Laurence Yep was born June 14, 1948, in San Francisco, California, the son of Thomas Gim, a postal clerk and Franche Lee, a homemaker. His own identity was a difficult issue because he grew up in a Chinese home in a predominantly black neighborhood where his parents operated a small grocery store; he attended a parochial school in San Francisco's Chinatown. He felt like an outsider at school because he spoke no Chinese like his peers. In Literature for Today's Young Adults, he says of himself, "I was the all-purpose Asian. When we played war, I was the Japanese who got killed; then when the Korean war came along, I was a North Korean Communist." He first came face to face with white American culture when he attended high school, where he continued to feel like an outsider. There he discovered science fiction and began writing...