I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me.

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

I thought of America as Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner sprawled on the edge of a Hollywood swimming pool biting into the same red apple.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.