Deterritorializing Hegemonic Globalization Progressively in Xiaolu Guo’s Experimental Writing: A Comparative Reading of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and A Lover’s Discourse

ABSTRACT

The narrative patterns of family saga, international romance, and hyphenated identity are popular with overseas Chinese authors who wish to enter the Anglophone market. In fact, they are implicated in the homogenization and marginalization of the ethnic minorities’ cultural discourse under asymmetrical globalization. This article argues that Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and its sequel, A Lover’s Discourse, are a continuous literary experiment in writing about the Chinese diaspora and pushing against those stereotypes. By shaping her protagonists not as recollectors but as observers via a documentary approach, Guo includes their international love within criticism of Western masculinity and links their diasporic experience to a cosmopolitan journey. The analysis of her experimental style of challenging Anglophone cultural imperialism and seeking global justice reveals the innovation and diversity of the Chinese diaspora’s translingual writing. Thus, Guo’s counter-hegemonic literary practice not only distinguishes itself from literature categorized as “ethnic” but also contributes to the discursive equality of international English-language literature by minority writers.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a non-exhaustive list of similar bestsellers, see Zhenhua Zhai’s Red Flower of China (1992), Anchee Min’s Red Azalea (1993), Ningkun Wu and Yikai Li’s A Single Tear (1993), Yan Li’s Daughters of the Red Land (1995), Ji-li Jiang’s Red Scarf Girl (1997), Rae Yang’s Spider Eaters (1997), and Ting-Xing Ye’s Leaf in A Bitter Wind (1997) from North America; Ying Hong’s Daughter of the River (1998), Anhua Gao’s To the Edge of the Sky (2000), and Aiping Mu’s Vermilion Gate (2000) from the UK.

2. Before Dictionary for Lovers, Guo published several works in Chinese; her 2003 novel Village of Stone is an autobiographical narrative of a family saga, the English edition of which appeared in 2004.

3. As Dictionary for Lovers begins from the perspective of an ESL learner, certain grammatical mistakes are not corrected in direct quotations.

4. In the preface to the 2003 edition of Wild Swans, Chang summarizes, “In spite of its tradition of class differences, people in Britain have dignity, and the underprivileged are not abused or downtrodden, as they were under Mao. And the fairness of the society, and the weight the nation places on this concept, is something today’s China still cannot begin to match” (12). Chang’s words represent her generation’s stereotypical construction of the immigrant blueprint in Euro-American countries, which cracks in Guo’s diasporic writing.

5. In an interview by Evans, Guo claims that she had written the draft of Dictionary for Lovers as “intellectual loneliness without story”, which “waited for two years in her agent’s drawer because it’s unreadable”; only when she established the international love affair could the manuscript be published (“Xiaolu Guo” 09:25–44). Analogously, A Lover’s Discourse had been initially about “th[e] Chinese village with all th[o]se crazy artisans painting Western art”, as Guo states in another interview by Yoo, but she “had to delete a lot of Chinese sections in order to shape the lovers’ relationship” for publication.

6. The discourse of hegemonic feminism homogenizes Third World women as being “sexually oppressed”, in contrast to the self-representation of Western women “as having control over their own bodies and sexualities and the freedom to make their own decisions” (Mohanty 40, 22). This binary opposition overlooks the gender inequality occurring in the West.

7. Hsiung Shih-I published Lady Precious Stream in 1934, and Lin Yutang published My Country and My People in 1935; soon afterward, Chiang Yee published a series of travel books after A Silent Traveler: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland (1937): these works tend to demystify Chinese culture and correct Westerners’ false suppositions about China.

8. Despite having built a home in London with her lover, Guo, unmarried, addresses Stephen Baker as her partner to show their equal status. Claiming that “[m]y existence is nearly beyond gender”, Guo totally disengages herself from the cliché of global hypergamy (Kidd).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Yifan Jin

Yifan Jin is a postdoctoral researcher of Department of Chinese (Zhuhai) at Sun Yat-sen University. She teaches overseas Chinese literature. Her research interests include Chinese Anglophone literature, diaspora studies, postcolonial writing, experimental writing, and the literary practice of feminist solidarity.