In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.

Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.

I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still.

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

I look at my young students, and I no longer have the sense that, oh, I'm the authority and they have to meet a certain standard. It's like, oh, look at these young ones. They've got such a hard road in front of them. I don't envy them having life ahead of them.

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.

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