1.Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.
2.Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.
3.The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.
4.When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day-but by the minute.
5.Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.
6.Media is driven by economic forces.
7.Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.
8.I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.
9.We have to keep in mind that it's not just about the numbers of people who died; it's also the manner which many of these victims met their deaths.
10.It's a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies.
11.There are now hundreds of thousands of new engineers that are being trained in China. If people start finding themselves losing their jobs, not to the Chinese here but because China has become such a dominant force - then there could very well be a backlash.
12.I received an honorary doctorate for my work. Maybe one of these works is considered the equivalent of a Ph.D.
13.It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest.
14.There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control.
15.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.
16.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.
17.After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
18.If the conditions were right there could be great acceptance. Often it is only when they pose an economic or political threat that it turns really ugly.
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