Westerners respect privacy, and they are very competitive in terms of work and personalities. My teammates in China and I can talk about everything. But with my Houston Rockets teammates, even though we're friends, we cannot ask each other about everything.

Others are improving very fast, and I'm not improving as fast, and that bothers me.

If you're going to learn a new language, you can't try to be perfect. You'll stop yourself from talking. You just have to let go.

Friendship first, competition second.

Embarrassed journalists ask me embarrassing questions, and they get embarrassing answers, and then hand out embarrassing stories to the embarrassing editors, who put them to the front pages of newspapers. When is this going to end?

Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here.

Putting our ecosystem in great peril is certainly not a part of Chinese culture that I know.