I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.