ABSTRACT
Part Chinese-English dictionary and part fictional journal entries, Dictionary charts the wanderings of impressionable twenty-three-year-old Zhuang Xiao Qiao, from China. China was hard at work building an East-West city as "a new urban mosaic that did not exist" in Mao's lifetime. The Chinese Post-cultural Revolution has ushered in an epoch of varied interconnections between Eastern and Western identities and ideologies. Xiaolu Guo's literary and cinematic writing-style is indicative of how East-West cities transform their identities rapidly and fluidly while redefining and repositioning their inhabitants via globalization. While ultimately it may be utopic to think that urban harmonies are lasting, what is significant is Guo's ability to intersect literary and visual narratives within her writing and present competing understandings of East and West discourses. Guo's literary London and Beijing offer us a view into how subjects attempt to navigate the transcultural odysseys across East-West landscapes of the twenty-first century.
