What Makes You Write a Novel on China?

You've written a lot of books on china and articles. What made you decide that there were things you wanted to say in a novel? You know, one of the things i think that chinese have never done particularly well is introspection. And maybe if i could get at things like religion, people's interpersonal relations, culture, music, literature, all these things which bespeak of a different side of sort of the human condition, i could come to some more fulsome depiction of what i had come to see as animating china.