Taiwanese writer and commentator Lung Ying-tai has no qualms about being a gadfly. Her novels and critical essays on social and political issues have angered government officials and attracted death threats, as well as fan mail, from readers. Yet of the 20 books she has written over the years, the hardest to produce was her latest, Letters to Andreas.
'It's the most difficult project I have undertaken; a miracle,' says Lung, an influential writer with admirers from Shanghai to Singapore.
Now a visiting journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong, she took on the Kuomintang government in Taiwan during the 1980s (Wild Fire, her critique of injustices under martial law, was one of the most avidly read books at the time), and last year challenged President Hu Jintao over the closure of mainland current affairs magazine Freezing Point.
Letters, however, is a more personal project - it's a record of a mother's struggle to adjust to the notion that her child has grown up.
Made up of a series of letters between Lung, now 55, and her elder son, Andreas Walther, it grew out of an exchange she initiated four years ago to rebuild their strained relationship.
Lung had just stepped down as the first director of Taipei's cultural affairs bureau and hoped to spend more time with Andreas and her younger son, Philip, both of whom were living in Germany with her ex-husband. But her overprotective ways - trying to accompany her sons on their visit to the mainland, for example - caused a rift with then 18-year-old Andreas.