Progression

Klimt's Tree of Life

When I was little, my parents used to ask me and my sister every night at dinner to name three things we learned that day. It seemed tedious to a child - what did we learn? Sometimes we could ramble on about new French words or multiplication tables, but other days we were completely at a loss. But this exercise should have been easy. The reality is, we were learning so much every single day. We all do, each day, even if we don't always stop to realize it. In fact, the daily insights we have are really important, be them sweeping moments of falling in love or as simple as learning what "homosexual" means. The point is, it's all important, and we should never overlook the smaller moments of spiritual progression.

In this light, we can look to Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary as a series of epiphanies that amalgamates into one, large epiphany. As a dictionary that Guo's main character, Z, creates, each short chapter is titled by an English word, one that Z has either added to her English vocabulary or has expanded her understanding of during the course of her daily events. Though it would be fruitful to focus on specific epiphanies Z has throughout the book, such as her first time masturbating, or the myriad cultural connections and dissonances she discovers, if we look holistically at the novel as one great, united epiphany, we can see that Guo's greatest accomplishment is compiling the seemingly ordinary moments of change and realization into a larger chronicle of progression. Z's most meaningful epiphany is her realization that her own Concise Chinese-English dictionary, her diary, is the one that brings her to a new spiritual place. This entire section of her life, which fits neatly into book form, marks a moment of realization and the shaking of previous boundaries to bring Z into a new understanding.

The burdens of consciousness Z carries with her she releases via writing, by sharing her private realizations with us. In doing so, her overall commitment to writing in English not only brings her to a better understanding of English and general Western culture, but the entirety of it is a finished epiphany; one giant realization of her growth and maturation. And it very well may be that Z's choice to share this diary with us, the reader, is in a way its own epiphany: the realization that what she has accomplished is truly something. Her experiences, her new knowledge, her entire voyage was the work of change and spiritual balance. She had extreme highs and extreme lows, fell in love and found her own body; she became a woman, had her womanhood taken from her, and regained it back with her strength and conviction. Knowing all of this, she speaks to us so we can read each entry as a small, but vital change and perhaps reflect on our own daily epiphanies. What did we learn today?

As a travel fiction, Z's novel stands a picture of both a figurative and literal journey, one that ends with a return home. When she left, she was still a girl, and she returns a woman, who has the maturity and peace of mind to be able to share her writing, instead of her body, with us for our benefit. She has learned to respect herself, and she respects her voyage as a whole, the pieces of which she puts together to make sense of a confusing, often difficult and beautiful life. And life itself is, of course, a journey.