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Chinatown
First off, I want to say how much I enjoyed reading A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. The protagonist, although sometimes annoying, is very endearing. The story is so accessible to me, I didn’t want to put it down when I was reading it.
I think the concept of a chinatown is a perfect metaphor for this story. The story is about the mixing of English and Chinese cultures. The London Chinatown is like a little snowglobe of culture in the middle of a very different world. It’s a strange concept, an attempt to preserve a culture in a foreign land. I believe there is often no intention by the Chinese to merge with the culture that surrounds their Chinatown but what ends up happening is that there is a merging of cultures, just as Z’s culture merges with her lover’s culture and how she merges with the foreign culture that she is placed in.
This is a perfect travel story, because it relates travel and the theme of place to the lives of the main characters in a non invasive way. Travel plays a huge rule in the gradual maturing of the protagonist. In the beginning she is needy, she doesn’t speak English very well and is waiting for someone to come take care of her. She does find someone to take care of her, to give her shelter and food and love. He shows her his London. She is lucky that she manages to learn how to live on her own by the end of the book, because she is so dependent on her lover that she could have lost her identity completely.
The way Z matures and changes is shown through her writing: at the beginning of the book she can only speak fragmented English and throughout the book her English improves. She also becomes more aware of herself as a human: she becomes comfortable living with herself and being on her own. Z says at the end, England is “the country where I became an adult, where I grew into a woman.”
There is a theme of trying to find one’s home. Both Z and her unnamed lover are searching for a place where they will ultimately feel satisfied. Z’s lover is a self described drifter, a traveler like Port, searching for something unknown. It appears at the end that he may have found his home in the Welsh countryside, and Z may have found hers in Beijing, but their homes are not together.
China Town
I also wrote about China Town in my blog entry, because the idea of trying to preserve an old culture in a new country struck me as interesting as well, especially because this idea tends to only reach such extremes as to build a city in Asian cultures (Chinatown, Korea Town, etc.). Of course, there are areas like Little Italy, but these neighborhoods often have a much more noticeable use of the English language.I think, like you said, that although Chinatown is an attempt to remain strictly Chinese and have no need to speak English, English language and Western culture often sneak in, due to surrounding neighborhoods and tourism.
While this was perhaps not
While this was perhaps not your main point, your mention of Chinatown reminded me of some reading I did on multiculturalism and that while seemingly benign, the process of assimilation is in fact contentious. You quite rightly, as the author does, align Z.'s coming of age and awareness of "herself as a human" with her assimilation into English culture. However, you point out that assimilation is not always a goal for immigrant groups, which begs the question of whether such a transition is natural, inevitable, or even positive.