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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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