One funny thing that happened is, when I was a young lawyer, I was representing a big bank in New York, and I had a client, we dealt exclusively by telephone because we didn’t have Zoom back then.

And we were going to meet for the first time in Anchorage, Alaska, where I was working on a big financing for the Alaska Power Authority. And so we were going to meet in the lobby of the hotel and go to dinner and begin to talk about the documents.

So when I met my client for the very first time, he was shocked, he had no idea that I was Asian. And I said, “Well, what were you expecting?” He said, “Well, I knew you were from the Midwest, and you don’t have an accent.” And he said, “I just thought you were going to be a blonde, blue-eyed, corn-fed Midwesterner.” So he was just so shocked to see that I was Asian.

And speaking of the accent, I’m often asked by people, people I meet for the first time and complete strangers, cab drivers striking up a conversation, where are you from? And I typically answer that question, I say, I live in Los Angeles and I’m a native of Cleveland, Ohio. Because to me it’s important that I am from Cleveland, Ohio.

And then they will say, where are you really from? And I say, well, I was born in a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. But they pursue it. And then I know that they really are asking about my ethnicity. So I say to them, my parents were born on the West Coast, theyr’e American citizens, and my four grandparents immigrated from Japan at the turn of the last century.