Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.

Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.

The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.

It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.

No one is immune from either taking the wrong action or not taking action at all, but the sense that something is completely out of a person's control is stronger in China.

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

You can write about a country without taking a stand, but you cannot write about a country without noting that there's history, and that there's politics going on. To me, that's the same if you write about America. You don't have to write about politics, but the politics have to be present in the characters.