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The high walls of difference
The other characters we’ve read about have for the most part been educated, middle-class people who knew exactly what they were getting into when traveling and what to do when they got there. Z is a peasant, and her limited education in China makes her destination initially incomprehensible to her. Guo connects her with a lover who is a product of his time, his culture, who is totally foreign to her, with his past of homosexuality, his postmodern art, his drifter personality, his rejection of intellectualism. Z doesn’t understand what makes her lover who he is, and vice versa. There is a chasm between East and West that love can’t breach, because neither of them understands love’s place in the context of the other’s life and the larger culture they are part of.
Guo communicates this through Z’s confusion with language. She not only has to translate words from Chinese to English, but translate what the concepts mean to the society, like the meaning of home. Even the sentence structures imply different ways of thinking, different ways of understanding the world and the self. It’s almost impossible for someone so young and naïve as Z to understand English culture because of these barriers, and the miscommunication with her older, well-travelled lover suggest that more life experience doesn’t make it much easier to break them down. Their arguments where they say to each other “you Chinese” and “you English” are evidence of that.
All this shows what a process it is to communicate when disparate worlds come together. As Z goes along she’s trying, trying to piece it all together, to understand how another people see things. Even after a year she’s not experiencing culture shock anymore, but I would say she’s still in a state of culture surprise. As her grasp of the English language evolves, she begins to understand the culture more, and China’s place in relation to it, but it is clear that words alone are not enough – you have to know the difference between what it means to you, and what it means to them. It takes a long time, and lots of questions, to climb those walls.
It goes both ways.
I really like this idea. But reading your post led me to another question.
You write
"It’s almost impossible for someone so young and naïve as Z to
understand English culture because of these barriers, and the
miscommunication with her older, well-travelled lover suggest that more
life experience doesn’t make it much easier to break them down."
If Z cannot understand our culture, than how can we claim to understand hers? Though the author does a good job of guiding us through Z's quest to learn English, if your claim is true, that she is too naive to comprehend Western culture, then how can we assume we understand what she is writing? We may understand the alphabet she uses, but perhaps our Western socilization is preventing us from seeing the deeper meaning, and true message of her journal...
"Culture Surprise"
"Culture surprise" - nice term, by the way.
I think it's interesting that you point out Z's economic and educational status before her travels. Off the top of my head, everyone else we have read about has been affluent or well-educated, which puts them in a different situation. Someone on Tuesday said that everyone else was better prepared to enter the culture they did, and that was quickly shot down, but I think in a way they were because of their place in life. Sure, our other travelers might not have expected to go crazy in the desert or anything, but people are products of their upbringings and situations, and Z's certainly place her in another category compared to our other travelers. I think it would be interesting to compare where she is at the end of the novel with where other travelers were at the end of their respective novels (or lives, as the case usually was).