Ji-Li Jiang: Hi this is Ji-li Jiang and I am the author of Red Kite, Blue Kite. I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to write this book and then I will read an excerpt to you.

My father has a writer friend in China, whose son became a very famous poet although he only lived a short life. One day, about twenty years ago, when I visited my family in Shanghai, I saw a TV program about the son's life. It mentioned that during the Cultural Revolution, his father was sent to a labor camp. And the son, who was still a little boy, had to follow his father to the labor camp to live. That image, the little boy in a remote village, somehow stuck in my mind. And then later became the seed for Red Kite, Blue Kite.

I was born and raised in Shanghai, China. Shanghai is the most crowded city in China. As you can imagine we had few outdoor spaces in which to play. I loved to fly kites. But our alley was narrow and the streets were filled with people and bicycles. So, we climbed on the roof of our apartment to fly kites. That memory certainly came to life in my story.

Now I'm going to read a few pages from Red Kite, Blue Kite.

I love to fly kites. But not from the ground. My city is crowded, and the streets are skinny. Baba and I fly our kites from the tippy-top of our triangle roof. We are above but still under, neither here nor there. We are free like the kites.

My red kite is small and nimble. Baba's blue kite is big and strong. Mine follows his, forward and backward, up and down. The kites hop and giggle as they rise and dive, soaring and lunging together. Baba loves telling stories while our kites fly. I laugh and cheer and feel like it's me up in the clouds. Looking down at the dotted houses. My friends are ants playing on the snaky streets. With Baba and his stories, and our red kite and blue kite, I can stay up here forever.

Then, a bad time comes. My school is shut down. Soon all the schools are shut down. People wearing red armbands smash store signs and search houses. Men and women are sent to labor camps to work. Baba is one of them. Mama died when I was born. So I'm sent to a small village next to Baba's labor camp to live with a farmer, Granny Wang. A thick forest stands between Baba and me.