‘If Our Love Existed in Chinese Tense’: Temporal Tensions in Xiaolu Guo’s <i>A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers</i>

Abstract

This article is a close textual reading of Xiaolu Guo’s <i>A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers</i> (2007). In the novel, the protagonist Z confesses she is not good at tenses. Her uncertain command of temporality transposes from the context of grammatical tense to her love life, where her desire to forever be with her English partner conflicts with his belief that the future is not in the present. As her language learning struggles mirror the widening fissures in her relationship, temporal tensions arise. For one, Z’s first language (Chinese) does not have tenses, while her second (English) is dominated by time-sensitive verbs. This article is interested in the temporal tensions (time as linear or as looping) that illuminate the cultural and linguistic factors affecting Z’s perception of love, and reveal the gendered power structure (her male partner’s dominance over Z’s female subservience) that steers the relationship. Her ruminations on love and efforts at making sense of tenses draw together an ideographic scripting of a kind of love that deprioritises temporality to counteract the discipline and development of love in a linear time culture. Love in ‘Chinese tense’, as Z desires, is one that defies progression, future-proofed and faithful as a picture is unchanging.