the feminist chinese women during the turn of the century and i wanted to write about my japanese culter't have the story or the culture unfortunately because i was born in san francisco, half chinese and half japanese but raised in the chinese culture. when it was time to write the second book and i knew i wanted to explore my japanese side it was going to be difficult in the way that i didn't know the culture. right away i had to learn a lot. it was something that was not engrained in me besides the story. i sat down and thought about the story my mother told me about her brother being ill. he at one point went from hong kong to japan to recuperate. he was the one that wanted to be an artist and wanted to paint. i thought about that because it must have been hard growing up in hong kong to be far away from everything and have a dream and get sick at this point. i thought u is there a story here? that's the way it begins for writers. people think things jump out and we have it in our head. it's the opposite we have nothing in our head. we turn on the machine and praying for something to

that reversing a culter here in washington, dominated by special interests was going to take more thans going to take more than one term. probably takes more than one president. >> richard, i may be the only one who didn't think he ever overpromised because i didn't think the things he was talk b were accomplishable in some four-year time frame or accomplished only by a president. he was talk b washington cooperation. he can't cooperate with himself. he has to get the house and the senate. i think he underestimates something critical. in a moment of crisis, his basic assumption, and of his whole team was that republicans would come on board with something to save the american and the world economy. that was not the case. maybe it was naive. maybe it was unprecedented. i don't know hue blame for that. the world didn't work out that way. it is not just about the special interests. it is about reading the politics as they were. in his own words, the world as it is turned out not to be the world as it ought to be. and the world in a crisis after 9/11 was a certain degree, a minimal degree