Your new book Repeat After Me is also your first fiction novel. After Foreign Babes, how does it feel to make the jump from writing reality to writing fiction?
The two projects were similar in a craft sense. In both cases, I had endless amounts of material. For Foreign Babes it came from my life, the lives of my friends and other real people, diaries, newspapers and everything I'd read, heard or thought about China, America and the world for years. Repeat After Me came from my imagination, but that's also just a big buffet of characters, stories, rhymes, colors, observations and conversations. Repeat After Me follows the love story of Aysha and Da Ge, but contains a host of other memorable characters. Who was your favorite to write?
Julia Too. Because I'm wildly in love with my two little girls, and Julia Too is a collage of who they were, are and might (someday) be like. I can't wait to meet their future selves, and writing Julia Too gave me license and time to remember and imagine my daughters in all sorts of stages. Much of Repeat After Me deals with how people communicate between cultures in intimate relationships. What are some of the challenges you faced in cultivating inter-cultural relationships?
Well, I never told a joke anyone in China found funny or gave a gift my Chinese friends didn't hate. So some of the subtleties were apparently ungraspable for me. But on the whole I think people on the ground in each other's countries find less clash than love. Many of us take great joy in each other's weirdnesses, both cultural and individual.

What: Repeat After Me book talk with Rachel DeWoskin When: Wed. July, 22, 7:30pm Where: The Bookworm Tel: 6586-9507