The Lost Garden by Laurence Yep

First published: 1991

Subjects: Adolescents, race and ethnicity, and writers

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The 1940’s to 1991

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: San Francisco, Brooklyn, West Virginia, Ohio, and Milwaukee

Principal Personages:

• Laurence Yep, a Chinese American who searches for his cultural identity through writing
• Thomas Yep, his hardworking, Chinese-born father, who owns a grocery store
• Franche Yep, his American-born mother
• Spike Yep, his athletic older brother
• Marie Lee, his tough maternal grandmother, whose “Chineseness” greatly affects Laurence’s writing
• Joanne Rider, his wife, a children’s picture book writer who encourages Laurence to write children’s books
• Father Becker, the English teacher who inspired Laurence’s desire to publish his writing

Form and Content

In The Lost Garden, Laurence Yep describes how he searched for his identity while caught between two cultures and seemingly rejected by both. The book has four distinct sections: The first describes his family and family life, the second describes his neighborhood and its people, the third describes the alienation that he encountered, and the fourth describes how straddling two cultures served him well in his career as a writer. In the middle of the book, the author includes photographs of himself, his family, and their grocery store.

Yep’s father, Tom, came to the United States from Kwangtung, China, at the age of ten. Yep’s mother was born in Ohio and reared in West Virginia, where his maternal grandparents owned a laundry. When his mother was about ten years old, the family relocated to San Francisco. Yep’s parents met at high school.

Yep’s brother Spike was ten years older and athletic; in fact, everyone in the family was athletic except for the author. Yep often felt like a changeling, wondering how he wound up being born into his family. At the end of World War II, his father bought a small corner grocery store, named La Conquista. Their home, Pearl Apartments, was on the top floor of the grocery store. He and his brother had to help set up the stock, price the inventory, and wait on the customers. As much as Yep hated the endless chores, the habit of establishing a daily routine served him well later when he became a writer. He came into contact with numerous ordinary people while working in the grocery store: Jimmy the Italian truck driver, Saul the junk man, Mr. Vincent the mortician, and Mo-mo the hulking unofficial guardian angel who protected La Conquista from gangsters are brought to life in The Lost Garden by Yep’s strong characterizations.

When Yep was a child, he did not want to be Chinese: “It took me years to realize that I was Chinese whether I wanted to be or not.” He also could not escape Chinese culture because of his grandmother, Marie Lee, who instilled in him a sense of “Chineseness.”

Reading was always a part of the family’s activities. During Yep’s asthma attacks, his mother would always read to him while waiting for the doctor. His favorites were L. Frank Baum’s Oz books and Andre Norton’s science fiction because children are taken out of their everyday world and travel to new lands where they must learn new customs and adjust to new people.

Yep attended Catholic school, where he had an imaginative chemistry teacher and an excellent English teacher. It was a difficult decision for him to choose between a chemistry major or journalism major, but his teachers suggested that he apply to the college of journalism at Marquette University. There he met Joanne Ryder, his future wife, and she introduced him to the classics of children’s literature, including A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books. After he failed a journalism course, Yep realized that he had more talent for writing fiction than fact.

Critical Context

The Lost Garden reveals the prolific, award-winning author’s source for his books dealing with Chinese American experiences. Readers find a believable portrait of the author as a sensitive, imaginative child, struggling to belong and to find his cultural identity.

Yep has won numerous awards, among them the Children’s Book Award, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. Dragonwings was named a Newbery Honor Book; it is based on a newspaper clipping about a Chinese immigrant who invented a successful flying machine a few years after the Wright Brothers. This book is especially strong in its coverage of Chinese traditions and beliefs. Child of the Owl won a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Award. Yep set the story in a more contemporary Chinatown, where a young Chinese American girl discovers her heritage through Chinese folklore and history. As autobiographical fiction, Yep’s Sea Glass deals with conflict between generations. Star Fisher is about a Chinese family overcoming prejudice in West Virginia during the late 1920’s. All of Yep’s books cover themes such as poverty, racial discrimination, and loss of identity. In Dragon’s Gate (1993), which was also named a Newbery Honor Book, a boy in 1867 China accidentally kills a Manchu and is sent to America to join his father, who is helping build a tunnel for the transcontinental railroad through the Sierra Nevada Mountains; some of the same characters also appeared in The Serpent’s Children (1984) and Mountain Light (1985).

Many of Yep’s fantasy and science-fiction novels explore the theme of alienation, such as Sweetwater (1973) and Dragon of the Lost Sea (1982). Other genres in which Yep writes include the folktale, mystery, and horror story.