Book review: Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth in Beijing

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

In this novel by Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth in Beijing, a restless young woman leaves her poor dusty village in Zhejiang province to find her fortune in Beijing, where she lands up working as an extra in the film industry.

Life in modern Beijing and modern China for a young woman, as she travels to Xian, the home of the terra cotta warriors, and to a poor city in Manchuria, where the last emperor Pu Yi lived as a virtual prisoner of the Japanese in the last days of the Qing Dynasty.

Like all Beijing residents from the countryside, she spends three days and nights on a train returning to her village for the Chinese New Year, where she eats "longevity noodles" and listens for several days to the sounds of firecrackers.

In her love life, there is a possessive young man in Beijing, who won't let go of the relationship as she moves out of his apartment and asserts her independence. A new American boyfriend doing research in China for his Ph.D. is part of her move to independence from tradition, but he returns home soon. We follow her hectic emotional journey till in the end she finally reaches the place she wants to be.

Beijing moving fast to modernize - shoddy buildings and garbage strewn alleys, and a changing culture.

Book Review: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. a novel by Xiaoulu Guo

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: A Novel by Xiaoulu Guo
Published 2008 by Vintage

A student from China arrives in London for a year's study of English so she can return home and help her parents with their expanding shoe factory business. Zhuang is 23 and a reluctant student, who nevertheless carries around a Concise Chinese-English Dictionary and looks up and writes down almost every new word she comes across for the entire year in London.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a new novel by Chinese writer Xiaoulu Guo, takes us in the heart and mind of a foreign student suddenly exposed to a strange culture. The student Zhuang tries to understand all the inconsistencies and contradictions of her new surroundings and the paradoxes of the English language as well.

She must also deal with her newfound sexual freedom and her relationship with an Englishman she meets and falls in love with but who is her opposite in many ways. Though they live together for almost the entire year, they remain very different. More Buddhist in his outlook on life, he finds her need for commitment and security too demanding and unnecessary. She, on the other hand, is frustrated by his apparent lack of concern for the future.

At the end of the year, Zhuang's student visa is not renewed, and she returns to China while her lover moves to Wales, a place he finds restful and peaceful but which she had found beautiful but cold, rainy, and gloomy.

I recommend the book for anyone interested in East versus West perspectives.

A poem by a young man who also values dictionaries with foreign words:
www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/1207/poem_180287.html