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

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

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.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

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 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.

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.