Xiaolu Guo - A Lovers Discourse

A Lovers Discourse

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Village of Stone

A Concise ChineseEnglish Dictionary for Lovers

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

UFO in Her Eyes

Lovers in the Age of Indifference

I Am China

Once Upon a Time in the East

Nine Continents

Xiaolu Guo

A Lovers Discourse

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 2020 by Xiaolu Guo

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Jacket design and illustration Suzanne Dean incorporates Woman, Bonfanti Diego Getty images; Man, DEEPOL by Plainpicture/Oleksii Karanov; illustrations of black elderberry by Mary Eaton National Geographic/Bridgeman; Swallow Bridgeman; Wasp by John Curtis Bridgeman Images and Elderberry by Walther Muller from Hermann Adolph Koehlers Medicinal Plants Florilegius/Bridgeman

From A Lovers Discourse by Roland Barthes. Published by Jonathan Cape Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited Roland Barthes 1979. From Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes. Copyright Skira., 1970. Translation Copyright Farrar Strauss and Giroux. First published in Great Britain in 1983 by Jonathan Cape. Reprined by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head Words and Music by Hal David and Burt Bachrach 1969 BMG Gold Songs (ASCAP) / New Hidden Valley Music Co. (ASCAP) All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. Used by Permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited. All Rights Reserved. 1969 WC Music Corp. (ASCAP) Licensed courtesy of Warner Chappell Music Ltd.

Wind of Change Words & Music by Klaus Meine Copyright 1997 BMG Rights Management GmbH BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited, a BMG Company.

All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Used by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic Hardcover edition edition: October 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-4952-7

eISBN 978-0-8021-4954-1

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

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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 tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Fragments dun discours amoureux ,

Roland Barthes

Contents

WEST

SOUTH

EAST

NORTH

DOWN

UP

LEFT

RIGHT

on Citations

Love at first sight is a hypnosis.

Roland Barthes

I dont believe in love at first sight.

What do you mean? Wasnt it clear the moment you picked the elderflowers by the park and we looked at each other? Or was it in that book club?

A few years after we moved in together, we had this conversation about love at first sight. I remember you said:

I dont believe in love at first sight.

I was taken aback. I thought we were definitely in love at first sight.

What do you mean? Wasnt it clear the moment you picked the elderflowers by the park and we looked at each other? Or was it in that book club?

You gave me a damp smile, as if my confusion proved that you were right.

But doesnt love always start from first sight? I mean, before one reaches ones thirties or forties. Its only when we have a second thought about our first sighted love, that we might change our mind. You might ask, why does this happen before one reaches midlife? I dont have a theory yet, but I think when we are young, our impulses take over our mind. Romantic love is always an impulse in my case. I am not old or wise enough to understand yet what else love could be.

All I knew in that first moment at the park was that you saw the way I had looked at you. Perhaps I should not be so sure that you saw how I looked at you. Well, you were still a complete stranger. You were from a culture I had no knowledge or deep understanding of. Besides, you were very tall and I was short. Height sometimes disorients our perspective.

WEST

The Elderflowers

What will you do with them?

The elders? I will head them and boil them up .

I didnt know your name when we first met. No one introduced us. The only thing I remember is that you were picking roadside elderflowers.

We were in a park, Clapton Pond in north-east London. Some friends had arranged a picnic to celebrate a warm spring. But on that day, it was neither sunny nor warm. The clouds above London were making fun of us, with their fluffy cotton faces. The daffodils had faded, but the bluebells had just begun to bloom. Their clustered buds were nodding in the wind. Everyone was talking. And I was watching. Words didnt come so naturally to my mouth. The English manner was something I found difficult to follow then. You were the only man who was not involved in any of the conversations. You walked away from us, and disappeared behind some shrubs by the roadside. I could see you were plucking milky-coloured plants by the edge of the park. When you came back, I saw that you were carrying a bunch of elderflowers. You glanced at me, with a look I could not quite read. Your eyes were blue green, and they didnt dart about but were steady. I was not used to seeing a man holding wild flowers on an occasion like this. I thought there was perhaps something socially peculiar about you, or at least a little eccentric. Still, you had an air of normality. I noticed your blue denim jacket, and your muddy boots.

What will you do with them? I asked, pointing at the flowers.

The elders? you answered. I will head them and boil them up.

You remained in my memory as the elderflower picker . Even though I later learned that men (especially European men) do pick wild flowers sometimes. But that day in the park was only a few months after I came to Britain, and I had never seen a man do that with such concentration in public.

You were the elderflower picker. And that is how I still picture you, after all these years.

Vote Leave

It says Vote Leave , but leave what?

Oh, leave the EU! You know, the European Union .

I came to Britain in December 2015, six months before the Referendum. I had no idea there would be a referendum. I vaguely knew this word in a Chinese context. But in China we never had such an experience. I had never voted, because we were never asked to vote. Besides, we were told only countries like Switzerland or Iceland might be able to conduct a national referendum because of their tiny populations. Leaving aside politics, I had too many unanswered questions for myself when I came to England. After my MA in sociology and film-making in Beijing, I didnt want to work in an office, nor did I want to stick around in China. I read a biography of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead, and decided to study visual anthropology in the West. I wanted to be a woman in the world, or really, a woman of the world I wanted to equip myself with an intellectual mind so that I could enter a foreign land and not be lost in it. I would have a stance or mission, a way of navigating as an outsider. So I applied for PhD scholarships, and finally Kings College London accepted me.