When I was in China, Mao was Chairman, and parents were terrified to tell their children anything that differed from the party line in case the children repeated it and endangered the whole family.

My father said he was going to write to the Jinzhou City Party Committee asking for permission to 'talk about love'...My mother supposed it was a bit like asking permission from the head of the family...the Communist Party was the new patriarch.

If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet.

My grandmother's feet had been bound when she was two years old. Her mother...first wound a piece of white cloth about twenty feet long round her feet, bending all the toes except the big toe inward and under the sole. Then she placed a large stone on top to crush the arch.

I remember when my mother pointed to a stone, and she said this was the kind of stone people used to place on the feet of the baby girls to stop them trying to climb away and unbind their feet.

At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.

As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless 'Little Match Girl'in the Hans Christian Andersen story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say:'Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!