What was the most difficult thing about writing RED AZALEA?
AM: To live the time over again. It was painful. TBR: How was writing KATHERINE, your first novel, different from your experience writing BECOMING MADAME MAO? AM: The scale was much larger both in background and characters. There were four major characters in KATHERINE while more than twenty in BECOMING MADAME MAO. Also, I had to follow the record of history tightly in BECOMING MADAME MAO. It was a totally different experience. TBR: When did you decide to be a writer? As a former actress, what skills did you learn in that art form that affected your writing life? AM: I didn’t decide. The reason I wrote was to learn English so I could graduate from college and get a job to be a small firm secretary. I never dared to dream. I was a new immigrant and survival was the only thing on my mind at the time. Talking about being a former actress, I was never one to begin with. Madame Mao’s people picked me from a cotton field for the way I looked — a proletarian peasant, not that I had any acti
