How Let's Send Him To America came to be…
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I was playing a lot of tennis and everything was great until I signed up for a Tae Kwon Do class. That’s when I discovered that tennis shortens your hamstrings explaining why I had such lousy stretch. Sadly, Tae Kwon Do is all about high kicks. I spent a year in agonizing yoga classes before I could kick someone my size in the head. I had a long list of people whose heads needed kicking.
A girl joined our class and on the first day I was prepared to snicker as she went through the agony of stretching like all beginning students do. Without warming up, she bent down and did the splits. I talked to her after class. She’d been studying ballet since the age of four.
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When I joked about a group of people in tights jumping around she grabbed me by the black belt and dragged me to a ballet and said… “see?” I was stunned. I had a massive case of stretch envy, but more importantly, I noticed that a lot of their balletic movements were similar to the kicks and spins I was clumsily trying to learn in my martial arts classes. I got the idea that I wanted to write a musical that combined martial arts and ballet. I dropped the musical part and began casting about for a story and this novel emerged.
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I discovered that thousands and thousands of Chinese men were brought here as laborers and were treated horrifically. I do well when motivated by guilt. Having spent most of my life as a university professor, I like to do research, and what I discovered shocked and embarrassed me. In addition to being a professor, I also moonlight as a Clinical Psychologist. This helps me understand the guilt I feel reading about how badly we treated the many thousands of Chinese workers left here after we no longer needed them as cheap labor.
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This is the 24th book I’ve had published. Although I enjoyed writing them all, I’ve never felt the sense of purpose I experienced with this one. As a research psychologist, I’ve learned that people remember information in stories better than from lectures with a lot of facts…to this end I wove a story around this shameful period of our history to have greater impact. If it works, you’ll enjoy the story and share in the feeling that a substantial wrong was, and in too many cases, is still being done.