Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.

Most of us, when imagining an All-American, wouldn't picture a man who looked like me. Not even I would.

You are validating someone's life by telling their story. Even if it's a sad one.

The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.

Television and movies were our biggest teachers. When we came to the United States, the Vietnam War was just ratcheting up. And so the Asian faces that I saw on the news, they were the face of the enemy. Asian men, particularly, were either small, ineffective, or they were evil. And those messages were deeply, deeply embedded in me for many years.

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.