Radical

The world can seem strange and lonely when you step away from your family and everything you have tried to call your own. Yet beauty may also appear. Xiaolu Guo travels to New York to take up a position as a visiting professor for a year, leaving her child and partner behind in London. The encounter with American culture and people threatens her sense of identity and throws her into a crisis -- of meaning, desire, obligation and selfhood. This is a memoir about separation -- by continents, by language, and from people. It's about being an outsider and the desperate longing to connect. In Chinese a 'radical' is the graphic root of a word and Xiaolu uses her exploration of language and her own life to create this playful and provocative text. At once a memoir, a dictionary, and an ardent love letter, it is an expression of her fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes, and an attempt to describe the space in between. An archive of an artist's search for creative freedom, it is above all else an intimate account of her efforts to carve out a life of her own.