Life & Wisdom Quote by Colleen McCullough

A sequel, in McCullough's framing, isn’t fan service; it’s a corrective lens. By calling it "the Chinese question", she signals that the first book didn’t exhaust its most combustible material. The phrase lands with deliberate chill: "question" is the old bureaucratic euphemism for a people turned into a problem to be managed, debated, contained. It hints at policy, prejudice, and power - not simply culture. McCullough’s intent reads as both authorial restlessness and an assertion of scope: she’s not done because the moral and political pressure in that topic won’t let a single narrative close the file.

The subtext is about authority. She’s telling readers and critics alike that she’s aware of what she opened up, and she means to own it. "That I have raised" is quietly strategic: it casts the issue as something surfaced through her work, not imported from outside controversy. At the same time, the repetition - "There will be more about that in a sequel" - has the bluntness of a publishing-world promise, the kind meant to reassure a market while also holding the line against simplification. She’s telegraphing continuity and escalation.

Context matters: McCullough built her career on sweeping historical fiction that treats private lives as conduits for national myths and anxieties. Talking about China in that register evokes immigration, labor, empire, and Western fantasies of the East - a terrain where novelists can either reproduce stereotypes or interrogate them. Her statement reveals an ambition to keep digging where the story is politically tender, not just narratively unfinished.