Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law.

It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

The worst... was what the Pakistani soldiers did to the Bengali women after their failed rebellion.

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

Often, what you see in the media is driven by economic forces.

After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.

Now, most of the new immigrants coming to this country are from Asia as opposed to Europe.

When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese.

I don't mind solitude. I love talking to other people, but I do need my space.

Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.

Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.

It's much more difficult to work on a broad subject than on a specific one, because even if it's hard to find the information, if you look hard enough for something specific you will find it, and you will discover things that you wouldn't have thought of before.

I received an honorary doctorate for my work. Maybe one of these works is considered the equivalent of a Ph.D.

Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.

It's a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

If the conditions were right there could be great acceptance. Often it is only when they pose an economic or political threat that it turns really ugly.

I have to finish this book tour of almost 30 cities.

Of course, in the United States, which at the time was a very young country, there were also class distinctions. They weren't as pronounced, but they quickly evolved as well.

There is also an epidemic of infertility in this country. There are more women who have put off child-bearing in favor of their professional lives. For them, the only way they are going to have a family is to adopt from China.

We have to keep in mind that it's not just about the numbers of people who died; it's also the manner which many of these victims met their deaths.

Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien.

There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control.

Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law.

I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.

I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.

When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.

There are now hundreds of thousands of new engineers that are being trained in China. If people start finding themselves losing their jobs, not to the Chinese here but because China has become such a dominant force - then there could very well be a backlash.

They probably do have an Asian Barbie.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.

I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.

We support President Truman's civil rights program.

There are those who say to you - we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

A lot of things happened in a lot of places. And to see how well it was handled in Atlanta. There are a lot of reasons for Atlanta being a special town in the Civil Rights era.

He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.

The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

Eyes is the attempt to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement and to create an emotional, intellectual constituency. But what do you do after that? The black community doesn't have institutions that pick up such moments and preserve them.

It is distressing to me that we live in an age in which we still must fight to protect our civil rights as Americans, in which a hate crime perpetrated against someone based their sexual orientation can go unpunished, and in which discrimination is being written into our laws.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.