The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

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

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."

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.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

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