"It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public."
"To fly we have to have resistance."
"It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it."
"It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like."
"Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice."
"When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family."
"I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd."
"My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground."
"I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world."
"I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with."
"I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that."
"You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down."
"My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions."
"We were unusually brought up; there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother."
"The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning."
"I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It's what you learn, what you think. That's all that counts."
"Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication."
"When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business."
"My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar."
"I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character."
"I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them."
"The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical."
"All my work is much more peaceful than I am."
"I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up."
"Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think."
