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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.