Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers

“No.” You take two cold vegetarian samosa from the shopkeeper.

“And, you don’t think he can love that young girl either?”

“No. None of them love each other. No love exists between them,” you comment. “They are loveless.”

I bite the cold samosa. Ah. Loveless.

“What you will do if you were the man in the film?” I don’t let you go.

“I would leave the town, just like I left Lower End Farm. Things are dead and finished in that town.”

I stop eating samosa. One more thing I need to know: “Why you don’t want to be with that young woman either? She is young, and pretty and simple. They can be together for the rest of their lifes.”

“Because she demonstrated how limited she is at the end of the film. Remember the last scene? When they sit on the hill looking down on the suburb, and she says to him that one day they will live in one of those houses? He listens to her and throws the stone down the hill.”

“Why a house, or a home, is a boring thing?”

“Because…”

You stop. You don’t want to explain anymore. Maybe you know you are being unreasonable.

We arrive at home at midnight. The little street is dead quiet, and the house is dead cold. We are so tired; nobody wants to have further discussion. We know clearly how far we could reach if we carry on the discussion about love and life. We both give up, without saying it.

Then I realise it is indeed Saturday night and Sunday morning. A doom night and a doom morning. An absolutely doom moment in my life. There is a special delivery letter sitting on the kitchen table waiting for me. You got it this morning. My heart is racing, racing badly. No, I shouldn’t open this letter. It is from Home Office.

It is you who open it. You read it, and give it to me, without any words.

There is a black stamp on the page twenty-two of my passport, from IMMIGRATION & NATIONALITY DIRECTORATE of Home Office. It is a pentagonal stamp. Pentagon, a strange shape. Only the Pentagon near Washington has that strange shape. It is a doom stamp.

The application for my extension of UK visa has been refused.

Once you told me I am an agnostic , or maybe even a sceptic , but now I proof myself that actually I am a fatalist , like lots of Asian people are. The result of my visa application is in my expectation. Not because I am being a pessimist , just because I know there is no actual reason for both me and authority to extend this visa. I already knew this when I prepared my paperwork. I say there is no reason, I mean even you: you can’t be my reason to stay in this country. And you can’t save my life. You, a possible Anarchist , always want to be free.

I put my passport back in a drawer. I sit down, switch on the lamp and open my notebook. I look at all the words I learned in the last week. Then I look at all the words and phrases I learned since the first day I arrived in this country: Alien, Hostel, Full English Breakfast, Properly, Fog, Filtered Water …So many words. So much I learned in the passed year. The vocabularies on my notebook, day by day, become more and more complicated, and more and more sophisticated.

I open a new page, a blank page; I start to write down the film title Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . The pen holds in my hand with the anger, and deep disappointment-the anger about my fate, the disappointment about you.

“What are you writing?” You stand in the opposite corner of the room, staring at me.

I don’t want to answer.

“I know what you are writing, actually.”

You voice sounds vague. Not only vague, but also cold.

You turn your back and throw me the last sentence before we go to bed:

“AT LEAST YOU’RE STILL LEARNING A LOT. EVEN IF EVERYTHING IS BROKEN.”

You voice horrifies me.

You leave me, and disappear into the bedroom.

race n. 1. a contest of speed; 2. any competition or rivalry, e.g. the arms race; 3. a rapid current or channel.

“Life is a race against time.” My father always says so:

“Wasting time is shameful, just like leave the grain rotten in fields.”

“An inch of time is an inch of gold, but you can’t buy that inch of time with an inch of gold.”

After all these education, I believed time was the most expensive thing in the world. When I was a teenager in the middle school, I dared not waste just even twenty minutes to play around. Staring at blue sky having daydream is a fool. Sleeping on the grass under the sun is a lazy cow, without producing milk for the people. Wasting time will earn nothing back in the future. But here, in this country, people spent whole afternoon having a pot of tea, and spent hours having a piece of cheese cake, and a whole night to drink beers in the pub. If life is a race against time, why people pay so much attention on tea and cake and beer?

“You are too anxious. Try to relax. Try to enjoy life.” You say it to me, on the way back from Wales to London.

If life is a race against time, like my father and my teacher said, then life itself must be a very aggressive thing. There is no peace and no relaxation in a race. And one’s life would never win anything in the end. Because whatever effort one makes, time always parallels passing the one. The one will eventually stop racing one day, let time goes by. My father is wrong, I think. People here they don’t live like that.

And what about you, my lover? Life to you seems not a race at all. Because you already decide not living in the towns and society, but living in the nature, living with the sea and the mountain and the forest. So there will be no more social struggle to you anymore. So you can achieve peace. You talk slow and walk slow, you let the time pass by you, because you don’t want to be in a race. So you won’t lose, in the end.

And here it comes to the fate. I met you; a man was born in the year of Rat. A rat never has a stable home, like me, born the year of the goat. Two unstable animals, two homeless things. It won’t work. It is our destiny.

In China, we say: “There are many dreams in a long night.” It has been a long night, but I don’t know if I want to continue the dreams. It feels like I am walking on a little path, both sides are dark mountains and valleys. I am walking towards a little light in the distance. Walking, and walking, I am seeing that light diminishing. I am seeing myself walk towards the end of the love, the sad end.

I love you more than I loved you before. I love you more than I should love you. But I must leave. I am losing myself. It is painful that I can’t see myself. It is time for me to say those words, those words you kept telling me recently. “Yes, I agree with you. We can’t be together.”

departure n. the action or an instance of departing.

Dear Student, Welcome to London! On finishing our course, you will find yourself speaking and thinking in your new language quite effortlessly. You will be able to communicate in a wide variety of situations, empowered by the ability to create your own sentences and use language naturally.

This is what language school leaflet says. Is it true? Perhaps. Mrs. Margaret tells me she is proud of me speaking English like this among her other students. When our last lesson finished, I finally pluck up my courage and run after her:

“Mrs. Margaret, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course you can.” She smiles.

“Where did you normally buying your shoes?”