wow anna, you can write so much Chinese! thanks for the lengthy comment. i love reading comments. that's interesting you mentioned the cover. i quite liked the old cover b/c it felt representative of the history and culture that come up in 1/3 of the stories. but the colour was a bit dull so i switched to a more vibrant one (much to my mother's dismay. she liked the old one :)
it's also really interesting that you mentioned my perspective as neither chinese nor western. lol. i feel like an inbetweener a lot of times. all of us do. asians who half grew up in china and half grew up in the west. if you drew a venn diagram, one circle representing china, one circle representing canada, people like me would be inside the sliver where the two circles overlap. at times you feel like you belong nowhere, but other times you're grateful that you have deep access to both cultures. b/c i've been in canada for so long, cultural identity doesn't even bother me anymore. i don't even question whether i'm more chinese or canadian. i don't really care. it only came up, and hit me in the face, when i started dating seriously. or trying to date seriously. then i became acutely aware of the cultural divide all over again.