A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Kindle Edition

I found it highly readable. The strength of the writing kept pulling me to the end. Its a romance in a dark and bleak place. It has much humor and philosophical parts. The book within the book is a humorous tour of EU countries and provides a different view that most of the book portrays. It is about growth being inevitable, and it's also about attraction and building bridges with the unknown. It does not answer if we humans can complete these journeys.

Zhung is a young Chinese girl who is sent to London for a year to learn English by her parents, factory owners, so that she can fit more easily into the new Chinese economy. She arrives with very little English, tossed into the ocean of new faces, words, meals, customs and cultures. Her most useful possession is her Chinese-English dictionary, which she uses incessantly as she tries to learn enough to maneuver through this foreign environment.Her days are taken by attendance at the English language school; her nights are lonely since she knows no one and has no idea where she might go. Finally, she discovers the cinema and starts going there at night. She meets a man there and moves in with him within a week or two of their meeting date. She lives with him for the next year, experiencing England through his eyes and how he perceives the world to work.Zhuang, or 'Z' as she comes to be known for convenience, finds the gap between how she has experienced the world and how her lover does to be extremely wide and difficult to bridge. To her, moving in with her lover means they are exclusive and that he will satisfy every need she has. To him, while he professes to love her, his need is for some space and time for him to pursue his relationships with his friends and even former lovers. Z has a difficult time understanding this. Their time together is marked by her attempts to get her lover to commit to only her, and to his withdrawal and anger at her attempts to restrict his life. Throughout the time, she learns more and more about the English language, but the English outlook on life continues to elude her.Xiao has created an interesting novel. Each segment is started with a word from the dictionary, the definition of that word in a formal sense, and then how Z experiences what that concept means in this foreign environment. The reader is allowed to watch her grow and learn and to see how her culture differs from the one she finds herself in. This book is recommended for readers of modern fiction and for those interested in how people relate to each other.

If you are from a Western country and wish to live in Mainland China, this book should be on your ‘must read’ list. After the last five years of living in Shanghai, I felt it as if it was a person guidebook into the culture and thoughts of the beautiful people of China. There are so many books about westerners who go to China and try to explain what it’s like, but this was an amazing portrayal of the opposite, where we learn about China by seeing England and Europe filtered through Zhuang’s eyes and life experience. I absolutely recommend it.

The book's protagonist is a young needy love deprived Chinese woman who comes to England to study English and falls very quickly in love with an older English guy who is still trying to figure out who he really is. The voice is her voice.I am sure that a Chinese speaker would find her English very amusing. The author described well the differences between the two lovers and the dialogs were pretty credible and interesting to follow. Basically ;she was looking for stability and he didn't believe in its possibility.The were parts of the book that I found incredible. Fore example, the trip to Europe, or the return to Beijing where she found a job and friends. Nothing prepared the reader that she had any friends in the capital. All in all, it is a fresh look on the East meets West genre and I did enjoy reading while my reading was accompanied by some disapproving nods.

Watching/reading Z’s increasingly fluent use English is delightful. Her understanding of her lover’s strange behavior and the revelation of Z’s wisdom is revealed in the process thereof. Guo’s excellent writing is evident in a previous novel “I Am China.” Get to know her.