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David Evans

Xiaolu Guo   tried to overcome the problem of her latest novel  coming across as a piece of journalism by setting the action around a UFO sighting  in 2012.
It's an interesting idea, yet aside from the date and the unusual context, the story  reads like  journalism - albeit from the perspective of those people affected by the events depicted. UFO in  Her Eyes  tells of how the lives  of  the mainland's rural poor are being affected by the country's economic development. 
A village head sells off land for commercial and residential property development. Farmers are forced to sell their land for unjustified building projects; those who refuse  find their livestock and crops poisoned by industrial waste.  A butcher closes shop because he can't afford to buy a fridge in accordance with new hygiene rules. A  woman leaves her grandfather  to fend for himself after she's offered a job in the city.
If these stories sound familiar,  it's because they are. 
Anyone  who has watched the mainland's fortunes grow in recent years will know there is a human cost of its rampant expansion. Guo attempts to distinguish her novel by setting events in the near future and introducing an 'alien',  who turns out to be a lost American hitchhiker who goes on his merry way after being fed by a villager.
Then we have the UFO, or as Guo  says, a symbolic representation of US economic and political power.   It is all told in the reports of two policemen from the National Security and Intelligence Agency's Hunan Bureau sent to investigate the UFO sighting, complete with transcripts of interviews and notes in the margin. 
It all sounds rather ambitious and to some degree it is. What Guo tries to do is inject  a personal perspective into the tragic stories we have become  numb to,  and in doing so reignite our sense of injustice. 
'Newspapers write a lot about China, but the articles lack personal emotion towards those living in the provinces because [journalists] haven't been there,' she says. 
'They don't feel the pain that rural communities feel from modernisation. What is powerful for literature and for art is when you can work through two or three individual characters to reveal [the trivial aspects of their lives].
'I wanted to use  real details and events, but the whole thing should be something surreal, fictional and Kafkaesque. I made the decision that this novel should be political and current, but I didn't want it to be another piece of journalism.
'I want people to understand the story, but also the form and structure and shaping. I really think literature has stopped developing as an art form. I'm bored with realistic and naturalist writing. We've been doing that for a thousand years,'  she says on the phone from Paris.
Guo grew up in a small Zhejiang  fishing village and draws much of her inspiration from the remote provinces. Many of the characters in UFO are modelled on people from her home village and those she met  in Hunan, where she spent some time gathering material for the book and a documentary about life in rural parts of the  mainland.
A prolific writer and filmmaker who divides her time between Beijing and Paris, 36-year-old Guo is the author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,  short-listed for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.  She also wrote and directed How is Your Fish Today?,  a popular film among critics on the 2007 festival circuit. She is  now editing She, A Chinese, a film starring   Huang Lu, which Guo hopes will be ready in time for the Cannes  festival in May. 
Guo's childhood is reflected well in her book's characters in that they all tend to be ill-mannered and gruff. She says the children in her village were scared of the peasants working in the tea fields because their hard  lives tended to make them rude and violent. Her mother beat her when she was young and her father was forced to work on construction projects by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.  The experience helped her write Village of Stone,  a quasi-autobiography.
She  says  people brought up in the west are isolated by several generations from the poverty and hunger  their countries' populations  suffered during times of economic upheaval, pointing to Europe's industrial revolution of the late 1700s. In the past century,  the mainland has gone through several such upheavals and each time it produces a generation that knows what it's like to go hungry, she says. 
'When you hear about a peasant's troubles you start to feel love towards them, and more sympathy. And based on that sympathy and love and pity, you start to develop a more complex attitude towards the evolution of these people's lives under the [current economic] changes.'
By retelling stories from a personal perspective of hardship during  the mainland's current evolution, Guo hopes to add a new dimension to a recurring issue.   
UFO in Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo  (Chatto & Windus, HK$200)



Aliens among us