Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.

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

There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.

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.

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

I think the isolation in China also has to do with people's memories being wiped out, collective memories as well as individual memories, by the fact that the recent history has been constantly rewritten and revised.

Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.