I used to play flute and clarinet at school, and although I wasn't thinking about making a living or getting a pay cheque, I already knew I was going to play music all my life.

Roaming through the jungle of "Ohs" and "Ahs", searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.

I think it's not an accident that you don't have that many Asian American women writers who are breaking out. I don't think it's an accident that you don't have that many Asian American writers, either women or men. I don't think that immigrants are encouraged to become artists. That's very gendered and racialized and ethnicized.

Then I felt something inside me break and music began to pour out into the quiet. My fingers danced; intricate and quick they spun something gossamer and tremulous into the circle of light our fire had made. The music moved like a spiderweb stirred by a gentle breath, it changed like a leaf twisting as it falls to the ground, and it felt like three years Waterside in Tarbean, with a hollowness inside you and hands that ached from the bitter cold.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems.