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

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.

Superheroes are also about immigrants. Superman, the prototype of all superheroes, is a prototypical immigrant. His homeland was in crisis, so his parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He has two names, one American, Clark Kent, and the other foreign, Kal-El. He wears two sets of clothes and lives in between two cultures. He loves his new country, but a part of him still longs for his old one.

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

Sometimes, a fight you cannot win is still worth fighting.

If you look at our world, we're becoming so much more diverse in every sense of the word. It's not just about culture or identity. It's also about the different ways we communicate.

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.