"Stop Already" is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.

When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers.

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.

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.

In Among the White Moon Faces, I wrote about my desire to be a writer as rooted in my obsessive hours of reading English novels and poetry. It was that spur, that desire, that pushed me to set aside love and marriage in my early twenties.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

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.