'Love', this English word: like other English words it has tense. 'Loved' or 'will love' or 'have loved'. All these tenses mean love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, love is '爱' (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Guo Xiaolu (郭小橹). 2007.
A book delineating the challenges of transnational identity, intimate misunderstanding, and emotional displacement, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary centers on the life of twenty-year-old Z, who moves to London to study English and finds herself trapped by the newness of British life and the tongue-twisting impossibility of English grammar and syntax. Z meets an emotionally distant man and enters a romantic relationship with him, leading to both connected and individual journeys of self-discovery and defining love. As Z’s narration improves from careful, broken phrases treading eggshells, Z reaches the understanding that language and love are confusedly intertwined and distinct, that you can know all the words of the English language without understanding your lover.
Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.
