The experience left me with a deep empathy for refugees and immigrants and what they are going through. It also left me with an awareness that history had shaped my family, my refugee community and me. It gave me the sense that I needed to work through that history and try to understand it, which is what I do in my writing. And being a refugee also left me with the requisite emotional damage necessary to become a writer.

I think if I wasn't a refugee, and didn't feel that my emotional well being, my relationship to my parents and so on, had been fractured because of the many complexities of the refugee experience, I wouldn't have the material and the motivation to write. So being a refugee is certainly a mixed blessing. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. But I think the experience has left me with the empathy and the insight necessary to be a writer.