I guess your life as a corporate lawyer required more of an escape than junior high. But I didn't think about sci-fi until years later, after I graduated from law school, actually. It made me feel like there's a world out there that I could be transported to and I go there over and over again. That was my first real encounter with a multi-book series of sci-fi, that helped me gain understanding of a book as not just words on a page. I read his short stories and his Foundation series, which is this epic galactic-scale story in which he constructs a whole society and a whole theory of human behavior and civilization. Well, I definitely remember being in junior high when we started to read Isaac Asimov. When did your interests shift to science fiction? You’re best known for your sci-fi books How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Sorry Please Thank You. “Sci-fi was a way of being transported to a different reality, or of gaining a new perspective on this reality.” So I remember feeling, “He's ours.” There was this special attachment to Bruce Lee and to the idea of being a kung fu fighter, and I think that felt like our own thing on some level. And there's such a lack of seeing Asian American role models in American media, especially like Bruce Lee - an action hero and an icon, really. And on the block where we lived I didn't play with any other Asian-American kids. But I think, to your point, there was something special for my brother and I growing up in southern California, where there are other Asian-Americans, but we didn't go to school with many.

I remember Nadia Comaneci, it was on the news all the time about how she got perfect 10s and she had broken all these records! Even for an Asian-American kid in LA, she was absolutely world-famous. I grew up in Romania and I remember wanting to be a gymnast like Nadia Comaneci. It’s interesting how culture-specific idols shape our fantasies as kids. He was just too cool and obviously a kind of physical genius in terms of his fighting, grace, and velocity with which he moved. I watched Fist of Fury and Enter The Dragon, and there was something about him that was also not quite human. And somewhere among all this was Bruce Lee. This was probably based on video games where there are these really buff, impossibly good fighters. But there was a phase where I thought I would want to be a kind of hybrid between a video game character and a sort of elite fighter.

I loved science and I had this image that I would go on to develop a pill that you could take once a day and you didn't have to eat. Charles, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Charles yu