Latest news with #XiaoluGuo
Economist
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Economist
Xiaolu Guo on love, art and how the Chinese psyche has changed
One of the Chinese diaspora's most celebrated artists grew up poor but surrounded by literature and art. After a string of books in her native language Xiaolu Guo found her creativity constrained. In London she began writing and making films in English —most recently a reworking of 'Moby Dick'. After half a life inside China and half outside, she has illuminating views on art, love, youth and womanhood. Rosie Blau, a former China correspondent for The Economist and a co-host of 'The Intelligence', our daily news podcast, visits Ms Guo at her home. They explore the author's formative years, her bewildering move to the West and her thoughts on Chinese art and society today.
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
This month's best paperbacks: Mick Herron, Armistead Maupin and more
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.'
