and seemed these people suffered, but really was time for them having privileged to being re-educated, get to know another different life.

So if you don’t want to be intellectual, then you a Red Guard too, like Red Guards who beat up intellectuals during Culture Revolution. A Red Guard who living in the West.

I never thought I would like a Red Guard, but I like you. I am in love with you, even if you say you not intellectual.

I not intellectual either. In the West, in this country, I am barbarian, illiterate peasant girl, a face of third world, and irresponsible foreigner. An alien from another planet.

isolate v. to place apart or alone; chem. obtain (a substance) in uncombined form.

You are not at home again. You have so many social contacts, so many old friends need to see and chat, so many ex-lovers live in the same city as well, and I don’t know anybody in this country. I am alone at home. Dictionary checking, checking dictionary…I am tired of learning words, more new words, everyday. More exercise on tense, make a sentence on the past participial tense, and make a sentence on past conditional tense…So many different tenses, but only one life. Why waste time to study?

The garden outside is quiet. The leafs are breathing and figs are growing. Bees are beeing around the jasmine tree. But I feel lonely. I look that male nude statue under the fig tree. He is still facing down, like always. An enigma. Totally an enigma. Whenever I go to the modern museum, like Tate Modern, I never understand those modern sculptures. I hate them. They seem don’t want to communicate with me, but their huge presence disturb me.

The house is empty. Is the loneliness an emptiness?

I remember my grandmother always recite two sentences from the Buddhist sutras:

She explains it means the emptiness is without form, but the form is also the emptiness. The emptiness is not empty, actually it is full. It is the beginning of everything.

So far, I don’t see the emptiness is the beginning of everything. It only means loneliness to me. I don’t have a family here, and I don’t have a house or a job here, and I don’t have anything familiar here, and I only can speak low English here. Empty.

I think the loneliness in this country is something very solid, very heavy. It is touchable and reachable, easily.

The loneliness comes to me in certain hours everyday, like a visitor. Like a friend you never expected, a friend you never really want be with, but he always visit you and love you somehow. When the sun leaves the sky, when the enormous darkness swallow the last red strip in the horizon, from that moment, I can see the shape of the loneliness in front of me, then surround my body, my night, my dream.

Something missing, something lost in my life, something which used to fulfill in my China life.

We don’t have much the individuality concept in China. We are collective, and we believe in collectivism. Collective Farm, Collective Leadership. Now we have Group Life Insurance (

) from the governments as well. When I was in middle school, we studied Group Dancing . We danced with 200 students as part of the school lesson. We have to dance exactly the same pace and the same movement in the music. Maybe that’s why I never feel lonely in China.

But here, in this place in the West, I lost my reference. And I have to rely on my own sensibility. But my sensibility toward the world is so unclear.

I take out one a book from your shelf, Frida Kahlo. That Mexican woman artist. It is a picture album of her painting, her life, and her terrible illness, being disabled after the bus accidents. So many self-portraits. I thought one painter only does one of these in his life, like one person only have one gravestone. But Frida Kahlo has so many self-portraits, as if she died many many times in her life. There is one called Self-Portrait with Necklace of Thorns . She has the sharp and heavy eyebrow like two short knives; her eyes like black shining glass. She has the thick dark hair like a dark forest; the necklace of thorns climbing on her neck. There is a black monkey and black cat sitting on her shoulder.

The impression on her face is so strong. I learn that she had to plant metal in her body so that to support her survive from disable. I feel my heart is being penetrated by the thorns she painted. I feel painful.

When I put down Frida Kahlo, I think of you. You love the heaviness of life. You like to feel the difficulty and the roughness. I think you like to feel the weight of the life. You said you hated IKEA, because furnitures from IKEA are light and smooth.

I walk to the garden, staring at your sculptures again, one by one, carefully, attentively, thinking of you with my new eyes. That naked man, without head, stubbornly faces down towards the ground with twisted huge legs. What makes him so suffering?

humour n. 1. an ability to say or perceive things that are amusing; 2. an amusing quality in a situation, film, etc.; 3. a state of mind, mood; 4. old-fashioned fluid in the body- v. to be kind and indulgent.

Yesterday at home we celebrate my birthday. I turn to 24. OK I don’t know when is my real birthday, but passport birthday can be great excuse to have a big Chinese meal.

It is the year of goat. My animal sign is goat too. It is my second twelth year after the year of my birth, which means I am having my most important year in my life, because it is a year I meet my destiny. My mother will say that.

We are having a hotpot birthday party. You say you never eat hotpot meal before. You say it is interesting to see people sitting around a big table and cook food from a steaming pot in the middle.