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.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.

"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.

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.