Story of growing up in the East

 

Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up by Xiaolu, Chatto & Windus £16.99, 336 pages.

This is not April Fool, but a fact that Xiaolu actually on 1st April 1992, boarded a flight from Beijing to London against all odds at the age of 29. She was a film-maker who failed to make films in China. as the censors, their deemed her scripts too depressing, but she went on to publish three novels instead.

At the age of six, she had been told by a fortune-telling monk that she was a “Peasant Warrior” who would travel seven seas and across nine continents. Now after doing just that, she discovered her freedom and dignity.

As a baby, she was taken to the mountain region to live with peasants, and two years later they carried her to her grandparents’ hut in a tiny fishing village in Southern China. She was grossly neglected by her grandfather whose lost his livelihood as a fisherman after the government banned private fishing and fishing boats. She was, however, loved by her poor grandmother, who could not afford to feed her. Guo survived despite being malnourished and was illiterate until the age of seven when her parent came to take her to their city, where she found a privileged brother awaiting her.

She had chequered childhood, as she began rejecting her destiny as a woman. Although she had sex young, first against her will with an abusive neighbour and then voluntarily with a teacher.

At the age of 18, she was motivated to convince her painter father to spend all his money to take her to Beijing to compete against 6000 students for seven annual places to study film. She failed at first attempt but succeeded the following year.

Even in London, her tenacity and luck brought her success given her poor English, she used several English dictionaries and came up with the idea of writing from perspective of a Chinese girl learning English. She was inspired to write A Concise Chinese Dictionary for Lovers with Jung Chang’s acknowledgements (Chang’s non-fiction bestseller Wild Swans in the early 1990s), and a couple months later it was accepted for publishing and her luck began to change.

She is one of Granta’s best young novelist and prolific writer and film-maker.