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

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.

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.

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

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.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

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