Writing from the Western Chamber: First-Generation Immigrants and the Primordial Instinct in Xiaolu Guo’s Novels

Abstract

Xiaolu Guo’s fiction represents a sustained exploration of cultural encounters between first-generation Chinese immigrants and Britain. Across her writing, a tension can be seen between her protagonists’ gradual separation from, and deconstruction of, a monolithic ‘Chineseness’ and a tendency to essentialise culture in moments of disorientation and uncertainty. In this latter characteristic, Guo’s work pushes against the general trend in academic work of seeking to de-essentialise culture, itself a response to the continued prevalence of negative stereotypes. This chapter discusses this tension in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), I Am China (2014), and A Lover’s Discourse (2020) and focuses in particular on written language as a site at which this tension emerges and is played out. Ultimately, it argues that the general trajectory in Guo’s novels is to de-essentialise culture, but this occurs alongside a recognition of the seductiveness of what Clifford Geertz called the “primordial instinct” (1963, 109).