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 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.

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

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.

Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.

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.

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.