Writers from China's diaspora
Pregnant with her second child, novelist Liu Hong is feeling off-colour. Nonetheless, she suggests we talk on central London's picturesque - if windy - Primrose Hill, which is near where she and her husband, cathedral expert Jon Cannon, are staying.
Her thick hair afloat in the wind, Liu Hong - she prefers using her full name - chatters with an impish gleam in her eye, hedging her age as somewhere in her 30s. She then mock-neurotically fingers her face for crow's feet before coming clean and saying, 'Thirty-eight! And I'm proud if it.'
Liu Hong seems to be what the British would call 'a laugh'. But the author, who grew up near the Korean border in Manchuria, is sensitive about the way the citizens of her adopted country see China. Stereotypes needle Liu Hong. Her debut novel, Startling Moon, which views the Cultural Revolution through the eyes of a child, was an attempt to challenge the view that all Chinese feel oppressed.
But the assumption persists. Detractors ask Liu Hong, who holds a University of London master's degree in social anthropology, whether Chinese women 'still wrap their tiny feet'.
'I just find that really ignorant,' she says, condemning the western take on China as simplistic. Suffering is not unique to the Chinese, she says, asking why commentators insist on portraying the nation in purely political terms. 'I find that really hard. I want to think of China just as a country of people.' Given that she emigrated to Britain in the wake of Tiananmen, her distaste for viewing China politically may seem peculiar.
Her latest novel, The Magpie Bridge (Headline Review), is an old-fashioned ghost story about a student, Jiao Mei, whose dead grandmother appears in her London bedroom to break some news. 'Jiaojiao, wake up. I need to talk to you,' whispers the ghost, which is described as being 'dressed in a long creamy silk robe, glistening with golden threads, which looked heavy on her fragile frame. It was odd, the contrast between her authoritative voice and her ethereal body: she had the furtive look of someone on the run ...'