I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

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

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

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

Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

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

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

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.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.