Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload.

I am aware of myself as a four-hundred-year-old woman, born in the captivity of a colonial, pre-industrial oral culture and living now as a contemporary New Yorker.

A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.