Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, this is Bookworm, and I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Cynthia Ozik, author of Air to the Glimbering World.

Identity comes from home and from parents and from grandparents.

I'm uncomfortable with the word identity.

It's a word that has become more and more linked with the word ethnic,

which it seems to me as a sociologist's invention,

producing fake and demeaning splintering.

The word is Greek in origin and refers to pagans.

And if you look it up, it means persons who are neither Jewish nor Christian.

And I don't think anybody in this country wants to be an ethnic.

That was Cynthia Ozik.

We continue our special series,

Escaping the Cage, Identity, Multiculturalism, and Writing.

Today our subject is Asian-American writers,

and we'll be speaking with Susan Choi, Don Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Susan Choi's novel, American Woman, published now in paperback by Harper Perennial,

was inspired by the story of Wendy Yoshimura, the Japanese American woman involved in the Patricia Hearst kidnapping.

...