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I majored in Chinese. I was never really good at Chinese but I really, really benefited from having been exposed to Asian philosophy early in my life.

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

I had always thought that I would do something that was connected to music as a career, or possibly Chinese, which was my major.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

I've studied Chinese in college, but basically, I'm not bilingual.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

I think my father, who was Chinese, basically felt if we didn't major in science, we would starve on the streets, so we all went into science unquestioningly. I kind of faked my way through physics.

There's a real difference of what one believed was one's chief responsibility between American professors and Chinese professors. This was vividly revealed to me when I compared what I could learn in Chicago and what I could learn in China.

I was an English major in college!

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.