My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.

If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.