【英语听和读】郭小橹

 Amber¹: 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 Concise² 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 ‘clash³’ (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 Mandarin⁴ because in my village we

speak local dialect. So in Beijing, I spoke⁵ 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, fictional⁶ 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 literary⁷ 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, linguistically⁹. I had great fun with the linguistic⁸ 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 tune¹⁰ 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? 

1 amber   

n.琥珀；琥珀色；adj.琥珀制的

参考例句：

• Would you like an amber necklace for your birthday?你过生日想要一条琥珀项链吗？
• This is a piece of little amber stones.这是一块小小的琥珀化石。

2 concise   

adj.简洁的，简明的

参考例句：

• The explanation in this dictionary is concise and to the point.这部词典里的释义简明扼要。
• I gave a concise answer about this.我对于此事给了一个简要的答复。

3 clash   

vi.冲突，不协调，砰地相撞；n.冲突，不协调

参考例句：

• There is a clash between two classes at 2 p.m. on Thursday.星期四下午两点有两堂课是冲突的。
• The pot came down on the stone floor with a clash.锅“当”地一声掉到石地上。

4 Mandarin   

n.中国官话，国语，满清官吏；adj.华丽辞藻的

参考例句：

• Just over one billion people speak Mandarin as their native tongue.大约有十亿以上的人口以华语为母语。
• Mandarin will be the new official language of the European Union.普通话会变成欧盟新的官方语言。

5 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

6 fictional   

adj.小说的，虚构的

参考例句：

• The names of the shops are entirely fictional.那些商店的名字完全是虚构的。
• The two authors represent the opposite poles of fictional genius.这两位作者代表了天才小说家两个极端。

7 literary   

adj.文学（上）的

参考例句：

• Literary works of this kind are well received by the masses.这样的文学作品很受群众欢迎。
• The book was favourably noticed in literary magazines.这本书在文学杂志上得到好评。

8 linguistic   

adj.语言的，语言学的

参考例句：

• She is pursuing her linguistic researches.她在从事语言学的研究。
• The ability to write is a supreme test of linguistic competence.写作能力是对语言能力的最高形式的测试。

9 linguistically   

adv. 语言的, 语言学的

参考例句：

• But this group is linguistically, culturally, and even genetically diverse. 但这个人群在语言上，文化上，甚至在遗传上都是多样化的。
• Like the EU, Belgium is linguistically and culturally divided. 与欧盟一样，比利时是个多语言、多文化的地区。

10 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。