I think there's a lot of evolution that's happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.

There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.

I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.

It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.

And also, as a consumer now, it's weird that when I used to go to a book signing I would leave with a stack of pamphlets people had made to show off their work, and now I just leave with business cards where people have the URL to their websites.