FACES IN FOCUS: XIAOLU GUO

WRITER XIAOLU GUO BOUNDS THROUGH LINGUISTIC PLAYGROUNDS.

By Libby Hsieh

Chinese-born novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo came to Britain in 2002. A decade and change later, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Nine Continents. The question of transnational identity arches gracefully over her oeuvre, exploring themes of language, migration, alienation, and personal memory. Today, Xiaolu is acknowledged as one of the most exciting voices in English and Chinese publishing alike. Most recently, she dove into her obsession with language, offering a soulful meditation on freedom, femininity, and belonging in her memoir Radical. Xiaolu finds footing in the real and immediate. She is most herself when immersed in the act of creating: sitting at her desk, developing a personal lexicon that grows as naturally as the trees in her garden. Across fiction, memoir, and filmmaking, she pulls apart a tangled web of identity and authenticity, examining the stories that created her all the while.

LIBBY HSIEH: What are you most interested in right now?

XIAOLU GUO: Every morning is flush with new ideas. I suffer from constant ideas—I’m unable to gather the time or focus to work on any of them.

LH: How do you choose one to move forward with?

XG: When I was younger, I struggled to finish something before moving on to the next three things. After 20 years of living in the UK, things have settled down. I’m filtering through to what is urgent and essential. [Lately], I’ve focused on a more personal form of writing—less plot and artificiality—and a more natural way of narration.

LH: In Radical, you write, “Here I am in pursuit of the etymology of myself.” When you’re exploring language, are you able to free yourself from your past? Or are you writing new ways to commune with it?

XG: When I began writing in English, I felt an urgent need to gather my own vocabulary, create my own etymology, and find a corner which belongs to myself. Radical is a search for my own private lexicon through foreign landscapes. It is a private dictionary about love, the homeland, and belonging. I’m recreating myself, in a way, as a writer.

LH: When working between two languages, are you able to expand your ideas of what writing can be?

XG: Absolutely. In the beginning, of course, there was strong discomfort. When you switch languages and countries to write, it is so different—an immense kind of stimulation. Sometimes I felt speech loss, but most of the time I was swamped with new ideas. Very ordinary concepts had a huge sparkling impact on my mental activity because those words weren’t used in a Chinese way—like ideas of collectivism or ecology or womanhood or privacy. Those things were really rich and challenging to my old self.

LH: How do you balance the uncertainty of those explorations?

XG: I feel all my writing is to find a simple substance beyond superficiality. As a writer from a foreign land, I’m looking for a homeland through artistic creation. I feel very much at home when I write. I feel sort of void and weightless when I don’t.

LH: How do your approaches to writing and filmmaking differ?

XG: There’s a strange kind of pull between what is natural and what is demanding. To me, what is natural is writing—you know, like a morning coffee. There’s this female independence in the writing life: A woman doesn’t need anything to write. With filmmaking, I felt this constant demand: producers, big studios, working with a hundred people. Throughout the process, from scriptwriting to final production, I felt this draining in my external life. When you write, it’s purely interior.

LH: Outside of these mediums, what brings you creative joy?

XG: It’s gardening. I’m very lucky to have a small garden. It’s concrete, but I have at least 50 flower pots. I grow apple trees, cherry trees, pear trees, and quite a lot of bamboo and rose bushes. Without gardening, I would feel stuck. It gives me a sense of physical space.