Good humor pokes fun at the powerful — not the weak.

American and Vietnamese characters alike leap to life through the voice and eyes of a tenyearold girl-a protagonist so strong, loving, and vivid I longed to hand her a wedge of freshly cut papaya.

I learned to read when I was three, so I skipped right over picture books and didn't learn to appreciate art in books until much later.

We adults all stay sixteen or so in some corner of the soul.

Research is always a high priority in my fiction. Songs, fashion, politics, television, movies, trends - I try to get those details right.

I hope and pray that despite an unhealed past full of atrocities and deep divisions in the present, God can and will make "the distant near" and a "brother of the stranger" in America's future.

There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.

If you have a chance to see Children Of War, you can watch expert trauma counselors try to help bring healing to young people who have experienced atrocities in conflict.

Before marriage a man prays that she accepts, after marriage a woman prays that he accepts

She thinks of her mother, sitting cross-legged, sewing marigolds into garlands for the gods, telling her: "The biggest mistake we make is thinking we are powerless

They grew up, moulded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows, to be either well nurtured, generous, sound, or mentally crippled, bitter, unwittingly vindictive.

Neither old people nor sour people seem to make friends easily; for there is little that is pleasant in them.

Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do.

Most American media outlets that are controlled by Jews seem to be reflexively, or at least habitually, anti-Israel.

In spring training I'm in every newspaper (in Korea) every day. In the regular season, they watch it on TV.

Glasgow is less polite than Edinburgh but that's a good thing - they keep it very real.

with your name on my mouth and a kiss that never broke away from yours.

The absence of disease is not health.