It's easy to feel helpless - like you can't fight the tide. But remember: small actions can have a huge impact, and one person like you can inspire others to action.

Somewhere in the Commandments of Reviewing must be written, 'Thou shalt not compare Asians to non-Asians.'

I think, in the United States, we talk about race as a black and white issue... We're generally talking about it as if it's a binary equation whereas, in fact, there's more than two races and, in fact, those races blend together. There are a lot of different ways that people identify.

I moved to Shaker Heights from Pittsburgh, PA, just before I turned 10.

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.

No reader wants to sit through the same scene four times in a row, unless they're radically different.

There's a great joy in writing about a place you know very well, but there's also a lot of responsibility in trying to be accurate. It's a lot like writing about a relative: you can see both their strengths and their shortcomings, and even as you want to be honest, you want people to see the good that's there as well.

What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.

Comparing Asian writers mainly to other Asian writers implies that we're all telling the same story - a disappointingly reductive view.