At the 13th Annual Beijing Book Fair, Macmillan Press announced the formation of Picador Asia, its newest imprint dedicated to the Asia Pacific region -- the only Asian list created by a mainstream English language publisher. And to launch their initiative, which will distribute books in the UK come spring, the company picked Fan Wu's FEBRUARY FLOWERS, which turned out to be quite a challenge for the author, as the SF Chronicle discovers.

Literary agent Toby Eady of London, who brought Wu's novel to Macmillan, maintains that the reason so few contemporary Chinese authors are read in the West, and the reason modern China is so little understood by the West, is the dearth of good translations of contemporary Chinese writers. So Wu overrode the problem by writing in English. She gave herself the task of learning not only the language but the culture because "the more you understand another culture, the more you know your own culture. All our literary greats, for example Lu Hsun, understood other cultures," she said.

But for her next book, Wu is going back to her first language. "It's such a hard language, if you don't use it, you forget it. Besides, Chinese is such a beautiful language."