Family Background: My father's parents married in Japan and immigrated in the early 1920s to the United States, where they became tenant farmers near Costa Mesa, California. My paternal grandfather was killed in a tractor accident when my father was a little boy. My father helped pick celery on the farm and did very little schoolwork. Today he says, "When I was fifteen I had about a fourth grade education." Two of my uncles on my father's side died fighting for Japan in World War II. My father never met them. Meanwhile my father served with the U.S. Military Intelligence Service. He met my third paternal uncle when he (my father) was stationed in Japan after the war.

My mother and her mother were born in Southern California. The family moved to Hawaii in the 1930s. My maternal grandfather, who was a graphic artist, was an orphan and nobody knows where he came from. He drowned off the coast of Hawaii when my mother was seven. My mother says his last words to her were, "Be good." Her mother supported the family as a waitress in Hawaii before moving to Chicago. I have six aunts and uncles on my mother's side. My youngest uncle is just a year older than me!

I was born in Chicago in 1956. We moved to Georgia, where my father found a job as a chicken sexer. Then when I was about two, he found a chicken-sexing job in Arkansas, where we lived until I was almost nine.

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