Carol Chen
| Camden, Maine
My mother raised our family in a warm and cozy world—straight-laced, middle-class, sheltered. This could have meant death from boredom but for my father, a nutty, inquisitive Chinese radiologist, who didn’t know the word no. So my youth ran the gamut from convent school uniforms and Ursuline nuns to a mad-scientist father, who baked .... more
My mother raised our family in a warm and cozy world—straight-laced, middle-class, sheltered. This could have meant death from boredom but for my father, a nutty, inquisitive Chinese radiologist, who didn’t know the word no. So my youth ran the gamut from convent school uniforms and Ursuline nuns to a mad-scientist father, who baked circuit board transistors in our home oven.
When it came time for college, I wanted to attend a school in Mexico. No one blanched; no one said no. But Dad suggested I apply to Stanford University because he had read the students sun-bathed topless on the clay-tile roofs! I did end up graduating from Stanford and later Georgetown University Law Center, with a stint in the book-publishing world in between. Harper & Row drafted me to help Allen Ginsberg, someone I had vaguely heard of, pull together his COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1980.
Now, after thirty years as a country lawyer and a marriage that lasted against all odds, I am very thankful for the freedom to write. Two of my author heroes are P. G. Wodehouse and Colin Dexter. If only I could channel them both when putting mystery and laughter on paper. We shall see!
