I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years. We literally lived underground. We dug a hole and lived there for years. My father cleaned public toilets, even though he was a highly respected poet. Nationality and borders are barriers to our intelligence, to our imagination and to all kinds of possibilities.

A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.

I don't like China. Even today, I still feel I have no emotional relations with this place.

There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.

There's no single artwork I even want to mention or that I can even really think about it to have any feeling, to be proud of it.

What is important is that we actively express our thoughts and wishes, in every realm that we can access.

I'm not nostalgic about the old city. I don't enjoy it that much. It was just a city with one emperor and the rest of them just rats or meaningless people.