Anne Liu Kellor - Heart radical : a search for language, love, and belonging

Praise for Heart Radical

A lovely evocative book about travel and culture and love. And language and teaching and dancing. And intimacy. If you have never been to China and Tibetor if you have been many timesyoull enjoy this fresh and honest perspective.

Sharman Apt Russell, author of Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It and Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist

Anne Liu Kellors memoir shows us how far we must go to approach understanding. Traversing two countries across two decades, Heart Radical gets at the multiple meanings of the heart in word, in practice, in physical and emotional use and evolution. Vivid with sensory experiences, this book offers us the chance to travel with Kellor, but also within our own interior landscapes to arrive at new and deeper ways of connecting to our hearts most fervent and secret wishes. Kellors nuanced, elegant, and poetic prose depicts the toughness of love, of language, how both can hurt and heal us, how we can use them against one another, or to uplift each other. The choice is ours.

Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne and Im So Fine

In Heart Radical, language becomes a rich metaphor for our own complicated and changing identities. To be radical, Anne Liu Kellor tells us, is to be rooted in your essential nature. In this soulful memoir, Kellor looks to the many ways language is a means of communication, yes, but can also be a barrier to a full understanding of ourselves and of each other. In following Kellors journey to China and back again, we find ourselves searching for what is most radicalmost essentialin our own hearts.

Brenda Miller, author of A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form and An Earlier Life

Through personal and historical recollection and the language of wounding, Heart Radical speaks to land and culture, selfhood and belonging. To live within and without language, to ignore or embrace silence. This memoir is a refuge, a legacy, a heart breathing in one continuous motion.

E. J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others and A Lesser Love

Heart Radical is a richly absorbing, deeply moving book about one womans search for identity, enlightenment, and connection. Its also a tender travel memoir that takes the reader on an unforgettable and intimate journey with the author as she grapples with being a twentysomething American in Chinathe country from which her mother immigrated. I loved this book. Its vulnerable, searching, insightful, riveting and beautifully written.

Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things

Heart Radical

Copyright 2021 Anne Liu Kellor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-173-1
E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-174-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021908294

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1569 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

for my ancestors

In writing this book, I relied extensively on detailed journals, research, and memory. While I did my best to represent my past as truthfully as possible, it is also a given that memory can be subjective. I changed most peoples names out of respect for their privacy. This is my version of my story.

My entire life Ive craved more words. Words nourished me when I was little, gave me refuge when I was lonely or confused. And words guided me in my twenties, when I set off from my home in the Pacific Northwest for Western China and often felt even more alone, but increasingly witnessed by myself on the written page. When I had few companions to speak to in English, and still too few words in Chinese. When I wanted close friendships and romantic love, but it felt more tangible to reach for ideas of spiritual union. All I knew wasI was filled with an intense longing and sorrow. Sorrow for the magnitude of suffering in the world, in China and Tibet, and within myself. Sorrow which I felt so clearly, but couldnt understand why I felt so deep. And as much as I wanted to be patient and not need to know or control exactly where my journey would take me, a huge part of me also wanted it all to make sense right awaya logical rational explanation of why this is meant to be. Karma. Fate. My Path with a capital P. The People you are meant to meet. The Person you are meant to become. The ways in which you will be better loved once you do your Part to save the world.

Twenty-plus years later, I cant say Ive eliminated that kind of ego-driven desire. But I can say that Ive lived long enough to come back to my core of love and self-acceptance many times, in cycles. Looking outward, looking inward. Outward. Inward. Over and over. Reaching for a sense of being settled in my skin.

Throughout these cycles, words have been my constant. My steady awareness: noticing, documenting, remembering. Making meaning. Writing. Yes, writing has saved me. Writing has filled me. Writing has emptied me. Writing has showered necessary, nourishing words, helping me to understand and reckon with my choices. And writing has brought me back to myselfagain and again and again. A steady eye/I: witness. Lover. Guide. Friend.

Heart Radical is a record of a younger me, during a time when the trajectory of my life was still barely known, when I was just setting out on my Path with a capital P.

Now, there is still so much I do not know, but I do know that we each have an essential nature. And that it is our job to listen to that nature and figure out how to work with it, not how to become someone we are not.

Now, twenty-some years later, I am still the same person. And: I am vastly different. And so, I return to look at my past to discover what I may have forgotten in my middle age. For while I may no longer have the desire or ability to take off alone and forge a life in another country, I am able to see, name, and accept all of my layers with ever-sharpening clarity. To see how my story keeps changing, even if my essential longingto love and be lovedremains the same.

I am collecting heart words. Words in Chinese that are connected to the heart.

Shang xin: wounded heart; to be sad .

Nai xin: enduring heart; to be patient.

Zui xin: drunk heart; to be fascinated or enchanted.

I am fascinated by these words; my heart is drunk with this language.

I look in the dictionary under xin: . In Chinese, mind and heart are not held at a distance: