Q: What frame of mind led you to write your semi-autobiographical novel after returning to the United States?

A: I came back to America in January 1978 and started teaching Chinese three months later at the Foreign Language Institute in the U.S. State Department. That was where I met my husband. He was one of my students.

After teaching Chinese eight hours each day, I would head off to the University of Virginia in the evenings to study English. I told the teacher nothing really registered until the second hour--my brain needed the first hour to "reprogram" itself.

Picking up a pen brought tears

Even though I kept wanting to write about what I had been through, it just wasn't possible--I was busy round the clock. What's more, I simply couldn't--every time I picked up the pen I would start to weep. It was too painful to bear. Looking back was like living it all over again.

In 1982 I got married and my husband and I came to Taiwan. The surroundings here are nice--very warm and friendly--and everyone speaks Chinese. I could finally start living. Things had sifted themselves out in my mind after so many years, and I started to write.

There were two reasons I had to write it all down, I felt. First, I was a witness. I had lived through so much, and I'd be letting myself down if I didn't. Second, many Westerners, like my husband, had studied about China all their lives and knew what happened in which dynasty and so forth even better than I. He could wax on and on about China's glorious 5,000-year history, but he was muddled up about the country's current political situation. The visibility there is too low, opaque, unseen. When I'd talk about my experiences during the Cultural Revolution, they'd stare at me wide-eyed and incredulous. They'd been taught that China is such a civilized country. How could it have gone crazy and become like a world of beasts?

Witness in the flesh

I wrote for a year in Taiwan, not openly, because we still had to go to the mainland. Between 1983 and 1986 we worked in the U.S. embassy in Peking. I stopped writing because the long shots had become close-ups. The stories that I had seen or heard about in the past were occurring again around me.

People like my husband finally came to realize that what I had been telling them was all too true, and there were stories even more tragic.

We returned to the U.S. in 1986, where my husband worked at the United Nations in New York. I hired a nanny to look after my son, who was nine months old at the time, and headed off to the library and coffee shops to take up writing again. New York is like an international airport, with people coming and going. In coffee shops, in particular, with everyone talking away in English or Spanish or French and me writing in Chinese, I'd feel like I was in a safe, cozy little world and could work undisturbed. I finally completed it after we returned to Washington in 1988.

Analysis of an opaque society

Q: Your novel is called Che-she (Refractions). What are the implications of that title?

A: It's a term from physics, relating to the way a prism helps us analyze the spectrum. The cloud cover over the mainland is too thick, so to speak. The visibility is too low. Given such an opaque society, how can we get a true picture of what is going on below? I had seen the gamut of colors there, and I hoped that I could analyze that piece of earth through my own eyes like a prism.

Q: You met with so many trials and hardships, but there is scarcely a word of rancour or complaint in your book. What power did you rely on to get by?

A: The power of literature. The greatest difference between my novel and others about the Cultural Revolution, the genre of "scar literature" as it is called, is that they are full of rancour, pain and hate. My growth process inured me to the Cultural Revolution long ago.

I suffered a lot as a child, but I read a lot, too. If Turgenev andHans Christian Andersen had been able to bear their crosses, I used to think, why couldn't I? I might not be able to match them in achievement, but I could have their endurance! Do their works harbor enmity or hate? Turgenev suffered a great deal, but A Sportsman's Sketches is a world of pure aestheticism. He met with ugliness, but he longed for beauty. Jean Christophe is the book that has accompanied me the longest, wherever I've gone. All art is the refinement of beauty, the solicitude of love.

Most of my book is about other people's stories, people who haven't had a chance to write them down, many of whom have already left this world. As an eyewitness to what they went through, I have an obligation to write it down.

Writing in Chinese

Q: You lived in mainland China for 28 years before returning to the United States. What was it like to go from an extremely conservative society to an extremely free and open one?

A: Many people say it was a wonder I didn't keel right over the first day. I did feel a little dizzy when I first arrived. In a society like the mainland's, you can hardly get through a single day without spouting nonsense. Relations among people are highly artificial, and the newspapers are a pack of lies.

When I got to America, I could finally say whatever I felt like and do whatever I pleased. You can let out three whoops and people won't think you're a weirdo. All at once I was thoroughly relaxed, and I quickly gained weight. But going to America also gave me an empty, vacuous feeling. It wasn't like returning home, because how can you return home and not be able to speak the language? English isn't my mother tongue, so it was actually Taiwan that gave me the feeling of returning home. English for me is just a tool. I appreciate reading beautifully written English, but I don't necessarily like the same things that other people there do or find the same things interesting.

In Taiwan it's different. After all, you speak Chinese. Even though there are a lot of words I don't know, I pick them up quickly. The first day I learned ta-ko-ta [slang for cellular telephone], the next day lao-shen tsai-tsai [composed and confident] and just recently shou-pu-liao-te ku [too "cool" to resist]. I laugh right along with everyone else. Language is a subtle thing. Only a language that lets you "fall right in "can evoke that kind of response.

Caring for people wherever they may be

Q: You and your husband are both U.S. citizens, but you're very different in terms of cultural background and lifestyles. Looking back on your years on the mainland, what effect do you think they will have on your life in the future?

A: First, if it weren't for those 28 years, I wouldn't be able to write in Chinese. Next, you raised an interesting question. Is it good or bad for people living together to come from completely different backgrounds? I think it's good. Because it's hard for us to hurt each other. He doesn't know how to swear at people in Chinese, and I can't hurt him in English. I still don't have that skill.

A lot of people ask me how I define myself and where I stand. I tell them I stand on my own two feet. I shouldn't limit my breadth of mind to America or to mainland China, Taiwan or Hong Kong. The scope of concern can be a little larger, can't it? There should be concern wherever there are people. The most worthless questions in the world are "Where are you from?" "What's your race?" and "What's your religion?" Those aren't important. The most important thing is the value of each person as an individual. With that as a starting point, any problems can be readily solved.

The earth is only so big, and mankind has slaughtered itself for thousands of years. Why can't we try adopting a different attitude in dealing with people!