She introduced him to children’s literature and later asked him to write a book for children while she was working at Harper & Row. His decision to become a writer did not come until the time he entered college at Marquette.ĭuring his time at Marquette University, he met and became friends with the literary magazine editor, Joanne Ryder. Like my father, I was fascinated by machines”. However, as a child, he thought of himself as a scientist and he “was going to be a chemist. While working in his family’s store, he “learned early on how to observe and listen to people, how to relate to others. He earned a Ph.D in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Yep attended Marquette University and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His teacher, a priest, told him and a couple of his friends that to get an A, they had to get a piece of writing accepted by a magazine, and that's when he started to realize that a career in writing was meant to be. His first writing was done in high school, for a science fiction magazine. He later entered a Catholic high school in San Francisco where he continued his interest in chemistry and became equally intrigued with writing. Just like Casey Young, a character in Child of the Owl, Yep was placed in the lower level Chinese class where he was able to pass without learning how to speak the language. As it says in his autobiography, "I was too American to fit into Chinatown, and too Chinese to fit in anywhere else." As a boy, Yep attended a bilingual school in Chinatown. Most of his life, he has had the feeling of being out of place, whether because he is the non athlete in his athletic family or because he is Chinese and once lived in Chinatown but does not speak the language. A great deal of his work involves characters feeling alienated or not fitting into their surroundings and environment, something Yep has struggled with since childhood. Growing up, he often felt torn between both American and Chinese culture, and expressed this in many of his books. Growing up outside of Chinatown, Yep and his family lived above their family owned grocery store, La Conquista, in a multicultural neighborhood that consisted of mostly African Americans. His older brother, Thomas, named him after studying a particular saint that had died from a gruesome death (Yep, 1991). Yep was born in San Francisco, California to Yep Gim Lew (Thomas) and Franche.
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