She was a foundling in her own family, shunted to adoptive parents for two years, then to the edge of China, to a fishing village on the East China Sea, and to a furious, alcoholic grandfather and a grandmother sold at 12 into marriage for some pottage, and never given a name. Is that colourful enough for you?
But there is more: the life story of the young Chinese filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo makes Cinderella’s seem bland. The hovel she lived in until she was seven was on Anti-Pirates Passage. Her grand-father, a failed and bitter fisherman, lost his livelihood in the 1970s, when the Chinese state collectivised fishing and stole everyone’s boats. In the village, Guo was barely fed, often ate nothing but kelp, and heard the sounds of domestic violence all over the streets, in the din of raised voices and thrown furniture. This was not the last of the violence: her grandfather killed himself by drinking pesticide. Her grandmother only ever walked with pain on her bound feet.
Guo saw all this, and remembered. Her memories are raw and furious and compelling, but also scarcely believable sometimes: how does a five-year-old remember verbatim a three-page conversation of visiting census- takers? So there is artistic licence of a kind I rarely forgive (distrust one scene, and perhaps you distrust them all).
This is a shame, because I want to believe them all, when there are scenes such as the one where a young girl is given licence to be an artist, when she meets a group of art students and learns that the mind can change reality, that a brown sea can be blue because an artist has made it so. The young Guo is ‘at a loss for words’.
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