【英语听和读】郭小橹

 Amber 1: Hello! Today, we meet a young and highly-successful Chinese writer and filmmaker,

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 2 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 3’ (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 4 because in my village we
speak local dialect. So in Beijing, I spoke 5 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 6 stories, to represent that clash between a little person and that environment. 
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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 7 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 9. I had great fun with the linguistic 8 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 
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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 10 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?