My best teachers, the teachers who had the deepest effect on my reading, combined the two. They would mix required reading with reading where you had some choice, you had some autonomy. There's a place for both. A good teacher will know how to find that balance.

I think a lot of us go through a period where we feel like outsiders, and deal with that by wishing we were insiders. So that was the emotional core of American Born Chinese.

I think a lot of us who are in books now were nervous children.

To find your true identity within the will of Tze Yo Tzuh...that is the highest of all freedoms.

What is China but a people and their stories?

Building a habit of reading leads to all sorts of reading.

I think reading has got so many more enemies now that graphic novels have kind of flipped over to that side.