Chinese-British author and film-maker Xiaolu Guo left China two decades ago to live in London. A writer of novels and memoirs, she has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize and won the US National Book Critics Circle award in 2017. Her work explores migration and alienation, as well as memory. Her provocative new title, Radical: A Life of My Own, takes the form of a diary-like dictionary, fusing autobiography with an exploration of language as she describes the personal crisis that ensued when she sought to claim creative freedom by leaving her family to take a teaching role on another continent, and became erotically entangled with a linguist she names “E”.
How did your new book come about?
Originally, it arose as a lexicon of the female world, of our struggles and freedoms and duties, but an alternative title could be The Book of Separations – separation from my language and my original culture, from the ones I love. And a separation from my second home, which is Britain.
You describe leaving your partner, J, and young child in east London for weeks at a time to teach at Columbia in the US. What was the impact on your relationship with them?
To live creatively is to invent one’s own way to live, and that requires living with uncertainty. Being together or not together is not a static state. We are on the same boat, going through the storm and calmness of the ocean, like many other families in real life. My daughter was only five or six and it was really tough, just not seeing her. The first stay was six weeks. I came back and went to my daughter’s school and we both burst into tears. Next, I stayed four weeks, and it became slightly bearable.
What made it worthwhile?
I was longing for personal space outside of a domestic life, and to escape, to be free to write books and make films for a while, until I knew what to do next. Many small decisions can be quite radical in one’s life; the crucial thing is that one takes pains to see the beauty and joy it generates at the same time. I am glad that I have gone through all this. It’s been a very rich emotional and physical practice.
Has the book clarified anything for you?
When you’ve come through the most difficult time of early motherhood, your heart is still very wild and full of desires. You lose your centre. The sections about female freedom taught me a lot intellectually but the geographies of my life are still very fragmented.
Alongside its intellectual voraciousness – you quote sources as varied as Nietzsche, Mary Shelley and the ancient Chinese polymath Zhang Heng – there’s an unabashed emotional intensity to the book in the way you describe sex with E.
I am always very intense, that’s natural for me. I think I imbued it from my parents’ shockingly incompatible marriage. My mother was this rough, uneducated Red Guard, and my father was a tender, cultured, romantic painter. I often find myself embarrassingly earnest as a person – it’s not very cool.
You and J are still in each other’s lives: “no one has ever left anyone” as you put it. Have he and E read the book?
Yes. It’s funny, because they both think it’s a strong book. I can’t even put into words my feelings for their deep generosity, this mutual intellectual respect. It would be tacky to ask “Can you forgive me for writing this?”, but I feel very indebted to them.
The book’s ultra-short chapters leave room for a lot of white space on the page. Was that intentional?
White space is such a huge concept in Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. It meant I found a lot of European novelists from the past really difficult to read, because there is absolutely no white space in their narratives. I also wanted to write this book with a kind of condensed abstraction that might talk to more people. I think that women’s yearning should be a bit more collectively gathered, and pinning things down divides us.
How different an artist would you be had you never left Beijing?
I see an incredible amount of freedom in the way I write in the west. I really appreciate that. Before I left, I wrote almost 100 hours of TV soap dialogue, and I would probably [still] be doing that if I’d stayed. It’s a bizarre, split life because at Beijing Film Academy we studied Godard and Pasolini but most of my classmates are now churning out page after page of kitchen sink drama – domestic, social stories with a communist tone.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing a book about British history going all the way back to 1066. I’ve felt very burdened by China and its politics – it’s this great inheritance but also huge cultural baggage, so I’m moving away from it intellectually.
Growing up, what kind of a reader were you?
In 80s post-Mao China we were still flooded with revolutionary stories, so I was drowned in state literature with selfless heroes and soldiers, but I must confess that it was as powerful for me as any literature I received later on.
Is there a classic you’ve recently read for the first time?
Moby-Dick. I tried in the past, but finally… My God, what a powerful, mad book with the most intense literary allusions and poetry.
What works of contemporary literature have you enjoyed lately?
The post-Mao Chinese author Wang Xiaobo and his novel Golden Age, as well as his essays. I just read Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters [published in the UK in July] and it is a strong work on the relation between womanhood and art – something very close to my thinking and my way of living.
Are there authors you regularly return to?
EM Forster and Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s struggle for freedom beyond the home and for a literary voice in this world is inspiring. I see my own struggles in her struggles. As for Forster, his message “only connect” is very essential for me. His novels manage to show the possibility and impossibilities of human connections in a beautiful way.
What do you plan on reading next?
My own forthcoming history book – I have to make the final revisions. Then I will read Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I used to love his Kubla Khan simply because of the eastern or Chinese connections, and now I’m about to read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I find his work very rich, incredibly imaginative, almost like universal folklore.
• Radical: A Life of My Own by Xiaolu Guo is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
