Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

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.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.