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My hands are writing English, but my mouth is speaking Chinese. Somehow I am able to write a language that captures the Chinese rhythms and tones and images, getting that power into English. I am working in some kind of fusion language, an American language that has Chinese tonalities and accents.

Also, Chinese is a pictorial language, so I work on my images and metaphors and try to show what that is all about. I feel that I have had to translate a whole Eastern culture and bring it to the West, then bring the two cultures together seamlessly. That is how one makes the Asian American culture. -- Maxine Hong Kingston