![]() ![]() Standing in front of 636 Bush St., near Chinatown, they peer up to the fifth floor, where she once lived. It's an overcast day when Yang drives up from Carmel with her best friend, the writer Allston James. "But when Jewel, the manager sees us, she says, 'Hmm, a little girl, huh? Well, just as long as she is quiet and doesn't jump up and down and disturb the folks down below. ![]() "The rules say no children in the building," Yang writes. But it is also based on the real story of the Yangs' first years in America, in a skinny green apartment building on Bush Street that she remembers stuck out in a block of gray buildings like "a lime Popsicle." ![]() "Hannah" is the story of every immigrant to these shores. Now, a decade after she first introduced readers to a faraway landscape peopled by the likes of Old Lady Lu, the healing witch, and Uncle Yu, the Yang family servant with big front teeth and a big, pancake face, Yang brings her family story home, to San Francisco, in "Hannah Is My Name." Largely discovered by writer Amy Tan, who was left "gasping and sighing" over "Baba" (full title: "Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father's Shoulders"), Yang was also heralded by Maxine Hong Kingston as "our Isaac Bashevis Singer and Marc Chagall." Yang later wrote a sequel, "The Odyssey of a Manchurian." "Baba," which means father in Mandarin, was the title of her first book in 1994, a seamlessly woven rendering in words and brilliant watercolors of the life story of her dad, Joseph Yang, in the tumultuous China of the 1930s and 1940s. ![]()
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