I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

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

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

Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

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.