There’s this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can’t even fight against because they’ve been there so long that they’ve become part of the Western imagination of China. Ken Liu Read Quote
The Grace of Kings’ draws on Western traditions as much as it does on Chinese traditions, though the bones of the story are drawn from the Chu-Han Contention period before the Han Dynasty. Ken Liu Read Quote
I don’t have a specific message for ‘The Grace of Kings’ and the sequels in mind other than wanting to challenge some of the source material I was working from as well as some of the assumptions of epic fantasy. Ken Liu Read Quote
It’s incredible to me that any two individual minds, trapped in their skulls and bodies and histories and unique experiences, are able to reach across the void between them and touch at all. Ken Liu Read Quote
There’s inherent cultural imbalance whenever you’re translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references – history, language, culture, all this stuff – but to be well-versed in Western references as well. Ken Liu Read Quote
The ‘Grace of Kings’ isn’t a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent, and only lurches toward more justice. Ken Liu Read Quote
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I’ve collected over the years can probably make a book of their own. Ken Liu Read Quote
People who are ambitious – politicians who crave power – think that they’re in control of it, but at some point, the movement that they started overtakes them, and they lose the ability to direct things anymore, and they become essentially riders on a wild stallion, and wherever the movement goes, wherever power takes them, they have to go along. Ken Liu Read Quote
