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There are aspects of Asian culture in my work, but it's really rooted in an American experience - transcendentalism, '60s counterculture, punk rock.

Stories about race and identity pique my interest for obvious reasons. That's in my body, my brain, my history, my memories - it's all part of my toolbox as an actor.

I think it was hard for people to cast me as an ethnic, as an Asian American woman.

I grew up accepting that my nationality was not depicted on TV or film. To be honest, it was something I didn't acknowledge as a kid. But once I realized my love for acting and the possibility of pursuing a career in it, I quickly noticed the absence of Asians in general and thought, 'Well, I'm gonna try to change that.'

I've done a lot of books with Asian antecedents to them - some of my fantasy novels have been that way, and certainly in the 'Battletech' universe, there's a lot of Asian culture in that.

It's funny - when I started acting, I didn't know I was going to be talking about Asian-American issues so much. You know what, though? It just comes with the territory, being ethnic.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

The story that I wanna tell is pretty much about the way I grew up. Being bi-racial, growing up in a big city and being an artist.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.