Translator

Chinese Character for "Love"On a quick note before I begin, I found A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers to be a perfect airport novel: short chapters, simple but effective language, and engaging plot, and a sympathetic protagonist. While I thought I would be out for the hour and a half that it takes to fly from LaGuardia to Detroit Metro at six in the morning, I found myself keeping my seat-neighbors awake with the overhead reading light because I didn’t want to stop reading the novel.

My own enjoyment aside, I found that A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers had one of the best insights into travel of any novel we have tackled. While The Evening of the Holiday handled a relationship birthed out of the temporality of travel, Dictionary gives us a view into the ways human beings seek out connections (both physical and not) when in a new land. Z may be getting better at English everyday, but her body speaks the same language that every human body does. Severed from real verbal exchanges, Z and her English beau cling together in a form of physical communication that bonds them together without having to know whatever the other is saying all of the time.

Does this sound familiar? Reading this novel, I saw more than a few parallels between Z and my fellow NYU students – and not the ones from other countries. We come from all of these different locations, and in many ways we speak “different languages.” My friends from South Carolina or Texas don’t know the names I refer to, the regional slang I use, the traditions I reference, or the locations I am familiar with, and I am as in the dark concerning them. For many people, launching themselves into this physical bond of sexual relations is a way of bypassing this and creating a binding connection that simulates long-time knowledge. College sex might seem like horny teenagers at first, but I think it is definitely a coping mechanism for lonely young adults away from home in the same way that it is for Z in a strange land, and it is much faster than taking the time to learn a whole new “language” - think of it as a translator.