Most people don't think about race as much as I do. They don't have to.

To be honest, I'm not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.

He handed her a plastic container of dried fruit Loreen had packed for the trip to use as a steering wheel so she could practice matching the turns... Fan’s arms began to ache from holding up the container but she was beginning to enjoy herself, too, feeling an unlikely liberty and exhilaration, which if you think about it, can be seen as a good approximation of this life, where control is more believed than actual.

When I’m describing wartime activities or violence I don’t want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture. Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.

And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality.

It’s not that I wrote those details, but photos can give you the confidence that you have a real feel for the landscape. Then you can invent with a solid kind of faith, and recreate a feel and flavor of the time, and, one hopes, a tonality, a sense of that time having been lived by those characters.

Yeah, and the language the “we” has, and the character the “we” has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn’t plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you’re doing, but you’re sometimes still sort of curious as you’re writing it.

She was quite enrapt, we were certain, even as her face remained almost totally blank, just as a drinking glass remains unchanged when filled with water but of course it is not at all the same.

And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don’t in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can’t help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone’s so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.