Author’s afterword:I was really excited and honored when Laurence M. Yep asked me to submit a story to the anthology in which this story first appeared. We had met only once, many years before, when I was a grad student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and he came to speak, if I remember right, at the School of Education in the late ’70s. He is, of course, the author of many impressive works and has been honored for them repeatedly, including the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal and the John Newbery Medal. Also, in 1969, he became the first Asian American to have a science fiction story published, with “The Selchey Kids,” in Analog magazine. My friend Glenn Chang became the second in 1974 and I believe I was the third.
In grad school, I was active in an Asian American student organiza
