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

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."

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.

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 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.