I just wanted to ask, what would happen in the front row
if there was a white guy an Asian woman
sitting like right there?
[LAUGHTER]
That's OK.
I mean, obviously I'm married to somebody who's white,
my kids are mixed.
It's not about that you don't have the race relations,
it's just thinking about the different forces
that form that.
I mean, they did they did a study a few years ago when
they looked at interracial dating and Asians at Berkeley
and they found that the women were out dating
at a rate of three to one.
So it's like what's going on?
What was interesting was then they
interviewed couples, which--
which are all white [? men ?] and Asian women?
And they would go like, well, when
I saw [? Hwa ?] I didn't see color, I just saw a person,
and [? Hwa ?] saying when I saw Bill I didn't see color,
I just saw a person.
Well, if that was just simply the case,
why is it that they're out dating a rate of 3 to 1?
And why are they dating black men
or Native American [INAUDIBLE]?
I mean, the thing is that--
I mean, Black men understand the position of Asian-American men.
I mean, the background for that--
the poem Colors of Desire.
One of the things is my friend Marc Hayashi, the actor,
once said to me, every culture needs its eunuchs,
and we're it, Asian-American men are the eunuchs of America.
And I said that to my friend, Alexs Pate,
who is a Black writer and he said, yeah,
the Black men have the [? sexual ?] [? penis ?]..
So those things are really--
we don't talk about these things,
we don't like to talk about race and we certainly
don't know to talk about race in the past.
And people can actually have relationships like that.
I know people who have interracial relationships,
but they never talk about race.
It's possible but-- but it's a very different relationship,
if you just throw race on the table
and say we're going to talk about this all the time.
And I would say that in the second relationship
things can be more difficult, but there's more intimacy.
So it's not simply the people just falling in love,
there's all these different things
and it's very complicated.
I was very clear for instance why I was attracted to my wife.
I mean, I knew when I was growing up.
I mean, Don mentioned that-- and mentioned
that I grew up in a white suburb,
so I grew up thinking I wanted to be white.
And when I was in high school a white friend would say to me,
you know, I think of you David just like a white person.
And I would go great, that's what I want to be.
And it took me years to realize, oh, I'm not a white person.
What does that mean?
And but at the time when I was growing up,
I felt like people expected me to date other Asian-American
women.
So why should I do that?
Just like people expect me to speak with an accent
or expected me to know about Japan.
And so I was still reacting against the stereotype.
And it was actually only when I read Frantz--
I talked about this afternoon when
I read Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
about the psychology of racism.
And Fanon talks about how the Black schoolchild
in the French West Indies grows up
reading texts about the French.
And he says, what does that Black school child learn?
And he says the Black school child learns self-hatred,
self-determination, and identification
with their colonial oppressor.
And I read that and went wow, that's what I mean.
And then Fanon also says the Black man constantly
sleeps with a white woman as the solution
to his feelings of inferiority.
Will be erased by sleeping with white women?
And I look at that well, that's what I mean.
I didn't mean that I sat there and said,
OK to my wife get out of the house.
I mean, it's was just OK because your relationship is based
on many, many different things.
It's not the sole thing and when we share a sense of humor,
we share a sense of taste, and politics,
and all quirky little things like, we don't have pets.
But that's part of the issue and then my wife
had to figure out-- it took her years
to figure out why she ended up with an Asian man.
And it had a lot to do with her growing up in the South.
And being very aware of being grounded
as a northerner in the South and so she was always an outsider.
And so she identified with outsiders in a way
that I don't think if she'd grown up in the South
as a white Southerner.
I mean her greatest fear growing up was that one of her friends
belonged-- would belong to the Ku Klux Klan.
So she would-- when she went out to people's houses,
she would look in their closets to see
if they had sheets and stuff.
[LAUGHTER]
And she-- her high school was--
she was in high school at the time
when they started to integrate schools in the South.
And her first crush was actually on a Black boy,
but it was too taboo and she said--
and she also grew up with, her father
was head of the Center for Disease Control.
So she had people from all over the world coming
through their house.
The people, you know, doctors from Africa, from India,
from South America, from Asia.
And she says I think I grew up feeling
like if I was with a white guy he would be a little boring.
But if I was with a Black guy, it would have been too taboo
and would have brought up all this legacy of slavery
in the South.
So you were like in between.
[LAUGHTER]
said it's very multicultural where you live.
Yeah.
How do your kids handle growing up as biracial?
Are there a lot of biracial parents?
There are a lot of biracial.
I think my kids tend to think of themselves more as Asian.
And my wife says to people, why we do this, she says,
because the whole culture is--
my wife is 3/4 WASP, 1/4 Hungarian Jew.
And she says the whole culture is a WASP culture.
We have to educate them on what it means to be Asian-American.
And they look in different--
my daughter looks the most Asian.
And then my youngest looks the least Asian.
But they also identify with Asian as opposed to white.
And their friends are in the poem, just all different races
and stuff.
One thing I noticed is that sports
allows boys to integrate racially easier than girls,
because you get on the field and you
can play sports [INAUDIBLE].
And the girls don't have--
if they're in sports, then they have those activities.
But if they're not in sports, then they
don't have those activities to integrate in that way.
But it's complicated.
And we're always talking about it.
My boy is much more [INAUDIBLE] than my daughter.
Yeah, I'm just wondering, as a contemporary writer,
do you ever find yourself censoring your writing now
that you have children or on some of your topics
on sexuality?
I'm wondering, what dialogue do you have?
I'll tell you a little story.
I did this show with my friend Alexs Pate.
I was watching an old video of it.
And I did this monologue of my father.
And my daughter came in.
And so I was watching this old tape.
And I did this monologue about my father
and the effect of the internment camps.
I did one about my mother, arguing with my mother
about the Rodney King decision.
And then I started talking on stage
about-- it was a piece about sexuality.
And my daughter just got up in bed and said,
I got to do something downstairs.
[LAUGHTER]
So I get downstairs.
And she looks at me, she says, I can
understand why grandpa and grandma don't
like your writing.
[LAUGHTER]
And I said, you know, people do that all the time,
not just writers.
Comics use their parents all the time.
She said, I could never do that.
I could never talk about these things.
And she once told my wife that her greatest nightmare
is that one of her friends would call her up and say,
I'm reading your father's book in class.
[LAUGHTER]
And she made me, at one point, promise not to write about her.
And I said, well, let's visit this every six months.
[LAUGHTER]
But the thing about it is, I ended up
writing a poem about the argument that we had in the car
about not writing about her about a week
after I promised not to write.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know what she's going to do.
There's this whole section in the book which is about--
really centered on her and her coming
aware of sexuality and reactions to all these different things,
like the Abercrombie and Fitch fiasco
that happened with those t-shirts and stuff.
I don't know.
The thing is that-- what is Philip Roth, John Updike's
saying, writers have no shame.
And Roth says, it's not that we don't have shame,
but it just doesn't stop us.
[LAUGHTER]
And then Czesław Miłosz has a saying where he says,
when there's a writer born in the family,
that's the end of the family.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know.
It's just--
Do your kids read your work?
Well, my daughter started to read it when she first felt--
started reading.
But then she realized there was sexuality in it.
And she went-- she just closed the book [INAUDIBLE]..
Whereas, my boy is just like, this is cool.
They gave their answers that they like it.
And they like it that I write about them,
because my daughter hates it when I write about her.
So she's [INAUDIBLE] and ironically, she's
the best writer in the family, so.
But that's just what it is.
It's like, that's what dad does.
It's like, if dad or mom's a cop, this is what life is like.
This is what it's like to be.
And they'll just have to figure it out from there.
Yeah, of course, you're always thinking about stuff like that.
But in the end, as a writer, you just
have to write what you have to write.
And the way that other people react, that's part of the job.
And either people accept it or don't.
But it's like if you marry somebody who's a policeman,
you accept that they're going to be in danger all the time.
If you marry somebody who's a funeral director,
you accept that there's going to be dead bodies around.
[LAUGHTER]
Otherwise, don't marry them.
If you're going to marry somebody who's a writer,
you just know that anything you say
may end up actually in something that they write.
One more question, yeah.
This is going to go off topic.
But being from Chicago as well, are you
a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan?
[LAUGHTER]
I was both.
Although, I was more a White Sox fan,
because I grew up when the White Sox were really--
they actually got to the World Series.
But I was--
I will go agree with you.
It was a different era that I--
second grade, I would just go by myself to Wrigley Field.
I can't imagine saying to my kids, just go to the ballpark
by yourselves.
Well, thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]