I was born in the picturesque city of Chiayi on the west coast half way between the northern and southern tips of Taiwan. As a teenager I survived the first 10 years of the somewhat draconian Taiwanese K12 education system. My family and I then followed the footsteps of my father, who had earlier come to the States for graduate school. We lived a short time in a rental townhouse in Mt. Clemens, a suburb about an hour drive north of Detroit, before moving permanently to a small rambler nearby. With a baby brother as a new addition to our brood, the place was way too crowded for the six of us. But we managed. Soon I’d go off to college, spent a brief stint at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana for my Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, and eventually a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
My personal story isn’t all that different from those of many immigrants to America. If there were anything to set mine apart a tiny bit, it would be my penchant for locking myself in a room and hacking away at really long stories — tales either based on my personal experience after spending near a decade in the ivory tower or something straight out of figments of my imagination. The interested reader may find my first book, Blinded by the Light, a science fiction novel about a Homeland Security agent in hot pursuit of a terrorist hell-bent on triggering an apocalypse, and my new book The Huron’s Bend about two star-crossed lovers bound by their shared passion for language.
