Chasing Chinese U.F.O’s in conversation with the ebullient Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo has pissed off her publisher. It wasn’t meant to end up like this.

“I told them I was writing a detective story,” says the 35-year-old author. “But not very far into it I realised I do not know how to write this form. It’s very masculine. So I decided to write something else and hope they wouldn’t notice.”

To readers of her previous works, the quirky How Is Your Fish and her chick-lit smash The Chinese/English Dictionary for Lovers, a gentle romance in broken English, news that Guo does not naturally churn out testosterone-fuelled thrillers will come as no surprise. What does surprise is that Chatto & Windus ever imagined that that’s
what they’d get.

“They were not very happy with this one,” she admits, meaning, UFO In Her Eyes, her latest publication. It is ostensibly the tale of a small southern Chinese town becoming the epicentre of a flying saucer mania. However, the UFO plot, delivered mostly as transcripts from police interrogations of the sole witness, is subterfuge for delivering a sketch of China’s socio-political growth spurt over the last half-century, from the naivety of feudalism via Mao and the reds to full-blown capitalism and Superpower status. Not, probably, what the publisher had in mind from the pinafored Guo. But their objections
were not merely thematic. “They were very reluctant to publish in hardback at all,” Guo ruefully tells her small audience, at the reading I attended. “They said it looks too much like a film script.”

That this is no mere impression is confirmed buy the fact that Guo and
an actor are able to perform half an hour’s dialogue from the book without any textual abridgement.

A sense of disappointment is actively fostered by the author. An accordion player has been drafted in ‘to do anything he can to make the reading less boring’ and repeatedly Guo brings up the low sales figures of the book. She handles and curtails the Q+A as though embarrassed. All very curious. But one senses disingenuity; as a seasoned film-maker, one who reputedly secured funding from Channel 4 by marching into their offices and demanding it, this particular lady is surely made of doughtier stuff than this performance suggests. She has written a serious book, and knows it. She believes in the material to the extent that she is preparing to film the thing (a process no doubt helped by having the script already in the bag). So why the long face?

Perhaps she is suffering transition pains – culture shock. The figure of the alien recurs in her work. The transitionary linguistics of the Dictionary were no doubt a synecdoche of the author’s own minimal state; now, as an auteur three continents from home, her work
evokes the country she’s left behind, through the avatar of the scrutinised peasant woman: the deracinated observer: the innocent abroad.

“For my next project, I want to write a third-person novel set entirely in Europe, but without Chinese characters,” she tells me. She insists the story must be in third person; yet this fact seems to trouble her. “Without an ‘I’ figure it because so cold, so impersonal,” she says. This apparent refusal of Guo’s to allow herself to identify with the West is odd; but perhaps that’s the point. She seems anxious not to fit in. The UK has, it seems, embraced her idiosyncrasies (by way of contrast, she points out that she could not
have published a book like Dictionary in France, where the literary establishment would have scoffed at a text in broken French), nevertheless, she confounds expectation, wilfully upsetting poor Chatto & Windus and her burgeoning chick-lit readership in one fell swoop.
Indeed, perhaps the outsider persona is one she wants to maintain. When one audience member asks how, having been a film-maker, she ended up as a writer in England, she positively recoils. “I haven’t ‘ended up’ here,” she says.

The concept of a final destination is perhaps anathema to Xiaolu Guo. Rather, she is interested in the spaces between things: between art-forms; genres; countries; politics. She is focussed on the act of crossing over; on paradigm shift; on the process of developing out of one thing towards another. The concept of ‘ending up’ is, in her eyes, entirely alien.

Words & Interview//N. Quentin Woolf