A friend recently moved back to the UK after living in China for ten years. Being English, he was always going to be an outsider in China, but what surprises him now is how foreign he feels in England too. He asked me whether this feeling ever ended. I told him that I suspect people like us will never fully belong anywhere again.

The novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo articulates this sense of alienation exquisitely, knowing exactly what it’s like: ‘Part of me is always in exile.’ She left China in her late twenties when she was already a published author. In Radical, she tries to come to terms with being an outsider, using language as metaphor (she says she’s pursuing ‘an etymology of myself’). The result is a collection of poetic thoughts about what it means to belong, each sketch beginning with a word (from German, English or Chinese) and its etymology. These reflections come together to tell a roughly chronological story, less memoir and more anthology. She writes beautifully, though at times her introspections veer on the self-indulgent.

The book begins in the autumn of 2019. Guo has moved from London to New York to take up a temporary job, leaving behind her young daughter and a philosopher named J, ‘the father of my child’. She misses them both. In one vignette, which opens with the word Übermensch, (‘German, translated as “overman”, “superman”. German root: über “over”’), she reads Nietzsche, J’s specialty, in her Harlem apartment as the snow falls.

She soon begins an affair with a translator she calls ‘E’, but by the spring of 2020 the pandemic has come. She moves back to London ahead of schedule, to the house she shares with J and their child, while E returns to his family. She and E continue to correspond for the rest of the year, Guo heart-broken. ‘How come I never hear you say “talk to me” or “I want to see you”’?, she asks in one email (at times, the reader feels uncomfortably voyeuristic). What becomes clear is that, as much as she feels like an outsider, Guo isn’t really looking for somewhere to belong. If anything, she seems to fear that she is already tied down, and that her creativity might suffer as a result.

While in New York, she muses on the word ‘wedlock’, and focuses on the needs of two parts of her identity: ‘For the immigrant, the child is a new root… But what if a woman needs another kind of home, to send out her own new roots?’ Later, in London, she reflects on the word ‘paradox’:

The paradox in a woman artist’s life is perhaps this: to sustain her life with new energy and creativity she needs inspirations and adventures, but these adventures may destroy the safety and structure she has built around her life… What I have really been trying to make is a female life not trapped by domestic duty and patriarchal constraints, one that creates its own imaginative and creative power.

So she’s restless, pulled by two incompatible instincts – to belong and to be free. What begins as an immigrant’s search for roots turns out to be a woman’s quest for liberty.

No wonder, then, that Guo seems devastated when she returns to London, even though it’s where her child lives. She mourns the loss of E; but perhaps it’s really the freedom of New York she misses. She seems to admit as much, comparing herself to Prince Calaf, Puccini’s protagonist in Turandot:

The prince is not in love with Turandot, a woman he hardly knows. But he is in love with the illusion of a woman, and more so, he is in love with himself in relation to youth and beauty.

At times Guo seems to be trying too hard to find meaning. Even setting aside the fact that this is a memoir about a single year in her life, and that a fleeting affair is given the significance of a lifelong love, small acts such as eating an avocado swiped from E’s kitchen (as she does on the plane back to London) are imbued with grand importance: ‘That was the beginning of our separation: an avocado, and the stone inside.’ Yet the prose is superb – and all the more impressive when you consider that this is the second language she is published in.

In linguistics, a ‘radical’ is a base component of a written Chinese character. But in this memoir, Guo is the eponymous radical. The feminist, the lover and the artist strain against the demands of motherhood and the obligations of monogamy.