Jaivin grew up in a town in Connecticut as the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper, married an Australian scholar and is an Australian citizen, but at times she finds herself acting, thinking and swearing in Mandarin.

''Fuza'', a short-form expression in Mandarin for ''it is complicated'', is how Jaivin describes China's complex and untidy history - the upheavals, campaigns, famine and violence - and it summarises her judgment, after 37 years of close observation, of a culture unable to be easily defined.

''Do I understand China? I do but I don't,'' says Jaivin. ''Do you understand Australia? I think it is impossible to know any place or any person absolutely, and I was mindful of that when I'm writing. The nature of the unknowable. How well do you know the person you love?''

Fuza is how she regards herself. At various times, Jaivin has been a serious scholar, journalist, translator, essayist, playwright and commentator on Chinese urban culture.

''I consider that, as with most people, any single label, be it sinologist or Australian erotic writer, will always sound confining, incomplete, wrong,'' says Jaivin. ''We're all made up of many parts. We're all fuza.''

That which is unknowable characterises Jaivin's elliptical new book, The Empress Lover. Her seventh novel, but only the second about China, tells the story of a film translator of uncertain parentage whose life is upended when she receives a letter from a dead scholar offering to reveal long-hidden family secrets.

The novel takes place over 24 hours in Beijing, interweaving a story of imperial China with modern communist China.

Jaivin takes as her starting point the real-life figure of Sir Edmund Backhouse, a polyglot scholar, who claimed in his memoir, Decadence Manchu, published after his death in 1944, that he had had an affair with the Empress Dowager Cixi of China. Jaivin does not for one moment believe Backhouse's claims. It would be near impossible, she says, for the empress to carry on a semi-open affair with a younger foreign man without it appearing in the records of the Chinese court. What intrigued her, however, was the grand scope of Backhouse's fantasy life, which got her thinking about the boundaries of memory and reality and the trauma of history.

''Everybody thought they knew Edmund Backhouse: he was a quite scholarly gentleman; he was very deferential, very courteous; he tended to avoid foreign company; some people suspected he was gay,'' Jaivin says. ''After his death, questions started to come up. Was he a forger? Was he a scam artist? Was he a fraud? He was never completely nailed down, at least not publicly. When he died he left behind two memoirs - one concerned Europe and the other China - and they were extraordinary. He claimed he was the lover of the empress dowager of China - no one could have anticipated that.''

Jaivin began writing The Empress Lover five years ago and struggled for a long while to create a framework to illuminate the ''big, dark room of history'' while juggling the voices of three narrators. The book's structure of sliding doors almost ''broke my brain'', she laughs.

Jaivin rents an apartment in Elizabeth Bay and when in Beijing likes to stay in the traditional courtyard home of two sisters, one of the few places in old Beijing that has so far avoided the wrecking ball.

She is a bird of bright plumage, wearing a slash of red lipstick, green nail polish, and red-pink hair. A Daoist priest in Chengdu once told her she wore too much black. ''You have too much fire and what you need is to calm the fire down and that will help you achieve focus. I advise you to wear white and yellow.'' Jaivin, who is wearing black and orange, laughs.

''They aren't really my colours. I'm not the kind of person who describes herself as spiritual. I'm not New Age. When people ask me for my star sign, I say I haven't got one. I'm completely secular.''

Jaivin's 2008 temple visit is stitched into The Empress Lover. She didn't know whether the priest was a philosopher or snake-oil salesman. Sipping tea, he told her, ''You are a man among women and I'm guessing you are not in a relationship.'' Jaivin wasn't, having just split from a long-term partner. ''You are not the kind of person who is in need of a long-term relationship.'' She thinks she is more self-contained with age.

Happiness, he told her, was the distance between what you are and what you wish to be true. Don't yearn for the Nobel Prize for Literature, he cautioned. Just write the best book possible, and Jaivin thinks The Empress Lover is that - perhaps her best fiction yet.

''I was very struck by his words. What he clarified for me was the only way to make sense of the world was to acknowledge the world doesn't always make sense.''

Jaivin's interest in China began as a passion, not a career move. At Brown University, she was an environmental activist who wanted to change the world. China studies introduced her to uncharted territory and, in hindsight, she concedes she might have been drawn to the Orient by the opportunities of self-creation.

''I wanted to become a cosmopolitan type, for sure, but also a scholar, a poet - I wrote reams of poetry in my 20s - and even, at times, [I wanted to be] Chinese. It was absurd.''

One of Jaivin's first jobs was editing primary-school English textbooks for Oxford University Press in Hong Kong. In Beijing, she joined the now-defunct Asiaweek magazine and met a young Australian scholar, Geremie Barme, who introduced her to the Foreign Language Press translators and editors Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, luminaries of Beijing's newly revived intellectual scene.

''It was like the Algonquin Round Table translated to post-Mao China,'' Jaivin recalled in her recent Quarterly Essay, Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World. ''It gave me, then in my 20s, the impression that there was nothing more glorious or noble or even as much fun as being a literary translator.''

The city's underground arts scene was vibrant, but not without danger. ''It was never fun to think that the police might show up - it was frightening - but I admired the bravery and conviction of the artists.''

In 1986, she left Asiaweek and China for Australia with her husband, Barme. ''One of my friends was pressured to report on everything I did and who I saw. When he told me about this, and that resisting was so difficult that he was becoming suicidal, I was shocked. I quit what had been a dream job.''

Jaivin was visiting China when tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in 1989, and her 2001 book The Monkey and the Dragon charts her friendship with Hou Dejian, a Taiwan pop star who participated in the protests, and the pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, whom she had met several years before through Barme. (Although they are divorced, Barme remains one of Jaivin's ''closest friends in the world''. They collaborate professionally - he is director of the ANU's Centre on China in the World and she is a visiting fellow and editorial consultant.)

The experience shook her up and, in the aftermath, she turned from reportage to fiction, travelling to China less than usual.

Jaivin branched out into erotica with Eat Me, an international bestseller published in 1995 when she was 40, which includes a lusty scene in the fruit section of a supermarket. She sexed up and skewered the art world, adolescence and rock music.

The Infernal Optimist is a dark comedy set in an immigration detention centre, a subject close to her social activist heart.

Only 10 years ago did China become a big part of Jaivin's life again, and start to insinuate itself into her fiction, first in A Most Immoral Woman.

Some of the hungry artists with whom she mixed in the 1980s became directors of such landmark Chinese films as Farewell My Concubine, Blue Kite and Hero, all translated for English audiences by Jaivin. Never once was she tempted, like her heroine Linnie, to improve on the original script.

Jaivin does not expect The Empress Lover to be published in China. Her books are generally too racy for the Chinese censors and she has been told Chinese readers are apparently not interested in novels about China by foreigners.

In contrast, Hali Bote - Harry Potter - and the first instalment of Finnegans Wake, have been published in China with great fanfare. As Jaivin says, it's complicated.

The Empress Lover is published by HarperCollins at $29.99. Linda Jaivin discusses it at Readings Carlton, 309 Lygon Street on Tuesday at 6.30pm.