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.

Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.

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

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

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

Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.