She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.

What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

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

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

Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.

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.