Laurence Yep
Born June 14, 1948 in San Francisco, California, Yep was the son of Thomas Gim Yep and Franche Lee Yep. Franche Lee, her family's youngest child, was born in Ohio and raised in West Virginia where her family owned a Chinese laundry. Yep's father, Thomas, was born in China and came to America at the age of ten where he lived, not in Chinatown, but with an Irish friend in a white neighborhood. After troubling times during the Depression, he was able to open a grocery store in an African-American neighborhood. Growing up in San Francisco, Yep felt alienated. He was in his own words his neighborhood's "all-purpose Asian" and did not feel he had a culture of his own. Joanne Ryder, a children's book author, and Yep met and became friends during college while she was his editor. They later married and now live in San Francisco.
Although not living in Chinatown, Yep commuted to a parochial bilingual school there. Other students at the school, according to Yep, labeled him a "dumbbell Chinese" because he spoke only English. During high school he faced the white American culture for the first time. However, it was while attending high school that he started writing for a science fiction magazine, being paid one cent a word for his efforts. After two years at Marquette University, Yep transferred to the University of California at Santa Cruz where he graduated in 1970 with a B.A. He continued on to earn a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1975. Today as well as writing, he has taught writing and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara.
“And, as the tiny lights drift into the blackness, the people pray that others around the world will remember Hiroshima and work for world peace. The atom bomb is too terrible a weapon.It must not drop again.”
“Scientists say that if the bombs drop again, no one will win because no one will survive. All life on Earth will end.”
“The with forbidden the death of warriors”
“And all of a sudden I saw that if life seems awfully petty most of the time, every now and then there is something noble and beautiful and almost pure that lifts us suddenly out of the pettiness and lets us share in it a little.”
“I only knew that there was a certain rightness in life--the feeling you got when you did something the way you knew you should.”
“She's trying to sabotage all the magic holding this island together. But that would create a catastrophe for all of Hawaii.""Well, that does it," Koko huffed. "As of today, she's off my Christmas card list.”
“If you throw up," Kles said unsympathetically, "remember not to face the wind.""Yeah, Koko. You're the one who's been complaining about doing the same things lately," Leech said. "Enjoy it.""Oog, and double oog," was all Koko could say.”
“Sometimes it's easier to be as bad as they expect you to be.”
“Just because there's tarnish on the copper, doesn't mean there's not a shine beneath.”
“You can learn to change the world or go on being changed by it.”