Learning to Speak, Part Four

IV.

     Xiaolu Guo's linguistic marriage of two tongues and their temperaments corresponds, in her novel, to the mating of a British man and a Chinese woman. Her book, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, might be called mongrel, but is it promiscuous in the Johnsonian sense? Maybe not. Eventually, her lovers part, after Z. has an abortion and after her application for an extension of her visa to stay in England is denied by the Chinese government. This was never to be a sunnily post-romantic, twenty-first-century tale of girl-meets-boy, nor a serene account of language-meets-language. Instead, the mergers are difficult, fractious, violent, incomplete, short-term, as notable for their conflicts and contradictions as for anything shared harmoniously in common.

     Like the...