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Cute pidgin pie

Jonathan Mirsky

Thursday, 15th February 2007

Slight. A slight story, slightly poignant, slightly drawn characters, occasionally slightly funny. It also has a grating aspect that is not slight: its language. The central character, a young Chinese woman in London, tells this story, I don’t know why, in fractured English. So there is a lot of this: ‘Patty Surly’ for Patisserie, ‘Queue Gardens’ (get it?) and when she is in Italy talking to a lawyer, he is described as an ‘Avocado’. Enough already. In 50 years of listening to Chinese learning to speak English I never heard this kind of thing: ‘I not meet you yet. You in future.’

Astoundingly, half way through this book there is a passage in a different type- face, signed ‘Editor’s translation’. It confesses, ‘I am sick of speaking English like this. I am sick of writing English like this.’ This is a misdirected torpedo below the waterlines of readers trying to suspend disbelief while coping with the cutesy narrative.

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