I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

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.

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

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

Isn't hate merely the result of wounded love?

I did not lose myself all at once.