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

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

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

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