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

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.

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.

Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.

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

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.