Coming out of the closet doesn't always mean liberation.

While I was growing up in Flushing, Queens, we socialized exclusively with other Chinese immigrants. I was forbidden to make contact with nonapproved, non-Chinese peers outside school. That was fine with me.

Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me - an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American - there were limits.

Sour Heart' is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the '90s. It's exceptionally hard to describe what I've written without sounding delusional or boring, so I'll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.

I think we spend too much on K-12 education a.k.a. teachers' salaries. It's the only industry where you never see any productivity increases.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being 'different' will pay off sometime after graduation. But no one explains to them why.

History has been my primary intellectual passion ever since, as a boy in Southern California, I began reading books on World War II and the life of Winston Churchill.