Xiaolu Guo, 52, was born in China and lives in London. The author of more than 20 books in a variety of genres in Chinese and English, she’s also a film director whose awards include the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival, previously won by Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch. This month she publishes two books: the paperback of her 2024 memoir, My Battle of Hastings: Chronicle of a Year By the Sea, and a new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, a retelling of Moby-Dick
What led you to take on Herman Melville’s 1851 classic?
I was in New York, a foreigner walking around for a year while teaching at Columbia and writing my memoir, Radical [2023], and this was a parallel project, a philosophical experiment. Most people are Asiatic – the world’s population is 60% Asian – and with each novel I write, I ask myself in what ways a non-westerner from a non-biblical background can engage in dialogue with the western literary canon. The word “Christendom” appears repeatedly in Moby-Dick. I wondered: what if people never knew what that is? If it said “Taoism” instead, would you still listen to the story? I’m a guerrilla gardener – I secretly go out planting trees in my neighbourhood – and it made me think: can I somehow just bring ancient east Asian philosophy into this American landscape? Guerrilla sabotage. I wanted the whole world on that ship. I spent so much time figuring out how to get a black captain from the civil war period into dialogue with a Chinese Taoist sailmaker.
