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Zhuang is a young woman sent by her parents from her small provincial town in China to London to study English. She decides to keep a diary of her experiences as well as all the words which strike her. She likewise carries around with her a handy dictionary as a reference to all the words she encounters as she makes her way. Her initial days are filled with her experiences with all things English often with very comical results. She wonders for example why English breakfast is so huge and why there is a constant preoccupation with the weather. Despite being occupied by her studies she is lonely and unused to being all by herself. Her solitude is broken when she meets a man, twice her age at a cinema. It doesn’t take much for Z to fall passionately in love with him and they are soon living together, she having comically misunderstood an invitation to visit him as an invitation to live with him. Before long however, the myriad differences between them manifest and Z realizes that, cliché or not, love is not enough.
The unique character of this book is its grammatical construction. It is constructed to reflect the level and progress that Z makes in learning English. As she progresses, the entries become more and more grammatically correct and assured. More importantly, the novel traces her growing maturity during the course of her relationship with her unnamed lover. Ms. Guo has written Z’s experiences with humor and a keen eye for detail. It is likewise filled with sharp reflections on the cultural differences that Z discovers and how her willingness to explore such differences may cause discomfort, even difficulty for others around her. One striking example is when she unabashedly reads her lover’s diaries without permission. There is genuine surprise on her part to learn that in the West, the concept of an individual self is a highly prized and zealously guarded one. It is only when she is chastised that she realizes that the highly individual sense of self demands a strong sense of privacy. At the same time however, it is this concept of individual self which permits her to explore without fear her own dormant sexuality. In writing about such experiences, the author has highlighted with poignancy the experience of being completely “other “. It is something all of us can understand and sympathize with. All of us have certainly been “other” at one point or another.