Xiaolu Guo interview: ‘Sex is as important a subject as death’

“Wu Yu!” says Xiaolu Guo, “It means: feeling wordless, like you have lost your language.” It’s a sensation that can still overwhelm Guo, a 46-year-old Chinese novelist and filmmaker, even after living in Britain for two decades. “Sometimes,” she tells me, pouring tea in her east London flat, “I feel I am lost in translation. Even after writing seven books in your language. My pen just floats above the paper and none of my languages – Mandarin, English, Zhejiang dialect – comes out.”

In 2008, the shifting, cultural gulf between East and West became the theme of Guo’s first, erotically charged English-language novel, A Concise English-Chinese Dictionary for Lovers. She returns to it in her new novel A Lover’s Discourse, named after the 1977 text by French philosopher Roland Barthes, about the relationship between an English architect and a Chinese PhD student who has moved to London in 2016 and is unable to find the word “Brexit” in her phrase book.

While Guo’s Australian partner, philosophy lecturer Stephen Barker, herds their talkative seven-year-old daughter Moon from the room, she tells me she finds it “very natural to note down the conversations between a man and woman, especially if they speak different languages and have different cultural backgrounds. I was also inspired by Barthes’s work on language and love and wanted to write my own version from a woman’s point of view, from a foreigner’s point of view, and from a different linguistic background.”

Guo’s book opens with a quote from Barthes: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words. My language trembles with desire.” But her work contains at least as much frustration as desire. Missing the “tangled forests of meaning” embedded in her native ideograms, she finds the Roman alphabet lacking in poetry. She also struggles with the limits our language places on romance.

In A Concise English-Chinese Dictionary for Lovers she complained that: “ ‘Love’, this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved’. All these specific tenses mean Love is a time-limited thing. Not infinite… In Chinese, Love is ai. It has no tense. No past and future… If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last forever.”

Her new book deals less with the grand concepts and more with the practicalities of modern cohabitation. Her unnamed heroine is baffled by the “sad” word “flat” for a living space. She is also unapologetically blunt about the physical disappointment of sexual intercourse: “After penetrative sex I felt lonely, and a little empty,” she says. “Once you were out, my incompleteness came back to me even more powerfully.”

Today Guo tells me that writing about sex “does not come naturally to me. But the subject is as important as death. Women’s sexuality is so undiscussed in literature and cinema. Where’s our female Georges Bataille? Where is the female Pier Paolo Pasolini?”

I suspect Guo’s straight-shooting has its roots in her brutal upbringing. Born in Zhejiang province in 1972, she was given away by her abusive mother and artist father (broken by the 15 years he spent in a prison camp in the 1950s for daring to paint) to a peasant couple in a remote mountain village. After two years, this couple returned her to her paternal grandparents, claiming they could no longer afford to feed her. Three years later, her violent grandfather committed suicide by drinking pesticide.

In her 2017 memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, Guo recalls squatting beside his corpse feeling “a deep sense of shame. My grandmother told me that dead people became ghosts but I didn’t see any… All I felt was a searing anger, and an icy-cold loneliness somehow emanating towards me from the shrivelled body.”

More horrors were to come: as an “isolated” girl, Guo was sexually abused by a well-respected local man who would take her to the dump and pull down her knickers. The regular assaults left her with “no power, no dignity, no hope” as he ordered her: “Stop crying! Every girl has to go through this!” “No wonder,” she thought then, “Chinese ghost stories know only weeping women, looking for justice in the afterlife.”

Today I ask if Guo is reclaiming some of that “lost power” by writing so truthfully about sex. “It’s not connected,” she says. “I am interested in the subject of desire, which is beyond good and evil.”

While studying film at Beijing University in the mid-1990s, Guo listened to the other young women in her dormitory share their own stories of sexual abuse. She began reading about feminism and developed revolutionary beliefs she was forced to suppress during the purges that followed the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square.

In 2002 she won a scholarship to study documentary at the National Film School in London where she indulged her passion for western authors such as Marguerite Duras, E M Foster and, of course, Barthes.

Like her heroine in A Lover’s Discourse, the young Guo believed that, in his book, Barthes was imagining conversations between heterosexual lovers. It was disorientating for her to learn that the French philosopher was gay: the only woman in his life was his mother, with whom he lived for 60 years.

“I had always identified myself with the woman in the supposed discourse,” Guo writes. “Did I feel cheated? For a woman like me, love was romantic first, then it grew domestic, and then it became concrete. Had I completely misunderstood Barthes? Or had I misunderstood myself?”

Elsewhere in her novel, Guo explores Barthes’s concept of “the death of the author” through her heroine’s PhD study of a Chinese village where about 2,000 uneducated workers reproduce western paintings for western consumers. It’s an idea Guo also addresses in her 2018 film, Five Men and a Caravaggio, which contrasts the pragmatism of the Chinese workers with the preciousness of Hackney-based “creatives”. She is disdainful of the fetishisation of individuality and originality, the way westerners “cling to their achievements”. Yet she admits to sharing some of these traits, having “built a first person singular” for herself in the West. Framed posters for her films hang on her kitchen walls.

As Guo leads me out into the garden, we discuss the anti-Chinese feeling that has been on the rise since the beginning of the pandemic. She tells me it makes her feel like “a secondary citizen” in the UK. But, says Guo, now a pescatarian who would once devour songbirds whole, it’s all relative. “The real problem is how we relate to animals. It’s an ecological question about our shared gloomy global reality.”

The wail of an ambulance cuts through the London air and I think of the passage in A Lover’s Discourse in which Guo writes of hearing in the siren the words, “Foreigners go home!” I look back through the kitchen window where little Moon is waving an orange at us. “Is this home?” I ask Guo and she laughs before declaring, in her idiosyncratic English: “I am a wanderlust!”

A Lover’s Discourse by Xiaolu Guo is published by Chatto at ￡14.99