I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

"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.

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?

I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.

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

That desire to reach further is also where I ended my memoir, in 1994 in California, perhaps ironically, looking out to the Pacific and back to Asia, toward the not-yet-written.