As he once explained, "In a sense I have no one culture to call my own since I exist peripherally in several. However, in my writing I can create my own."
Born in San Francisco, California, in 1948, Yep was raised in an African American neighborhood and attended a bilingual school in the city's Chinatown. Despite being of Chinese descent, he fulfilled diverse cultural roles during his childhood. Within his family, he learned both about Chinese culture and about the American society that was now his home. Describing his family's approach to living in a new land, Yep once commented in Horn Book that "my mother's family's solution was to juggle elements of both cultures. Though they stayed Chinese in some central core, they also developed a curiosity and open-mindedness about the larger white culture around them." Outside the family home was another story. As Yep once explained in Literature for Today's Young Adults, "I was the all-purpose Asian. When [my friends and I] played war, I was the Japanese who got killed; then, when the Korean war came along, I was a North Korean Communist." The fact that Yep did not speak Chinese made it difficult for him to feel totally at home in Chinatown, and he felt equally at sea when he began attending a predominantly white high school.
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