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.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

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.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

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