As a Vietnamese refugee who became an American writer, I can tell you that you matter, that your sadness matters, the story of how you survived and t….

The collection is a labor of love and devotion, and whenever I found free time from my journalism work, I'd work on one story or another, or at least….

Today, more people are crossing various borders in order to survive, thrive, change their lives. Even if you don't cross the border, with demographic….

Precious things lost are transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into testimonies, into stories and songs..

Art is the lesser sister to medicine. It aims to heal..

I have a funny story to tell about English and how I came to fall in love with the language. I was desperate to fit in and spoke English all the time….

Where are the leaders who can speak to the idea that it is not alien to American interests, but very much in our socioeconomic interests - not to men….

That experience of losing home, longing for home, that yearning for meaning and rootedness and identity in a floating world, it's what often makes an….

America's story is largely an immigrant story. That hasn't changed since the Pilgrims ate their first turkey some four hundred years ago, and they we….

After twenty years and thirty stories, thirteen pieces were finally selected and the collection was born. So far, the blurbs from [authors] Maxine Ho….

In fiction, it's as if you enter a dream world that you created, but your characters have their own free will. They don't do what you want them to do….

Though I later found a career as a journalist and an essayist, fiction is my first love and I never left it, even though there was no easy way to mak….

Isn't the first story told in the West about the Fall? Adam and Eve were immigrants too from somewhere, a lost Eden, a paradise lost. We all now are ….

In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat..

When a well-rounded character takes over, he doesn't lecture you about his history and how he is misunderstood. He lives his life, does things that a….

In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be they personal or national ..

I thought, "Wow, English is like magic." It not only shattered my voice, it changed me physiologically. I believed this for months ... There's magic ….

I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting..

I think in a larger sense, immigrant narrative is comprehensive and speaks to the core of human experience..

[The immigrant] becomes a kind of insurance policy against the effects of the recession. By blaming him, the pressure valve is regulated in times of ….

I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University..