I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

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 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.

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.