In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

In that way, I don't understand myself. It might have to do with my own conflicts, where to place my body as a child, which I have carried over to now. In this way I'm constantly dislocated.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material consequence of my being a woman - a wife, mother, housewife, and a certain kind of feminist teacher - attentive, one-on-one, face-to-face, nurturing, the kind who receives high ESCI evaluation scores from undergraduates and graduate students.

When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.

Even my novels offer passages in which the major character is imagined as a writer. In Joss and Gold, Li An is a business writer who edits her company's weekly public relations magazine. And in Sister Swing, Suyin writes human interest stories for a free, local community paper, The Asian Time.