“The Chinese encountered great prejudice in places like Southeast Asia where they assumed these middle-man minority roles, as Armenians and Jews have done in other countries.”
“Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law.”
“I have friends who are Caucasian who have pitched ideas for a Chinese-American show, and there is great resistance in Hollywood and the networks to support that.”
“When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.”
“Even if you wanted to be a hermit, people come out looking for you. I don't want to cloister myself away, but it is important for me to write about issues that have universal significance. One of them that have resonated with me all my life has been the theme of injustice.”
“The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.”
