Why did you move to Beijing? I'd decided to leave my job at a law firm and was pondering my options. Looking over my portfolio, I realized that a case I'd litigated in China had been the most interesting, so I began researching how I could expand my China practice. I spoke with a broad array of individuals in government, private practice, business and the academy, in China and in the States, and I concluded that, whatever I ended up doing, if I wanted to be taken seriously, I needed to learn Mandarin Chinese. So I moved to Beijing to study Mandarin full-time for a year. By the end of that year, I'd begun writing my first novel, and I'd simultaneously become less interested in practicing law in China. Having just invested significant energy becoming proficient in a foreign language, and finding myself in a cosmopolitan city with a low cost of living, I stayed in Beijing and committed myself to novel writing. What's your favorite book? I have two favorite books, D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel, and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. I have read them both repeatedly. Although these two books are quite different, they both take place against the epic sweep of history from the late nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth century, and they both show male authors writing about sexually-powerful female characters for whom they have profound empathy. Both books also use poetry or poetic devices to create powerful visceral responses, a technique which I find deeply moving and for which I have tremendous admiration. Who's your favorite author? I don't have a favorite author, but many authors have exerted tremendous influence on me. Among them: Philip Roth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Graham Greene, John Kennedy O'Toole, James Baldwin, Anne Enright, Thomas Rogers, Alan Hollinghurst, Joseph Conrad, Mario Vargas Llosa. What's a "literary mentor" and how did you find yours? My literary mentor is D.M. Thomas, a novelist, poet and blogger who lives in Cornwall, England. I first contacted him via a cold-call e-mail; it was the only cold-call I've ever made that got results. D.M. Thomas read my very first draft of Portnoy's Daughter and suggested that I start over from scratch. I accepted his advice. Thereafter, he read each chapter as I wrote it, offering guidance and suggestions, but refraining from outright editing. We followed the same procedure on early drafts of The Swing of Beijing and, subsequently, he read a first draft of Waiting for Love Child once it was completed. D.M. Thomas has been a brilliant mentor for me because he's able to offer genuinely constructive criticism. He can deliver bad news without hurting my feelings, and the guidance he offers is open-ended, thereby stimulating the development of my authorial judgment. I am extremely grateful to him for the time and care he's spent, reading and critiquing my work. Do you think that the Internet will render the book obsolete? The short answer is "no." I think the introduction of digital technologies necessitates a reorganization of people's means of acquiring information. Where folks used to spend a certain amount of time reading the newspaper or magazine articles, that time might be recharacterized in favor of e-mails encapsulating headlines, online news, blogs, or chatting. But none of these online experiences is a substitute for the consumption experience of reading a book. The private enjoyment of becoming engrossed in a story and not wanting to put it down until you find out what happens is not duplicated by online reading. (The online and cell phone novels that have become popular particularly in Asia do not change my answer. I believe that these modes of entertainment are more properly competitive with digital diversions like chatting and video games than they are with books.) Also, in many parts of the world, computers are a scarcity, and books are hardly more plentiful. As JMG le Clézio said in his 2008 Nobel acceptance speech, "the book is still the most efficient vehicle for widespread dissemination of information, and publishers should focus on making available a broad array of affordably-priced books in multiple languages."