A good deal of your material concerns the exploitation of women’s bodies and sexualities. In the instances of this that you observed (such as teenaged prostitution), how did women find means of empowerment or freedom?
 

Window.  Humor.  Friendship.   I am using “window” in its broadest sense: a means to see an alternative place, time, life; a way to see what we are not, where we are not, and what and where we can be.  I believe our longing for a window is as basic as the longing for touch; it is as old as hope.   If you put a prisoner in a windowless box, he’ll fare better if he can use his mind’s eye as a window to travel beyond his confinement and see an alternative existence, imagine future possibilities and hope.   This ability to imagine an emancipated life, I found, was important to the girl prostitutes I met.  It lessened their deprivation.   Also, their sense of humor and their friendships with other girls allowed them to laugh between sufferings and delight in the small things in life. 
 

Who or what are your biggest literary inspirations?
 

If I were a tad grandiose, I would say I hope to be as absurd as Samuel Beckett or Edward Albee, brave as Jeanette Winterson, cerebral as Margaret Atwood, magical as Toni Morrison, sincere as Zhang Ailing, and poetic as Jack Gilbert.   But I am not grandiose.  I don’t feel grandiose.  In fact, I am rather “everyday” in my approach to things.   I get literary inspirations from all sorts of things.  A fly.  A leaf.   A dung beetle pushing a ball of shit uphill.  A paper clip.  I feel that my relationship to English language is fertilized by the fact that I speak and write Chinese fluently.   Because the Chinese language is monosyllabic, I have a penchant for using monosyllabic English words.  Because the Chinese language is musical, the sound of an English word is as important to me as its meaning.   Because you can rap a 900AD Chinese poem today with ease, I often look for a beat and a rhythm in a story, as I search for the characters and the place. 
 
FOR THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW WITH JAMIE QUIROZ AT IMAGINASIAN IALINK, PLEASE CHOOSE EVENTS ABOVE AND CLICK INTERVIEWS.

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