People might like to think a war is done when a cease fire is signed, but for most people who lived through a war it goes on for decades.

Immigrants who voluntarily come to a country have already made a decision to assimilate to one degree or another. Probably not completely, but they've committed to the place, and they know that they need to make certain kinds of concessions. They change themselves in some way to fit in. They're looking forward as much as they're still looking backward.

If you're a so-called minority writer, the temptation is to write for the majority... I refuse to do that.

In the United States, we want to believe we will never become a country of refugees.

By college, I had a really grand, preposterous vision of myself as becoming a writer, but I don't think I had the discipline or the patience - or the ability or the humility. It took 20 years to acquire those things.

My identity is deeply intertwined with being a refugee because that's the first experience that I remember.

Growing up in the U.S., I was certainly deeply aware of the power of American media, specifically Hollywood and television, in terms of broadcasting a particular vision of what the American experience was like. As someone coming from a war that was a preoccupation of Americans in the 1980s, it did strike me that since we were a part of that war, we should have a chance to talk about ourselves.