I was a student at Berkeley,
I think I was 19 years old,
and I decided that I really wanted to be a novelist.
No professor,
no high school teacher had ever mentioned the name of an Asian American writer,
let alone assign a book for us to read or even a short story.
And so there I was, the only Asian American writer I knew.
And I wasn't very good and I was unpublished.
So there you go.
I knew that at least Chinese Americans
have been in the country at that time for 150 years.
And I thought, somebody wrote a poem.
You know, somebody wrote a story.
We built the railroad.
Somebody wrote something.
And I started looking.
The books were not hard to find.
Four of my friends and I,
we edited to the first trade anthology
of Asian American literature, and published it in 1974.
Some of the things that I tell my students or my young writers,
I say it's not so much sort of learning about technique.
It's more about making sure that you're writing about belief.
You know, what do you believe in?
You want to be able to say to yourself, you know,
that's exactly what I meant to say in my heart and in my mind.
Almost all the writers who are publishing today, and getting noticed,
all talk about other writers that came before them,
their own literary history is really important to them.
And the UW Press has, you know, really the largest catalog
of Asian American literature of any publisher in the U.S.
When I was chair of the English department,
we had an extremely conservative English professor in our ranks.
I was always kind of butting heads with him.
And one day he mentioned to me in a faculty meeting,
he said, I never thought I'd see the day when multicultural literature
would be part of the American literature canon.
And I said to him, finally, we agree on something.
I never thought I'd see the day either.
But here we are.