In "The Hundred Secret Senses," the central character, Kwan, is packed off to a California mental hospital for seeing "ghosts." She is somewhat weird, often embarrassing, and doesn't exactly look like Joan Chen. Where did Kwan come from?
Kwan comes strictly from my imagination, from that world of yin that I write about. I don't know anybody in my life like Kwan, although I feel Kwan-like characters all round me. I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from.You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
Olivia, Kwan's American half-sister is not so happy-go-lucky. Pained, needy, she accidentally pulls heads off pet turtles and has a hard time with other people.
I took my own skepticism and embedded it into Olivia. Some of her -- or the questions that trouble her -- are drawn from friends who have the usual existential questions about life and relationships and work and success, and "Why are we here?" and "Why are we with this person?" I've already had interviewers wondering if Olivia's relationship with her husband, Simon, is like my marriage, and I think, "Wait a minute, that's not my husband, that's not my relationship." Certainly all of us have gone through fights with partners in our life, but that's not drawn from my relationships per se. But I know that I'm going to be subject to that assumption.
You write that Olivia's mother suffers "from a kind heart compounded by seasonal rashes of volunteerism." She thinks of her step-daughter Kwan "as a foreign exchange student she would host for a year." In other words, she's a somewhat 
self-centered ditz -- like some of your other less-than-appealing Caucasian characters, in "The Joy Luck Club," for example. Is there a problem between you and white characters?
(Laughs). No. Some of these characters have to be foils. I needed a mother who was kind of undependable, so that Kwan could become that fount of love that Olivia is looking for. There was no intention -- unless there is something subconscious -- in trying to depict a Caucasian mother as not so great. I'd have to go through psychotherapy to explore that one. No, some of my best friends are Caucasian.