As a voice from communist China now accessibly resident in the US, his fiction is able to move between both Chinese and western literary cultures with unusual assurance and ease. His appeal does not stem exclusively from the fact that he writes in English, although being able to address readers directly, without the potentially flawed mediation of a translation, is undoubtedly a help. After living and writing in the west for much of the past two decades - gaining, in the process, a PhD in English from Brandeis - he also inevitably has a better technical grasp of what anglophone readers expect from a work of literary fiction than most of his peers still writing in China: in particular, a command of character, situation and psychological plausibility that is lacking in many contemporary mainland narratives.
