When we first moved to South Dakota, we could stop traffic just by walking down the sidewalk, my mother and father in front, my brother and me trailing behind. Cars and pickups slowed, sometimes in both lanes, and the passengers turned to stare out their windows. Our town was small: just five thousand residents and five thousand students. Apart from the university, there wasn’t much to it except tiny family-owned shops, a funeral home, a combination steakhouse–bowling alley, and nine bars.

In the beginning, the stares made my parents laugh. “Now I know what it’s like to be famous!”...

I’ll begin where I’m happiest, or most clueless—either adjective could be equally appropriate. I’m a child, eight, maybe nine, years old, living in the suburbs, part of the megalopolis twenty-five miles outside New York City, where my father is chair of the Asian Studies Department at City College.

It was my parents’ wedding anniversary. As this was also St. Patrick’s Day, our house was filled with the scent of corned beef and cabbage. And I do mean filled—from top to bottom, every inch of every room permeated. There was no escaping the pungent vapors, not under my bed,...

One of the rumors floatingaround town in South Dakota, as people began to speculate about my parents, was that my father was a white slaver. He must have somehow kidnapped my mother and forced her to marry him. Why she didn’t just up and leave, since she was equipped with a car, a career, and access to us kids, didn’t seem to pose any particular mental obstacles for people inclined to believe this scenario. Another rumor was that my mother, being a good Christian lady, had been hoodwinked into marrying a heathen in a rather naive attempt to save...

My maternal grandparentswere so happy that their eldest daughter would be spared the convent and was getting married, they couldn’t have cared less that she was marrying a Chinese man. My grandfather had been convinced for years that she would marry a “foreigner” anyway, since she’d spent so much time in Mexico, studying art there, sending postcards from cities whose names were impossible to pronounce, learning to speak “those Mexicans’ foreign language.” My father even looked like a Mexican in my grandfather’s eyes. He wasn’t surprised at all by his daughter’s choice.

My paternal grandmother, however, was shocked to...

Naturally there were some peoplewho warned my parents that they should not have children. My parents married in 1966, not long after the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned the antimiscegenation laws of old and a year before the Supreme Court confirmed the ban in the aptly titled case ofLoving v. Virginia. There were still many fears and prejudices about “mixed marriages,” and even the most educated people could say the dumbest things. One nurse acted as though my parents were two entirely different species, an amphibian and a bird, a mammal and a fish, when she heard that...

His first day on campus, as he walked from the parking lot to his office in the series of Gothic-style stone buildings that housed the newly created ethnic studies departments, my father thought to himself how the architecture recalled a medieval European monastery more than an urban college. Students, perhaps feeling the same sentiment, had spray-painted the walls with graffiti: Fuck the Man! Get Whitey! The Revolution is NOW! Students marched along the green carrying placards and banners: “End the war in Vietnam!” “Don’t Kill Our Yellow Brothers!” They looked nothing like the students back in Redlands. Every shade of...

And then, suddenly, things seemedto take a turn for the better.

At one of my father’s NYU night classes he met a young redheaded law student named Nancy Oxfeld who had elected to take one of his classes on China. She had enjoyed his lectures and thought he’d get along with her father—so she arranged for them to meet. It turned out that her father, Emil, was also a lawyer, a founding member of the ACLU in New Jersey. My father and Emil hit it off immediately. Emil was unflappable. Nothing my father told him shook his faith...

I can always date our family photosby the color of my mother’s hair.

When I was six, my mother dyed her hair a severe onyx black and wore it pulled back in tight chignons. The effect was very chic, but looking back at family photos, I can now see the stress in her face, her skin too pale beneath her inky hair. All her paintings from this era reflect a similar aesthetic: dark blues and violets, rigid vertical lines, flowers with petals as sharp as metal, portraits of people who do not smile but stare tensely out of the...

Often, that autumn, I woke upin the middle of the night with sharp pains radiating up and down my calves. I was twelve and growing rapidly. Soon hips would be jutting out where once I’d had straight lines, my waistline would shrink, breasts would bud, hair would appear in embarrassing places. My skin took on an unfamiliar sheen and developed a new smell. I didn’t like what was happening to me. It was as though I’d followed Alice down the rabbit hole and eaten something I shouldn’t have. I was growing in places, shrinking in others. I hardly knew...

At first, it was the little thingsthat began to drive my father crazy. Not the big ones, not the staring or the shooting, if you can imagine, but the mundane, everyday details. For example, the food. He’d forgotten this aspect about life away from New York, how people could live without Chinese food. Later he’d kick himself, but by then it was too late.

Our first few months in South Dakota we used to drive hours just to try a new Chinese restaurant. Sixty-five miles to Sioux Falls, 130 miles round-trip, just because he saw an ad in the...

When I arrived home from schooleach day on the bus, I was in no mood to talk to my parents. My mother would ask, “How was school today? What did you do today? What did you learn?” And I’d reply angrily, “Leave me alone!” or “Nothing!” or “What are you always asking me that for?”

When my father got home from work, he asked the same questions. I couldn’t stand it. Sometimes I would grow angry first, sometimes he would, but in the end it didn’t matter how they began, because our fights always ended the same way. He...

I thought I could make upfor my sins by going to confession with my mother before Christmas. My mother loved everything to do with going to church, including confession. It was like a trip to the dentist, that same clean, sparkling feeling afterward, a shiny, unstained soul—until the next sin. I wanted that feeling again. I wanted to feel clean.

While my father and brother stayed at home, my mother drove us in her Jeep across the bumpy, snow-packed roads to the Newman Center. She was very happy. My mother’s soul was always at peace when she went...

As if winter hadn’t been bad enough, spring arrived. All at once the snow melted and the fields turned to mud. Thick, stinky, sticky mud that coated my shoes like red paint, that splattered from the tires, that ran like a river through the ditches and the gutters and puddled on the sidewalks. Everywhere mud.

My father began to complain constantly. I think he had imagined living in the country like a Confucian scholar. Occasionally he might look up from his books and, from the comfort of his study, stare out the window and contemplate nature. He had not imagined...

That June, my father left for Harvardto attend a summer institute for university administrators, as he’d originally planned to do before his resignation, and the rest of us stayed on the farm. At first, we were all optimistic. My mother was confident that my father would find a new job soon, and this time, he promised, it would be in a warmer climate.

I was close to ecstatic. We would be leaving, I knew, in one year’s time. Suddenly my perspective changed. I no longer dreaded each new day. Instead I felt as though I were a journalist or...

We packed up the entire housethe summer I turned fourteen, preparing to leave as soon as one of my parents had a firm job offer. My father had several leads in Oregon and Texas, and my mother had an interview in California. My parents were nervous, they jumped at loud noises, they lost their tempers easily, they grew quite thin and yet still refused to eat supper, picking at the food with their forks.

For his part, my brother cried when he thought about leaving all his animals, which now included two Holsteins. He knew there was no way...

By midsummer we’d packed upeverything in the house and decided to move to northern California, where my mother had a job interview. My father had not as yet had any firm job offers, but he was not yet panicked. My mother was feeling a little nervous about her interview, which would represent her first full-time return to the job market since my brother and I were born, but my father encouraged her, reminding her of the powerful career she’d built before they were married. She was still young and good-looking—”Beautiful!” he said. “Like a movie star!” She had...

Years later, after I’d left home, I used to joke with my brother that if our parents had only seenDeliveranceinstead ofIt’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, our lives would have been entirely different. Looking back, I could see the signs that said “Don’t move to this place!” as clearly as if I were reading yesterday’s newspaper. Unfortunately, in 1979, on the cusp of a supposedly bright new decade, my father was as naive as most New Yorkers about the middle of the country, the so-called heartland, the place where small-town values still lived on. But what...

Then came high school.

The violence of the high school was legendary in our town, and starting in eighth grade my brother and some of his friends took up weight lifting in preparation. They felt that a year of concentrated effort might give them the edge they would need to survive freshman year. If a boy went down too easily in ninth grade—no matter the odds, five on one, ten on one—he would hardly make it through the rest of high school. The key was to be able to put up a good fight.

My mother had assured...

My father returned from Houstonone day to find my brother and me lifting weights in the basement. The metal clanked as we heaved long bars with colored disks on either end above our chests, grunting and sweating. My father stood in the doorway to what had been the ping-pong room before we had turned it into the “weight room,” and watched us for quite some time, but we didn’t notice him there. Finally, he could stand it no more.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I was still counting, breathless, unable to answer yet, “… five, six, seven …”...

Everyone has a moral line in the sandthat cannot be crossed. For my parents it was hearth and home. They weren’t going to give up their house. Both of them had led nomadic childhoods, for different reasons but with the same result: they weren’t going to lose their South Dakota farm without a fight. One afternoon my mother and I were shopping in the Piggly Wiggly, when a cart rounded the corner and the wife of one of the other vice presidents came into view. She looked startled to see us, and for a second her face flushed, her...

When I was sixteen, my father left the Texas job and took a new position in Chicago, working as a consultant for a historically African American educational foundation. He helped them raise funds, recruit members, organize conferences and workshops, network and expand. The new job didn’t pay as well as the old one, but he’d grown weary of Texas. Sometimes working in Chicago made him a happier person, and sometimes it only reminded him of all the reasons he hated our town in South Dakota. When he came home, he yelled constantly at my brother and me, but mostly at...

When I was an adultand had moved away from home, we used to argue about South Dakota, my father and I.

“People were racist against Asians,” I’d say.

“That’s not true. There’s no racism against Chinese in America today. Look at all the successful and rich Chinese in this country!”

“What about us? What about our dogs? People killed them in the driveway!”

“The hunters mistook them for pheasants. They didn’t know it was our house. It was a long driveway.”

“It wasn’tthatlong!”

But always I’d return to the time some boys had tried to kill my...

One night I heard my brother’s motorcycleracing up the driveway, spewing gravel. It was late, I should have been in bed asleep, but I had insomnia and was always awake now. My father was gone to Chicago or there’d have been hell to pay, he’d shout at Jeff for coming home at this hour. But he was gone, so my brother came to my room and stood outside my door.

“You awake?” he whispered. Maybe he didn’t even have to say the words. I sensed his presence, got up from my bed, and came into his room.

“I thought...

By the time I was seventeen, I had fallen into despair. I was only a year away from college, a year away from escaping, but I was so tired. I kept a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol in my dresser drawer. My way out, I called it. If things got any worse, I planned to take them all and kill myself. At the time, I didn’t think practically about backup plans, what to do if I started throwing up the Tylenol, for example. I didn’t think about the possibility of surviving and having to live with severe liver damage. When you’re...

It was China that changed my lifeand gave me the perspective I needed to regain my confidence.

After I graduated from high school, my father and I took a trip to China for a family reunion. For him it was an emotionally taxing experience, particularly when he discovered that his mother’s family was now living in poverty. He remembered his uncles and their children as they had lived before the 1949 revolution—as wealthy physicians with refined tastes. Now they were living in a crowded Beijing apartment with bare walls, rickety wooden furniture, a lone electric fan whirring in...

Once I had left home at age eighteen, I did not come home for Thanksgiving, although I did return for Christmas, when the dorms closed and all students were forced to leave campus. At home, I worked on the farm again and in my mother’s photography studio, but after my freshman year I also made sure that I applied for summer jobs and internships so that I wouldn’t have to come home for more than a few weeks. I went on two study-abroad programs and did not return for any holidays while I was out of the country. I lived...

It seems ridiculous now, the fear Americans in the 1980s and early ’90s used to have of the Japanese. I remember Yoshi Hattori, the Japanese high school exchange student who was shot to death in Louisiana when he knocked on the wrong door while looking for a Halloween party. And the best-seller,Rising Sun. Japanese businessmen weren’t content to wage war economically on America, they wanted our white women, too—for kinky sex and murder. Then there was poor Vincent Chin, the Chinese American engineer who was mistaken for a Japanese and beaten to death by an unemployed auto worker...

As I began writing our story, I found myself unexpectedly living at midlife with my father, and in Wyoming. I had left my snug apartment in San Francisco (right on the 1-California line, exactly halfway between the two Chinatowns, twenty minutes in four directions to twenty-two movie screens, a ten-minute walk to two Thai restaurants and one Korean barbecue joint). But my father—a widower now—had injured himself, and so I dropped everything to take care of him while he underwent physical therapy.

It was because of my mother’s trees that he was now in this predicament. Russian olives,...