LOST GARDEN, THE (In My Own Words) - Hardcover

Yep, Laurence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671741608 ISBN 13: 9780671741600

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 1991

Synopsis

The author describes how he grew up as a Chinese American in San Francisco and how he came to use his writing to celebrate his family and his ethnic heritage.

About this title

About the Author:

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 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. Kathleen S. 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.

Mr. Yep grew up in San Francisco, where he was born. 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. He lives in Pacific Grove, California, with his wife, the writer Joanne Ryder.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a strong debut for the new ``In My Own Words'' series, the author of The Star Fisher (see below) portrays his own youth. Brought up in San Francisco, where his parents managed for years to defend a mom-and-pop grocery against an increasingly rough non-Chinese neighborhood, Yep went to Chinatown to attend a Catholic school and to visit his grandmother. Always aware of belonging to several cultures, he is a keen observer who began early to ``keep a file of family history'' and who tellingly reveals how writing fiction, honestly pursued, can lead to new insights: in putting his own ``mean'' teacher into one book, he began for the first time to understand her viewpoint. He divides his account topically, rather than chronologically, with chapters on the store, Chinatown, family tradition, being an outsider, etc., concluding with his college years (``Culture Shock'') and some later experiences especially related to his writing. Always, Yep is trying to integrate his many ``pieces'' (``raised in a black neighborhood...too American to fit into Chinatown and too Chinese to fit in elsewhere...the clumsy son of the athletic family...''), until he discovers that writing transforms him ``from being a puzzle to a puzzle solver.'' A detailed, absorbing picture of Chinese-American culture in the 50's and 60's, of particular interest to Yep's many admirers or would-be writers. (Autobiography. 11-15) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0671741608
• ISBN 13: 9780671741600
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 139