Meng: Little Gods is a story about migrations, migrations through time, place, and class. It is centered around a Chinese woman physicist named Su Lan. The seed of the idea, which was in the opening scene, came to me maybe six years ago. That was the idea of a child being born on the night of June 4th, 1989 in Beijing and her father disappearing that night. Very much like the reader, I didn't know what had happened to this child, who she was, and who her father was, and why he had left. I spent some years trying to figure that out through many abandoned drafts. [laughs] Then the book really came together for me when I realized that Su Lan was going to be this intentional absence in the narrative and that the narrative would revolve around her.