My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

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."

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

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

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

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

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.