Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones is a literary thriller about a woman who runs away from her life and her identity in America in an attempt to find herself in a rural region of China, where she signs on to work for an archaeologist seeking the hidden remains of the precious Peking Man fossils that were lost there decades before. Main character Alice Mannegan spends her time in China exploring her history, sensuality, and the limits of her new life as a translator and a foreigner while on the periphery of a Chinese cultural mystery. The book is set in contemporary China from the period when the book was written, in 1998.
 
The novel opens with main character Alice on a bicycle in Beijing, riding toward an illicit sexual tryst with a local Chinese man. Alice is a translator and interpreter who has been working in China since she got out of college ten years before. Now in her thirties, she is struggling to find herself in a country where she feels more alive than the place where she grew up, but will always be seen as an “outside woman.” More than anything, Alice wants a relationship with a man, preferably Chinese, so she can totally escape her identity as an American woman and embrace Chinese culture and life. Unfortunately, Alice has yet to find a man who understands her, and so she continues her search throughout the book.
 
Alice takes on a job with an archaeologist named Adam Spencer, a recent divorcee who believes that the remains of an important fossil called Peking Man are hidden in the Mongolian desert. Spencer has two Chinese specialists on his team with him, Dr. Lin and Dr. Kong. Alice comes along to help translate between Spencer, Lin, and Kong, and in the process embeds herself both in the mystery of Peking Man and in the lives of the archaeologists.
 
The quartet venture on into the desert, in remote conditions where during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, many people were forced into labor camps who never were recovered or made it back home. According to Spencer, the remains of Peking Man were hidden in the desert by the noted theologist and archaeologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Frenchman whose notes on the region are scattered throughout the novel as clues that guide the troupe toward the mysterious remains. Unfortunately, the mystery of Peking Man is not the only one to be solved on this journey. Nearly all the characters – Lin, Alice, and Spencer – have troubles that they are struggling to overcome on this search in the remote deserts of rural China.

Spencer, whose recent divorce left him lost and aimless in every element of his life other than career, believes that solving this mystery is his only hope to prove to himself that he isn't a failure. He misses his only son, who remains at home with his mother and whose life he has frequently missed out on due to the travel that comes with his job. Meanwhile, Alice is struggling with her own haunted past. As she escapes further and further into rural China and away from the Western world, she finds it impossible to escape the memories of her senator father, a loving man with racist ideologies that Alice finds reprehensible. Particularly, she is fixated on a speech he made about her as a child, and the tragedy that came as a result of it. On the journey, Alice finds out that her father is dying, and is forced to find some resolution between her hatred of her father's beliefs and work, and his undying love for his little girl which sustained her for much of her life. As all of this happens with the American protagonist, Dr. Lin is on his own search – he is looking for any trace of his wife, who he still loves, and who disappeared in this area during the Cultural Revolution. Lin hasn't seen his wife in twenty years, and struggles as he begins to fall for Alice, who is actively pursuing him despite his grief.

The book is an intellectual mystery driven by the internal struggles of the characters, who force each other to confront their deepest secrets and desires as they look for another buried secret – the remains of Peking Man.



Nicole Mones is an American novelist and food writer. She has published four novels; Lost in Translation was her first, and won the Pacific Northwest Book Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She has also published Night in Shanghai, The Last Chinese Chef, and A Cup of Light, among other non-fiction articles for The Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, and Gourmet. Mones worked extensively for nearly two decades with China during her employment with a textile company, and all of her four novels are set in China.