Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang, the daughter of shoe factory owners in rural China, has come to London to study English. She calls herself Z because English people can't pronounce her name, but she's no better at their language. Set loose to find her way through a confusion of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps, she winds up lodging with a Chinese family and thinks she might as well have not left home. But then she meets an Englishman who changes everything. From the moment he smiles at her, she enters a new world of sex, freedom, and self-discovery. But she also realizes that, in the West, love does not always mean the same as in China, and that you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your lover. Drawing on her diaries from when she first arrived in the UK, Xiaolu Guo writes the story with steadily improving English grammar and vocabulary.--BOOK JACKET.