I’m a mischievous motherfucker. Can we say that in your publication? If not, how about: I’m a very lucky guy who feels fortunate to have found something that I enjoy doing as my life’s work.

There is a time in your youth when you hear the phrase, ‘life is short’. But it doesn’t have any weight or meaning when you’re 20. When I hit my fifties, I thought I better get going. But why SFMOMA? I have this idea you might as well start at the top and work down rather than vice versa, otherwise, you may never know just how high you can go. The work was accepted right away, but now I’m wondering: is it all downhill now?

There was no thought about it at the time; I just took pictures of whatever interested me. I remember Lee Friedlander saying that book ideas come after the fact. Like he discovered he had a bunch of pictures where he was in them, so he did his Self-Portrait book.

Looking back, I went through six years of college including two years for an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute without having to read a book or take a test. That appealed to me – not that I have anything against books. But tests? Think about SAT’s. How do they measure street smarts or ‘wisdom’?

Annie and Norman were good to observe on a number of levels. Besides the actual image-making, there was the way they ran a photo session, how you engaged the subject and how one nimbly handled the business aspects which were not taught in school. It helped me enter the world of photography as a living.

I never wanted to be a paparazzi – they did that as a job. We were just at the same events but I was taking a photo class and they were making a living. I had the freedom to do as I pleased. They needed a certain kind of shot for their editors. Robert Frank has two images called Movie Premiere- Hollywood in his book The Americans. It was more like that.

I don’t think that word describes me at all. I was very focussed if not intense about what I was doing. Fully driven, motivated and deliberate. Totally unstoppable. A Terminator with a camera.

I let others do that. I took them and now I’m enjoying the reaction to the work many decades later. However, one thing that comes up often is how the pictures are from a time so very much in contrast to the world we now live in. There are three hundred thousand people on the Golden Gate Bridge and not a cell phone in sight.

How important is (it?) for you to mix your personal story with that of others? There is no going back. The pictures are done. But the story has been an unveiling of not only this Chinese in America in the 1970s thing but also of me as an Asian artist who is just now after four decades getting some recognition.

As a first-year photo student in the 1970s, there wasn’t much colour work to see. Most of the ‘masters’ shot in black and white, so it’s simply a matter of that. It took a while for William Eggleston’s colour pictures to be accepted. In fact, when they were first shown at the MoMA in New York in the mid-1970s, they were very controversial.

It’s a question I ask of a lot of people. The demographic seems to be from 20 to 80 years old. It’s pretty amazing. I’m not really sure. It must be something universal that strikes people. Like humour or honesty. I really don’t know. There’s probably not one answer.

It’s been more than four decades since I did the work. Looking back, what amazes me is that I was able to even do it. At my age, I only have a fraction of the energy it would take to do that. Like in rock n’ roll or sports, I think there’s a sweet spot – for most people in your 20s and 30s where it’s best to really just hit it. There’s a window. Maybe this is too much of a generalization but there is a quote from David Crosby that goes something like, ‘Bands tend to devolve. They evolve up to the point where they’re exciting and they’re new and they’re good, and then after that, they work their way slowly downhill until it’s turn on the smoke machine and play your hits.’ You won’t be seeing any lame ass pictures from me.

Never ever give up. And the bigger the setback, the bigger the bounce back. I have found this to be absolutely true.