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" Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful. "

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" I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface. "

" It's okay if you get rejected 20, 30 or 200 times... You don't need everyone to like your story - you just need one person who really likes your story. "

" There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well. "

" It's true that misunderstanding and lack of understanding are often themes in my fiction, but I am grateful for the moments when true understanding is achieved, especially between writer and reader. It's miraculous. "

" My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American. "

" Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it's fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out. "

" My translation work has been pretty separate from my fiction, as it was basically an accidental side project that turned into a separate and parallel career. "

" Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own. "

" It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand. "

" I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that. "

" I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general. "

" Almost all of my stories can be understood to be elaborations on our drive to remake the world and our adjustments to the result. "

" What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there's a lot of projection. We prefer to think of China as a dystopian world that is challenging American hegemony, so we would like to think that Chinese sci-fi is all either militaristic or dystopian. But that's just not the reality of it. "

" In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that's not? "

" If I end up having a novel that sells really well and that allows me to pay for health insurance and mortgage without having to work at a day job, that would be great. "

" I don't really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres. "

" When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West. "

" In general, writers who talk to their colleagues and neighbors constantly about their own writing seem to me pretty insufferable. I try not to be that guy. "

" I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician. "

" Trying to predict the future is a loser's game. "

" Whenever you talk about Chinese dragons, emperors, palaces, concubines - they conjure up a whole colonial argle-bargle that has nothing to do with historical reality. "

" Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species. "

" I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different. "

" My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is. "

" The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions. "

" People who are ambitious - politicians who crave power - think that they're in control of it, but at some point, the movement that they started overtakes them, and they lose the ability to direct things anymore, and they become essentially riders on a wild stallion, and wherever the movement goes, wherever power takes them, they have to go along. "

" There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story. "

" It's incredible to me that any two individual minds, trapped in their skulls and bodies and histories and unique experiences, are able to reach across the void between them and touch at all. "

" I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories. "

" There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China. "