Meet The Author: Gus Lee

Gus Lee, one-time attorney, now full-time writer, began his first book in 1989 as a private memoir. “My daughter asked me to write a family journal and it turned out to be China Boy,” he explained in an interview. Not only was the work Lee’s first novel, but it was also the first time he had ever attempted fiction writing. “I just wrote this book. For me, it was a miracle,” he recalled. Using a favorite analogy, Lee compared his literary success to baseball: “Say you always wanted to bat .300, but had never played a game before. You’re at the ballpark and they let you hit. Everything they pitch, you hit, and you didn’t even know you could hit before. That’s the way I feel about writing. I never had any literary training, did any workshops. China Boy just happened.”

The semi-autobiographical China Boy introduced audiences to Kai Ting, the American-born son of transplanted Chinese…