I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

Sometimes I would get frustrated, I'd think, "You know, this is a good book, how come no one is paying attention to it?" So it's nice to have some recognition.

In White Boy Shuffle, I combined my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Takemoto, who really saved me - I don't think I've ever told anyone this - and my first basketball coach, Mr. Shimizu, into one character. Something about the way they talked about things, and their attitudes, had a huge impact on me. Not that I necessarily agreed with them. It was important to me to just put them there to stay grounded.

I had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I realized I should have said: Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

The anger and fear are so global. And of course, we live where we live and there's a hierarchy to who is worth what. It's been going on for a long, long time.

I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.

I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing these very academic, and, for the most part, serious papers there's just so much going on in her head and heart, and it's a reminder that there's a reason that she's studying these things.