Word: guo
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...woefully undertranslated in English. Expectations for a translation boom, created when émigré Chinese writer Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, remain unfulfilled. So what is an ambitious Chinese writer who desires to reach an international audience to do? The 35-year-old Xiaolu Guo has taken matters into her own hands by writing in English. As a novelist who is equally at home as a filmmaker, and a nomad who splits her time between Beijing, London and Paris, Guo underscores her gutsy insistence that the value of a story isn't contained within geographic...
...story is semiautobiographical. Guo grew up in a small village on an island off south China's coast, and went to Beijing at around the same age as her character Fenfang. She churned out novels to support herself while in film school. In 2002, she left Beijing for London, where she continued her film studies and began writing A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a humorous novel about her struggles with the English language and a British paramour. An expired visa forced her to return to Beijing, where she put the novel on hold and made Concrete Revolution...
...sarcastic about the setbacks she has suffered since arriving in Beijing. Nonetheless, when opportunities come calling, she is nothing but youthful gratitude: "I gave him my ID number, my Young Pioneers Cinema number, my mobile phone number, my home number and my next-door neighbor's phone number." Guo's tender portrayal of one of youth's abiding contradictions - its simultaneous scorn and passionate appetite for the world - is one of the novel's pleasures. Apart from Fenfang's genuine love of food, this is what the ravenousness of the title is about...
...ignorant but good-hearted rural immigrant to Beijing who works as a street vendor. The structure of the novel itself resembles a screenplay, told in highly visual prose broken into a series of short chapters. The Beijing Olympics brought viewers images of the city's monumental new architecture. But Guo gives us the insider vantage - the cramped one-room apartments, the cockroaches...
...China has rewarded Guo for her loyalty. The comely diver is China's most celebrated female Olympian, and that has translated into more, officially approved lucrative advertising contracts. (The Chinese state sports system makes sure to keep a chunk of her endorsement revenue.) On August 17th, Guo will defend her second Olympic gold, this time in the individual 3m springboard event...