Born June 14, 1948 in San Francisco, California. "In our family's own personal story West Virginia is as much a mythical homeland as China, for my mother was born in Ohio and then raised in West Virginia, where my paternal grandfather started a Chinese laundry in Clarksburg. Subsequently, my mother's family moved to the nearby town of Bridgeport, where they spent most of their childhood.... My mother, my uncle, and my aunts had left West Virginia for California when they were all children.

"Both my parents faced problems of acculturation. But my father, who lived in a white neighborhood of San Francisco, was always within walking--and sometimes of necessity--running distance of Chinatown. However, my mother and her family were the only Chinese in the area until another Chinese laundry opened up in competition.

"Of course, my mother's family would not have been the first group of immigrants to face the...