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.

If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.

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

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.

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.

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.