In her fiction and her films, Xiaolu Guo explores the gulf between language and culture, and the meaning of home in a world in flux.

Xiaolu Guo is one of China’s most successful cultural exports. Her novels have been shortlisted for four major fiction prizes and her films have been screened at some of the biggest festivals around the world. And she is only in her 30s.

Much of Guo’s work deals with the gulfs that divide her world—between the East and West and between words and their meanings.

To create her films and novels, she draws on her experiences as a Chinese immigrant making her way in England while negotiating the cultures and languages of two very different worlds.

Her latest film, We Went to Wonderland, reflects these themes. The documentary chronicles the journey of two old Chinese Communists during their first visit to Europe.
Watch a trailer for We Went to Wonderland, Guo’s latest documentaryIn We Went to Wonderland, Guo’s father, called Old Guo in the film, had decided that he wanted to see Europe before he died. So he drags his wife to London to visit their daughter in what the mother calls “the wonderland.”
“I came here to see the world before I die. But my wife wants to go home,” Old Guo, who is incapable of speaking due to a near-fatal struggle with throat cancer, writes in one scene.

The entire film was shot in two to three minute segments on a point-and-shoot digital camera using the video function, and the audio was recorded separately on a standard, low-cost voice recorder.

Ultimately, over 90 percent of the audio was reconstructed in the editing suite. And although it still sounds realistic, the cobbled-together nature of the production accentuates its fragmentary nature.

As for the camera, “I discovered the freedom I had with this tourist thing,” Guo says. The technical constraints allowed her to abandon the typical “epic” style of documentary filmmaking and instead chronicle the personal history and memories (which are fragmentary by nature) of these two aging Communists.

It is a theme that runs throughout Guo’s films and novels: the reclamation of “the individual voice of the peasants.” She maintains that “only by understanding their interior voice can you understand how a nation is being constructed.”
Watch a video interview with Guo, in which she speaks about how she presents reality on film.Its first screenings in January at the Rotterdam Film Festival and in March at the MOMA New Directors/New Films series in New York created a considerable buzz. Since, it has been shown in more than 60 cities around the globe.

And her two English-language novels—last year’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and the soon-to-be-released Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth—both examine the lives of young Chinese peasants trying to define themselves in big cities.

Guo’s life has taken a path similar to that of many of her protagonists. Growing up in a remote fishing village in south China, she ran away to the Beijing Film Academy at age 18, where her penchant for films, books and criticism flourished. By the time she left Beijing, she had already published five widely discussed novels in her native language.

In 2002, at the age of 29, Guo relocated to London, beginning her Western life in Hackney. The rundown neighborhood in the East End is a part of town that Guo says has “a profound displaced feeling.”

Life in the Split

In a moment of life mimicking art, Guo has recently found herself in a state of flux similar to those experienced by many of her characters.

In The Guardian on April 28, she wrote about a piece of mail that had just arrived: “one day, during my life as a foreigner in London, I received a letter from the police: ‘We have carefully reviewed your visa application. We regret to inform you that you cannot be granted leave to remain.’ I read that letter another ten times. I could understand every word, apart from the most important bit of all: ‘leave to remain.’ Must I leave, or could I remain?”

Turns out she had to leave. “In the West,” she says, “my life is completely temporary.”
The revocation of her visa has left Guo in a sort of limbo between Beijing, Paris and London, that more than ever mirrors her earlier creations.
Watch a video interview in which Guo speaks about writing in a second language.Like much of her work, Guo’s novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary, has been interpreted as being about the gulf between the East and the West. However, she says it’s about linguistic play and, above all, intimacy and sadness.

“In the West, I don’t represent anything…I refuse to represent China, because China has many faces. I refuse to represent culture,” she remarks. And while many writers manufacture their own geography in order to escape national borders, Guo tries to navigate this rift.

Ultimately, though, it’s her disavowal of nationalism that places her in a state of mental and physical (because of her new visa issues) transience—a concept that is fully explored in both of her English-language novels.

In Dictionary, the protagonist, Z, arrives in London from Beijing with only a limited knowledge of English. On the airplane, she muses, “when a body floating in air, which country she belonging to?”

As Z wanders through London, she learns words and idioms but does not necessarily understand them. The novel deals head on with two lovers (one Chinese, one British) trying to find a common voice.

Guo had a similar relationship to the book itself. As it was the first novel she wrote in English, she was learning the language’s nuances as she wrote. As she learns these subtleties, so does the novel’s heroine, and she seems to mature into British culture.
Both Guo and Z are bodies floating between two languages, struggling to express their emotions and culture in a foreign tongue.

With both her life and her art, she is navigating the chasm between the East and West, a division even clear distinctions of nationhood, geography and language haven’t been able to disentangle.

Nevertheless, Guo maintains the divide that runs through her life is an essential part of her artistic development.

Her novels and films, she says, “have to be translated from my Chinese sensibility.” But that translation is not as simple as looking up words in a Chinese-English dictionary.

The effort to bridge the distance between two worlds has ultimately defined her as an artist: “I want to deliver what is happening in China and my own heart, between this distance.”

And no matter how hard Guo tries to navigate the breach between East and West, she cannot stop flitting between the two in her works. Like her mother says in her latest film, “even if Europe is a wonderland, my home is better.”
Watch a trailer for How Is Your Fish Today?, Guo’s first narrative feature-length film.Guo’s work straddles the divides between East and West, novel and film, form and meaning, fiction and nonfiction: she deals in contrasts.

In one scene of We Went to Wonderland, Old Guo paints a forest scene in traditional Chinese brush style and reminisces about how, in the 1960s, he was forced to paint propaganda pictures for Mao. Later in the film, Guo’s mother stares at a painting by J.M.W. Turner at the Tate Britain and says, “even a peasant can see they are great.”
It provides a unique view of the West through Eastern eyes, and keeps the two angles in conflict as the subtleties of the effect of globalization on the nature of families and culture plays out.

But these divides are not just present in the content of Guo’s work; the play between form and meaning creates a dialogue around her films and novels that questions whether they are fiction or nonfiction.

Guo points out that both Wonderland and How Is Your Fish Today?, her first feature-length narrative film, are both reconstructions of reality—what she calls “fictional documentaries.” In How Is Your Fish Today?, this is exemplified by the autobiographical truth and improvisation that runs through the film. As for Wonderland, although it was shot as a documentary, its expressionistic style still makes it feel like a work of fiction.

Similarly in terms of form, both of her English-language books belong to the novel category, but reject a consistent, linear narrative progression. Dictionary is actually written in dictionary form, and Twenty Fragments slips between genres.
Twenty Fragments is sprinkled with photographs and documents; it reads like an entry into the multimedia-novel category. Furthermore, although it is about young Fenfeng’s experiences in Beijing, it is littered with Britishisms, like the constant exclamations of “bloody!”

And like the novel (which refuses to be just one thing or another), Fenfeng thrives on insecurity. She skitters between many illegally subletted apartments and lives constantly in a state of ambiguity.
The result is a novel that is written in pieces. It is a compilation of personal histories and small steps in understanding.
Watch a video interview with Guo, in which she speaks about the fragmentary style of her films and novels.