In the mid-90s, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Sun Yat-Sen University, she went to work in Shenzhen, the first Special Economy Zone in China, transformed from a fishing village to a bustling metropolis in ten years. During her three years there, she held varied jobs and traveled extensively, witnessing the unprecedented economic boom, as well as the exploitation of workers from poor provinces and the countryside. In 1997, a scholarship from Stanford University brought her to America, and after earning an MA in Mass Media Studies, she joined Yahoo!, a Silicon Valley-based Internet company, where she worked in market research and editorial for more than seven years before devoting herself to writing.

She started to write in 2002, five years after she came to America. Her debut novel, February Flowers, was chosen by Picador Asia as its inaugural book and it has been translated into eight languages. Her short fiction, besides being anthologized and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared in Granta, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Beautiful as Yesterday is her second novel, a story of three Chinese women from the same family. She writes in both English and Chinese, and often translates her own writing between the two languages. She currently lives in northern California.