I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, a fact that often confounds those
who expect Americans of Asian descent to come only from the coasts. In fact
Kansas City has had a continuous Chinese American population since the 1870s,
but my parents had only arrived there less than a year before I did. Until I
was three years old, we lived in a modest apartment near The Plaza.
Many years later, I described to my mother what I believe to be my
earliest memory, of sitting in the apartment at a small table with stuffed
animals in the other chairs and a plate with cake and ice cream in front of
each of us. My mother informed me that it had been my second birthday. She
had planned a party with other two-year-olds, but I had come down with
chicken pox and so my guests were a stuffed bear, elephant, and a critter I
can no longer picture clearly. When I described the layout of the apartment,
my mother confirmed that I remembered it right. I have several other
memories of living in the apartment, but none as distinctive as the birthday
party with stuffed animals.
I recall that my mother would push me in a stroller up the street to a
small market that had live chickens in stacked metal cages. She would have
me pick one. The man behind the counter would take it to the back and come ou
t a few minutes later with something that looked entirely different, which
she would take home and cook. I knew it was the same thing, and yet I didn’t
understand what he had done that made it inanimate and caused it to look so
different.
My father is now a retired neurosurgeon, but at that time his career was
just picking up after a long, delayed start for a variety of reasons,
including his service in the U.S. Army during World War II, on campaign in
Burma, for which he received a Bronze Star for treating wounded under fire.
He was the first nonwhite doctor to break the color line in the previously
segregated medical society in Kansas City, Missouri. I did not know until
many years later how risky and tenuous a start he had faced with his career.
We moved to a suburb in Kansas called Prairie Village. The area had a
few other families of Asian descent, though their kids never attended the
same schools I did. I read somewhere the population was about forty percent
Jewish. At that time, at least one of the nearby suburbs legally and
blatantly refused to sell houses to a long list of racial groups and certain
European ethnic groups; I suspect it was no accident that many of us wound up
clumped together in an area that did not have that list.
I spent my earliest years visually distinct from all the other kids
around me except for my brother, listening to parents and teachers asking me
where I was from and where I was born. Young children, of course, don’t
think of such questions; as I got older, my contemporaries began asking, too.
Somewhere in all of this, my own interest in my family heritages began.
Of course I liked having stories read to me and I began creating stories
before I could read and write. I dictated tales of about five sentences to
my mother, who wrote them down with a ballpoint pen, each sentence on a small
piece of paper. I drew a picture illustrating each line and bound the pages
together with brads. Most of them were lost long ago, but I still have one
in a file drawer.
My brother, Chris, came along six years after I did. When he was three,
our family went bowling and I watched him knock down every pin with one ball.
It was technically a spare rather than a strike, since he had just rolled a
gutter ball -- but he’s now a professional bowler as well as a lawyer.
Bill Moss is my oldest friend; we met when I was three and he was two.
He still lives down the street in the house where he grew up.
Another childhood friend was Bobby Greenlee, who introduced me to comic
books, Mad magazine, and science fiction through Astounding/Analog magazine
and the names Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. I
doubt anyone calls him Bobby now; he's a retired Air Force colonel in the Air Force.
Future Air Force Colonel
Photo restoration by Charlene Fletcher.
Around the age of eight, I met Henry Robertson. We had much in common,
including a tendency to be loners and a fascination with history, legend, and
mythology. At recess, while other boys played kickball, we were re-enacting
the First Crusade, the Trojan War, and Gettysburg -- no wonder the other kids
had no idea what to say to us. Away from school, we also wrote stories and
poems, at the same time but not in collaboration. Our third-grade teacher,
Miss Hughes, told my mother we were lucky to have found each other to play
with.
In sheer number of hours, however, I spent the most time with Bill Moss,
doing what most boys do -- playing board games or with toys inside, playing
out in the yard with other neighborhood kids, riding our bikes farther and
farther from home as we got older. We teamed up, argued with each other, and
got into routine, childhood trouble together.
My earliest memory of writing poetry was in the third grade. My mother
has been a poet all my life and had a collection of her work published,
titled From Ink and Sandalwood; I worked at poetry off and on until my early
twenties, when I finally figured out I was not a poet.
My parents, unlike the families of many writers I know, were consistently
supportive of my writing. My maternal grandmother, Mae Franking, wrote a
novel called My Chinese Marriage, based on her experience as a white woman
married to my Chinese grandfather, that was published in 1921. My father,
who is fluent in a number of languages, wrote articles that appeared in
medical journals, travel articles that appeared in the newspaper, and later
his autobiography published as a book, Monsoon Season. His father, who had
been one of the last imperial scholars of the Qing Dynasty before it was
overthrown, had poetry and essays published in Chinese. Whether an interest
and facility in writing are hereditary or environmental, I had the advantage
of both.
I also had encouragement at school, from my sixth-grade teacher, Mr.
Whitson, and in creative writing clubs in junior high, especially Sharon
Hamil’s eighth-grade club. Through my teen years, I wrote a great deal, both
stories and poetry, taking time away from both school work and sleep. I
showed a little of it to my mother and father and more of it to a very few
friends, but I kept most of it to myself.
Before I reached high school, Bobby and Henry moved away. My closest
friend became Mike Schwab, with whom I shared classes in American history and
Latin, where we read Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, and Ovid. Against a backdrop of
swirling social change in the wider world, we talked a great deal about
concepts from those two classes.
I always had a taste for the outdoors, probably imparted to me because my
mother grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when it was still a small midwestern
town and my father spent his early childhood in a Chinese peasant village.
In my childhood, we took vacations at the Lake of the Ozarks and visited
relatives at Lake Meddybemps, Maine. My parents purchased a farm outside
Kansas City, Missouri, and when the government decided to damn up a stream
that ran through it, we got a free lake where we fished, canoed, and sailed
small boats.
In my teens, I went on camping and canoe trips down the Current and Jacks
Fork rivers in the Missouri Ozarks. While I enjoyed being a Cub Scout, I did
not like the Boy Scouts, and quit in my second year. At nineteen, I spent a
month at the Minnesota Outward Bound School, canoeing, camping, rapelling,
and rock climbing. I was a poor rock climber, but enjoyed the thrill of
rapelling -- maybe it’s just that going down is always easier. The solo
portion of the experience was too much for me, but I enjoyed the rest of the
experience and gained a great deal of skill, self-knowledge and
self-confidence.
I enjoyed and hated high school. While I was a good student, I was not
as good as most people thought; I took honors classes in everything but math,
in which -- despite a common American stereotype -- I was no better than
average and probably worse. I dated, was no athlete, and most of all kept
writing. Most of what I wrote during high school was poetry.
One summer during high school I attended a six-week program for Chinese
American young people. For the first time, I made close friends of the same
ethnicity, born and raised in this country, including Art Soong from New
York, and Dave Young and Clara Yen from Southern California. At about the
same time, I became better acquainted with Chinese Americans in the Kansas
City area, in particular Newton Chun and his family and also two girls my age
in other families. They were all important to my developing sense of self.
I went to college at the University of Michigan, where my parents had met
and which my maternal grandparents had attended. My brother Chris later
attended Michigan Law School. While an undergraduate, I did less creative
writing than in any other period. During that time, I wrote poetry only and
not very much. I read widely, as always, for enjoyment as well as for
classes, but I did not focus on any particular sort of fiction. Looking
back, I suppose when I was not studying, I was experiencing life and learning
about myself and others, important prerequisites for writing fiction. In
fact, if I have regrets about my college years, I think I should have studied
less and enjoyed myself more.
The summer I was nineteen felt like one long adventure. I took a trip by
car with Mike to the East Coast and back, went to Outward Bound in Minnesota,
then traveled with my family and Henry to Maine. In August, a friend from
Outward Bound named Fred Jones and I hitchhiked from Kansas City to Los
Angeles. I got back to Michigan just in time for the new semester. While I
did some other hitchhiking, when that activity shows up in my fiction, I’m
usually drawing in some way on the experience of that trip. I lost track of
Fred long ago, finding too many people with his name whenever I tried to look
for him.
I had carried the idea of writing professionally in the back of my mind
since I was eight, though at that time I thought I would be a poet. When I
graduated from college at twenty-two, I decided to be a professional writer,
though I was aware that I might never make a living at it. I had never
mentioned this to my college friends and when I did, two of them ridiculed
the idea -- the only two people in my life who ever did.
After writing all my life, the difference was in making the effort a new
priority and in researching the business side of a writing career. Following
a year out of school, when I lived back in the Kansas City area, I attended
the Clarion writers workshop, where I met professional writers including
Robin Scott Wilson, Gordon R. Dickson, Harlan Ellison, Thomas M. Disch, Damon
Knight, and Kate Wilhelm. I also met one of the graduates from the previous
year, Michael D. Toman, who became a close friend and, some years later, a
fellow adventurer when we packed stuff into my car and moved from Michigan to
California.
Michael was the first good friend I made who was also a science fiction
and fantasy writer. We also had a shared interest in collecting books and
comics, and in movies and popular culture in general. I started going to
science fiction conventions, where I met other writers, both new and
established, and the readers and fans who have a special affection for the
field. When Michael and I visited Clarion the following summer to see some
of our former instructors, we met among others Robert Crais, who was a
student at the workshop that year. In California, Michael introduced me to
Alan Brennert, who had attended Clarion the same year as Michael.
Between attending Clarion and moving to California, however, I returned
to Michigan for graduate school. By this time writing was my first priority
and in my first year of grad school, I wrote the short stories that became my
earliest professional sales. More important than my classes was East Wind,
an Asian American student group that had formed a year before I started grad
school.
For only the second period in my life, I had a large number of Asian
American friends and acquaintances. Among them were some very good friends
and, over time, several girl friends. East Wind was very inclusive, having
among its members both an engineer with Ford Motor Company and
self-identified Marxists. Its focus was campus activism and one year we
joined other nonwhite student groups in occupying the university
administration building for several days.
The closest friend I made that year was Garrett Hongo. My fiction and
his poetry gave us a common interest in writing that went beyond studies or
student politics. We spent one summer in particular double dating, playing
pickup softball, and drinking more beer than I usually have -- all the while
discussing writing.
I attended graduate school with the idea that I might become a college
professor somewhere and write on the side. By the time I had finished,
however, I had lost interest in academics. The only career I wished to
pursue was writing; to support myself, I scrounged for money and found jobs
of little consequence.
Around this time, I met Rob Chilson. My friendship with Rob remains
something of a mystery to both of us. While I share some basic
socio-economic, educational, or popular culture background with all my other
close friends, Rob and I have virtually nothing in common on the surface:
Not our economic or educational background, not a racial heritage, not even
shared movies, music, and television in our youth. An interest in science
fiction and fantasy? Sure, but I share that with lots of people I know.
In any case, our rapport led to ten collaborations in Analog, countless
trips to science fiction conventions, and a great deal of fun along the way.
My career, for both good or otherwise, can be found in my bibliography.
I have left out only one major subject in this review -- I’ve chosen not to
mention women with whom I’ve been involved because I don’t know how they
would feel about being named here. With the exception of that subject, the
summary above touches on the influences that in some way molded me and my
work.
James Robert Greenlee
and future author William F. Wu
prepare to walk to
Prairie Elementary School
in Prairie Village, Kansas.
Bill and Garrett K. Hongo, now a noted poet and author, relax at a party
during their time in graduate school at the University of Michigan. At that
time, they had both sold professionally, but were just beginning their
careers as writers. Bill recalls they spent that summer double dating,
playing pickup softball, and drinking more beer than usual, all the while
discussing writing.
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Modified by: LJL