“It was very small, and you had to be careful what you did even if your parents weren’t around, because there was someone who knew your parents. “I felt something similar with the Chinatown that I knew in San Francisco before they lifted the immigration quotas,” Yep said. He was a homesick doctoral student studying William Faulkner in Buffalo when he began Dragonwings, admiring how Faulkner “took his town of Oxford, Mississippi, inside his imagination” and made it Yoknapatawpha. ”You know that phrase, ‘to see someone’s face glow’? Well, that’s what it was like to see my aunts and my uncle talk about West Virginia.” And with younger generations of Yeps now, he says, “there’s a game they play, trying to figure out who are the heroes in my books-and especially trying to figure out who are the villains.” They were storytellers on both sides, regaling younger generations with family stories. His own family includes first-generation grandparents in both San Francisco and West Virginia, where they forged connections with white Americans strong enough that his grandfather’s employer became his father’s “Irish godfather” and his mother had an adopted “Grandma” in her family’s landlady, Miss Alcinda.
When we talked, shortly after the new year, he had recently fielded questions from two great-nieces who are independently interested in learning more about their forebears and was looking forward to a private reunion of the first cast of his theatrical production of Dragonwings. It’s that twining of history and family-whether blood or found-that seems to define Yep. Each story started with an event discovered over a lifetime of finding “bits and pieces of Chinese-American history” in libraries and a relationship: “a genuine bond between two characters.” Yep’s fictional Chinese-American family is as varied as any real-life one, and they live through some wild times, from an anti-Manchu rebellion in Kwangtung province through building the transcontinental railroad, the San Francisco earthquake, the Great Depression, and the 60s through the newest waves of Chinese immigration from post-Maoist China. It’s a process he’s used throughout his writing life. In a telephone conversation, Yep explained how Dragonwings was “written in reverse” from that scene, when he stepped back to imagine how the event may have come to pass. The seed of that story was planted when Yep was in college, pursuing an independent study about Fung Joe Guey, a Chinese man who flew over Oakland for 20 minutes in 1909. Yep won a 1976 Newbery Honor for his second book, Dragonwings, which tells the story of Moon Shadow Lee, newly arrived on the Golden Mountain in 1903 to live in San Francisco’s Chinatown with his father, Windrider, an aspiring aviator.
It’s no surprise to learn that Yep’s sense of history and family is equally strong and expansive. He lives in Pacific Grove, California, with his wife, the writer Joanne Ryder.Readers of Laurence Yep’s Golden Mountain Chronicles, which relate the stories of some nine generations of one Chinese-American family and their friends from the mid-19th century to the early 21st, come away from the experience with a rich sense of history and family. He attended Marquette University, graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and received his PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Yep grew up in San Francisco, where he was born. Yep, and was named a New York Public Library's "One Hundred Titles for Reading and Sharing" and a Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book. His illustrious list of novels includes the Newbery Honor Books Dragonwings and Dragon's Gate The Earth Dragon Awakes: The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, a Texas Bluebonnet Award nominee and The Dragon's Child: A Story of Angel Island, which he cowrote with his niece, Dr. view more Laurence Yep is the acclaimed author of more than sixty books for young people and a winner of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.
His illustrious list of novels includes the Newbery H. Laurence Yep is the acclaimed author of more than sixty books for young people and a winner of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.
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