Sacred in the Everyday

Dictionary

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary by Xiaolu Guo suggests a kind of epiphany very different from what an epiphany is traditionally thought to be. The Oxford English Dictionary defines epiphany as “a manifestation or appearance of some divine or superhuman being,” and this is typical: a religious experience. But Xiaolu Guo makes the idea of an epiphany a very ordinary, everyday experience, without removing the sacred from it. In the novel Zhuang is living in a foreign country, learning about both the culture she is trying to become a part of and about love. The book is set up as both a dictionary and a journal. Each entry is a new word: it contains the definition, provided by a dictionary, and her experiences of the word. Each new word, and each new entry, is a kind of epiphany. She is not just learning words but she is learning what they mean, and how their meaning affects her life. In learning these new words and their meanings she is learning the difference between her culture at home in China and the Western culture.

One entry is entitled “Future Tense,” and in it she discusses Love, as a Chinese concept and as a Western concept:

‘Love,” this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved.’ All these specific tenses mean Love is a time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

If our loved existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.

She explains that Chinese does not have past, present, or future tenses. Everything is in one tense: this makes learning English very difficult because the Chinese speaker must learn that things exist “in a particulr period of time:” she must learn this about love as well, but not in the abstract way in which she learns is school. She is not learning about love from a teacher in a classroom, but from a lover in the world. She must learn as she experiences.

Every new experience she has and every new word she learns is an epiphany. Even though these epiphanies become commonplace, I think they are sacred experiences, if not in a religious sense. Love is a sacred thing, and so is everything else that she learns about. Everything she learns is taken for granted by those who already know it, but for her each word is something completely new, and her joy in learning words is expressed to other people.