Extreme longevity is a mixed blessing — at best — “Why can’t I just take a pill?” my mother has pleaded over and over since she turned 100. “I don’t want to be here anymore.” It’s a perfectly reasonable question, with no good answer. And that’s just not fair. Not to our family, nor to anyone who’s simply had enough…

Barriers of language and immigration helped hide the truth about family left and lost in China for 80 years. — My father was his family’s gatekeeper. Born in Shanghai in 1912, the eldest of his biracial siblings, he was raised to straddle East and West. He kept the peace between his Chinese father and American mother. And as the one member of his family who corresponded with those he’d left…

Author of East-West novels and all sorts of nonfiction, ghostwriter, MFA advisor, former painter… and current photopainter! — Novels! If you love novels about Americans in Asia and Asians in America and the families that form between them, you may have read my fiction. In the 1990s I published two novels, Face and Cloud Mountain, based on my family’s mixed-race history and my examination of my own Chinese-American identity:

Wit, irony, and the imperial minister’s poignant gesture that helped forge my family —

The subconscious has its own way of saying goodbye My mother died one year ago today, yet she remains deeply present in my life — largely through our dreams together, which seem to be multiplying. Most of these nocturnal reunions skip into oblivion as soon as I wake. …

Stop waiting and whispering, and dance! — It was like something whispering at us to hurry, to stop wasting time, and I would like to have danced with you through the back door, out into the garden, down the street, over the line of the horizon. Oh, my dear. I thought we would have more time. …

An Interview with the founder of Questions Unasked — Some families are rich in natural storytellers who keep their clans’ oral histories alive. Most of us today, however, are too busy and distracted by modern life to sit and listen to our elders, and we often don’t realize what we’re missing until it’s too late. To help families prevent…

Yung Wing, my grandfather, and the seeds of revolution against the China’s last empire — In 1900 my grandfather Liu Chengyu became one of China’s first pro-democracy activists when he joined a student-organized plot to blow up an imperial armory near his home in Wuchang. The plot was exposed and several of my grandfather’s young collaborators were beheaded, while he escaped into exile. …