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I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

A culture produces ideas which are being explored, which of interest to that culture at that moment. And I think one of the things a writer can do is to take those ideas and go a bit further with them.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series.

My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs.

Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.

I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.

Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.