Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just The Other.

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.