A great deal of his work involves characters feeling alienated or not fitting into their environment, something Yep has said he struggled with since childhood: "I was too American to fit into Chinatown, and too Chinese to fit in anywhere else." ĭuring his writing career, Yep also taught creative writing and Asian-American studies at the University of California at Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara. Growing up, Yep often felt torn between mainstream American culture and his Chinese roots, a theme he has often written about. He later earned a PhD in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. After two years at Marquette, Yep transferred to UC Santa Cruz where he earned a BA in 1970. The result was his first science fiction novel for teens entitled Sweetwater, published by Harper & Row in 1973. She introduced him to children's literature and later encouraged him to write a book for children while she was working at Harper & Row. There he became friends with a literary magazine editor, Joanne Ryder. His decision to become a writer did not come until he entered college at Marquette University. This experience inspired Yep to first consider what a career in writing might be like, even though he had always been fascinated with machines and wanted to become a chemist. His English teacher, a Jesuit priest, motivated him to submit his story to magazines until it got published if he wanted to get an A grade. Yep published his first story in a science fiction magazine at the age of 18 while still in high school. Ignatius College Preparatory, he also became interested in literature and creative writing. Although he had always been interested in science, at St. Not until high school when Yep attended a less segregated Catholic school did he confront white American culture in person, having grown up among Black and Chinese kids.
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He spent his early childhood commuting from his neighborhood to a Catholic school in Chinatown for Chinese children, where he was often made fun of by the mostly bilingual students for only knowing how to speak English. Yep was named by his older brother Thomas, who had just been studying the biography of Saint Lawrence for school. Yep grew up working in the family grocery store, where he recalls learning early on "how to observe and listen to people, how to relate to others. After struggling through the Great Depression, Yep's family moved to a multicultural but predominantly African American neighborhood. His mother was a second-generation Chinese American, was born in Ohio and raised in West Virginia where her family ran a Chinese laundry.
His father was a first-generation American born in China who had moved to San Francisco as a boy and grown up with an Irish friend in his neighborhood. Yep was born in San Francisco, California, in Chinatown to Thomas (Gim Lew) Yep and Franche Lee Yep.
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