![]() The cumulative effect of this was to make me feel like the outsider, in a way, because from Moon Shadow's point of view, my familiar world is his foreign world. He also italicizes all the American words in the book, a convention that usually highlights the "foreign" words in a story. For example, he refers to China and the Chinese people by the names they themselves would use (the Middle Kingdom, the T'ang people), and his main character constantly refers to white people as demons. He not only chooses a character who can provide me with a new perspective, but he uses language conventions in such a way as to jar me out of my usual position. Aside from how much I enjoyed the narrative elements, I enjoyed the perspective-shift that Yep provided me as a white reader. ![]() Response: I have never read a Laurence Yep book, and I am so glad I finally did. It chronicles his life in America, first in the Tang people's part of the city (what white people call Chinatown), and then living alone with his father among the "demons," as he considers white people. Summary: This novel tells the story of Moon Shadow's decision to leave the Middle Kingdom and come live in turn-of-the-century San Francisco with his father. ![]() Today as well as writing, he has taught writing and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1975. 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. 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. During high school he faced the white American culture for the first time. Other students at the school, according to Yep, labeled him a "dumbbell Chinese" because he spoke only English. They later married and now live in San Francisco.Īlthough not living in Chinatown, Yep commuted to a parochial bilingual school there. Joanne Ryder, a children's book author, and Yep met and became friends during college while she was his editor. He was in his own words his neighborhood's "all-purpose Asian" and did not feel he had a culture of his own. Growing up in San Francisco, Yep felt alienated. After troubling times during the Depression, he was able to open a grocery store in an African-American neighborhood. 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. Franche Lee, her family's youngest child, was born in Ohio and raised in West Virginia where her family owned a Chinese laundry. Born Jin San Francisco, California, Yep was the son of Thomas Gim Yep and Franche Lee Yep.
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