Like many parents, I love to talk about my children. A conversation with someone to whom I’m newly introduced often begins with “Do you have children?” (Yes.) “How many?” (Two.) Then the natural and understandable follow-up question is usually “Boys or girls?”

Usually, I revel in the possibilities inherent in meeting someone new. However, at such moments, I pause and protest silently. Ugh! This is a question one should never ask someone you’re just meeting.

My love for collecting stories was seeded in middle school with the sounds of crinkling sleeping bags, the salt of instant ramen brine, and the ache of raw conversations digging deep past my bedtime. Those nights, with the other pimply, Asian American peers at church, we peeled back our tight facades, revealing layers of vulnerability and hurt intermingled with courage and integrity, imprinting moments of connection felt so real to me that I became hooked recreating them, especially with individuals not so similar to myself.

I live a very insulated life. Although my co-op building welcomes a diversity of residents, I tend to remain in my apartment, rarely interacting with neighbors. The friends I do have are reflections of me: older white single (divorced, widowed, or never married) women. Only when I go to the theater—a setting where everyone is accepted based on talent, not on ethnicity, racial background or sexual orientation—do I enter a world of diversity.

Dear readers,

I grew up in a segregated neighborhood–not in Alabama or Mississippi, but in New York City. Stuyvesant Town, a coveted Manhattan location where I spent my youth, was built for veterans–white veterans–after World War II. It did not offer apartments to Black families until the mid-1960s.

When I was a boy, the area below Fourteenth Street, now the desirable East Village, was home to recent immigrants from Puerto Rico. Friends of my parents shook their heads when discussing that community and “those people,” who I grew leery of.