Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers

“But what so different of eating plants? Everything has its life. If you are so pure, why not just stop eating? So you can have no shit?”

“You are impossible to talk to!” You stand up, leaving the dinner table.

Typical argument 3: (On career)

I say I want to be a great English speaker among other Chinese. And I want to do something big in my life and get fame.

“You’re so bloody ambitious. What’s the point of fame? Why not just try to be yourself.”

“Why ambitious is not a good thing?” I ask.

“Well, for a start, it makes you pretty difficult to live with,” you say.

These words hurt me.

“OK, so I have big ambitious, and it ugly. But why you want to show your sculptures to others? You should just make your own thing and never show it to people!”

“I want to show the sculptures to others because I am curious about what they might think. I’m curious about their reactions. I don’t care about being someone big. I don’t care about fame or money.”

“That because you are a white English living in England and you own the property and you have social security. You are boss of yourself, so you have dignity. But I don’t have anything here in your country! I have to struggle to get these things!”

I am almost shouting, but I should not shout in your private property. People call policeman to come anytime in this country.

identity n. 1. the state of being a specified person or thing; 2. individuality or personality; 3. the state of being the same.

I try to be quiet with you in the house. I have been reading books you gave to me. I quickly finished Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales . I loved the nightingale story. It was so sad. Nightingale’s love not being valued by the prince at all. Why beautiful story always is sad? And I loved the selfish giant who has a huge garden too, but the last sentence made me cry. It goes like this: “And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.” I start reading To The Lighthouse . You are right, it is quite difficult for me. On the back it says it is about a middle-aged woman with her eight children in a summer house. Eight children without any husband? It must be a hard book. I holding breath while read the first page. I can’t breathe freely because there are hardly full stops. Virginia Woolf must be a very wordy person. The writing is so forceful, is nearly painful for me to read. I suddenly understand that you must be suffered a lot from me, because I am so forceful and demanding on words too. And even worse, you are forced to listen my messy English every single moment. You are unlucky to be my lover.

I put down the book and leave it for my future reading.

I am being caught by the word “ identity crisis ” on The Times . I write it down into my notebook. I always want to find this word, now here I encounter it. Now I want think about my own identity, in an intellectual way.

My mother told me: “Your skin too dark and your hair too thin. You don’t look like me and your father at all. You are like your barbarian grandmother!” She said to me: “Look at your big feet. A real peasant’s feet! Nobody will want marry you.”

I hated her, and I wished she could die immediately.

But she is right about this: so far nobody really wanted to marry me.

When I was in middle school, my schoolmates always laughed at me. So I spend time on reading to avoid talking to them. I read Snow White And Seven Dwarfs in Chinese, and I saw my mother is as evil as that stepmother queen. But I didn’t have a snow-white skin and I was just a peasant girl. So there was no prince will come save me and that’s my destiny. Being a teenage I was dying to run away from my hometown, the town which my mother always beat me up and blamed me for everything I have done wrong, the place without my dream and my freedom.

The day when I arrived to the West, I suddenly realised I am a Chinese. As long as one has black eyes and black hair, obsessed by rice, and cannot swallow any Western food, and cannot pronounce the difference between “r” and “l,” and request people without using please -then he or she is a typical Chinese: an ill-legal immigrant, badly treat Tibetans and Taiwanese, good on food but put MSG to poison people, eat dog’s meat and drink snakes’ guts.

“I want to be a citizen of the world.” Recently I learned to say this. I would become a citizen of the world, if I have a more useful passport. Ah Mrs. Margaret, that conditional again!

anarchist n. 1. a person who advocates the abolition of government; 2. a person who causes disorder.

anarchist

“What is Anarchist ?” I raise my head from Guardian .

We are in “First Choice,” a cheap greasy spoon, forty pence for a cup of tea. We like this kind of places. They don’t ask us leave if consumption less than £1 after one and half hour. I love east London.

You have an Earl Grey tea, and I have coffee. Liquidish eggs flow everywhere on my plate. Kids nearby are crying-two crying baby with one fat mother, no husband again.

Frown gathers on your forehead.

“Anarchists? Anarchists don’t believe in government. They think society shouldn’t have a ruling government. That everybody should be equal,” you answer, slowly.

“Sound like Communist,” I say.

“No. Communists believe the working class can control the power of the whole society, but Anarchists don’t believe in any power. They are very individualistic, whereas Communists believe in the collective.” You stop describing, as some working class man looks at us, stop biting his sausages.

My interests being aroused. I want to discuss more. You are my academy.

“But sounds Anarchist is the end of the Communist, or the advanced Communist. Is target or triumph of the Communism revolution is that, through the revolution wiping out the difference of the classes and eliminating the ruling government. No country boundaries. So the world can be equal . Am I right?”

“Maybe.” You open another page of paper.

“So are you an Anarchist?” I am not giving up.

“I was an Anarchist. But not anymore.” Now you give up your paper, and answer me seriously. “Most Anarchists are in fact bourgeois. They don’t really want to give up any advantages. They can be very selfish. I don’t think I am that kind of person now. I want to give up material things, and live the simplest possible life.”

The simplest possible life is the most complicated thing to achieve I say to myself.

“So who are you?” This time I really want to know.

“I don’t know. Maybe an atheist . I don’t believe there is a god living in the sky. I don’t believe in Capitalism, but I’m also not convinced by Communism, the way it is now.”

“So do you believe in anything?” I ask.

“Hm,” is your only answer. “What about you?”

“Me? I do believe there is a kind superpower control all our life. It is also the power above the nature. And this superpower human being cannot really do anything to change it.”

I look outside of the window, and I am sure right now in this very right moment there is a mysterious superpower above us, above our cheap café and above our silly conversation.

You point the ad of Donnie Darko in the paper and ask me: “Have you seen this film? The teacher in it says to Donnie: ‘You are not an atheist , you are an agnostic .’ I think you are an agnostic too.”