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| Looking out over the monk's quarters at Labarang Monastery in Xiahe, Gansu Province, 2002 |
In
1996, at the age of twenty-one, I left my home in Seattle
to backpack for six months through China, the birthplace of my mother.
As a half-Chinese, half-Caucasian American woman, I was eager to immerse myself
in Chinese, a language I had spoken with my grandmother as a child, but grown distant
from as an adult. Traveling into the remote countryside of western China and Tibet, I grew emboldened by the
freedom of wandering on my own and by my growing desire to live authentically. Back
in the States, I threw myself into learning more about China, Tibet, and Buddhism, befriending a
Tibetan nun and attending teachings with the Dalai Lama along the way.
In 1999, I set off on my second solo
journey, spending a month in Lhasa before
teaching English at a college in Chengdu, a city
of nine million in Sichuan
province. Increasingly I began to feel trapped on campus and to mourn the
legacy of silence that shadowed these two countries. Thankfully, I could escape
into the city on weekends where I was initiated into a world of Chinese artists,
smoky bars, and rebellious spirits. Alone, I also wrote, painted, danced, wept,
and expressed my growing loneliness and longing. Late one night, realizing the
depth of my unhappiness, I packed my bags and fled.
I’d come to China and Tibet wanting
to give something to the people, but soon my journey began to teach me how much
I still needed to learn about myself. Before long I met Dawei, a gentle-spirited
Chinese painter with whom I immediately connected and eventually moved in with.
But I still felt suffocated by the pollution, cultural taboos, and relentless
stares from strangers on the streets—and more disconnected from my heart-center
each day. My Chinese grew more fluent, yet outside of our home, I was treated
as an outsider—as foreign as the first day I arrived.
SEARCHING FOR THE HEART RADICAL is
the story of one woman’s cultural and spiritual pilgrimage, as she seeks to
reclaim her mother tongue and to find a home within. Whether witnessing a “sky burial” in rural Tibet,
navigating the slick, crowded streets of Hong Kong, or living in a crack-infested,
gentrified neighborhood in Seattle, this book explores the malleable sense of
self that is born when one lives and travels “in-between”, and the struggle to
embrace one’s own contradictions.
Ultimately, my restlessness would
lead me to betray Dawei, to say goodbye to China after three years of struggling
to belong, and to rediscover who I was once I lived in Seattle again—and in English. No
longer willing to hide behind old patterns of silence and conformity, I sought to
merge my different layers and claim myself whole—whether in China, in America, in a relationship, or
alone. SEARCHING FOR THE HEART RADICAL is one woman’s story, but it is also a
story that belongs to anyone who has ever longed for wholeness, authenticity,
and love.
