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The Guardian

07-03-2025

My Battle of Hastings
Xiaolu Guo
Delightfully frank and moving
This is the third memoir by Xiaolu Guo, who grew up beside the East China Sea where her grandfather was a fisherman. When she inherited some money from the sale of her parents' house in China after they both died of cancer, Guo begins looking for a place to live and work on the South Coast of England. Having lived in London, she missed 'the salty wind, the contour of shorelines, and the ceaseless changing waves in the viewfinder of my eyes'.
Guo eventually settled on 'rain-stained dilapidated' Hastings, which she describes as 'a cursed place but, at the same time, sexy, mysterious and somehow quintessentially English'. Her modest requirements are a 'sea view and a tub' in which 'to soak my body in the endless cold English evenings'. She moves into the tiny top-floor flat in December 2021.
Divided into the four seasons, the book is an account Guo's first year in a run-down part of the seaside town. Discovering a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in a second-hand bookshop, she also buries herself in the ancient history of the area. Aware that the locals seem uninterested in their city's remote past, she wonders why she, 'a Chinese immigrant to Europe, a woman with neither power not any Western ancestry', should care about the fate of King Harold or the invasion of the Normans in 1066. After visiting a re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings ('a strange and wonderful idea'), she concludes that a country that is able to view a great defeat from its past as an entertainment for families, reveals a detachment from its history that would be unimaginable in China: 'I must admit that this is one of the good qualities the British have.'
As well as exploring Anglo-Saxon history, Guo describes the challenges of her new life, such as renovating the cold and damp flat, as well as the pleasures, including walks in the countryside to gather wild garlic for cooking and visits from her partner and 9-year-old child, Moon, who collects shells on the beach. Her chronicle of life in Hastings with its 'loudly crying seagulls' becomes a wonderfully evocative meditation on migration, history, war (two months after she moves in, Putin invades Ukraine, which she compares to the Norman Conquest), and politics (after the third prime minister in a year, she concludes 'the country which I have adopted as my home cannot be saved'). Guo's delightfully frank and often moving memoir is also a poignant exploration of identity and belonging. At one point she memorably compares herself to a jasmine seed blown in the wind: 'we drift and then we land somewhere, we try to grow in its soil…We either germinate or turn into dust.'