The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.

Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!

Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.

People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.

We all become different readers in how we respond to books, why we need them, what we take from them. We become different in the questions that arise as we read, in the answers that we find, in the degree of satisfaction or unease we feel with those answers...In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.

But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying