I began my writing career at the age of 9, when I was in charge of putting my younger sister to bed and telling her bedtime stories. I made up an ongoing narrative which she, at the age of 3, loved. I never read books. This gave me the experience of innovation and improvisation. By the age of 10, I won the “What Democracy Means to Me” essay contest at St. Patrick’s School in Miami Beach. My father, a renowned lawyer, taught me how to look up material in the Encyclopedia Britannica  because he had bought the encyclopedia for our house. This experience and the years of working in his law office in the summers during high school and college taught me the invaluable skill of research, of where to find archives and how to use them. I graduated magna cum laude from Briarcliff College. I had a professor who had taught in Vietnam for a year, so I was an early researcher for his anti-Vietnam work. and at Columbia University in the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture, I chose as my major Chinese history with a minor in Japanese History. I won a Fulbright Fellowship for the study of advanced Chines, where I studied newspaper Chinese. I began to work for an anti-war magazine, Viet Report, and wrote a cover story on the Gulf of Tonkin incident. I began to speak at teach-ins. At Columbia, Hannah Arendt, the historian and philosopher, came up to me and congratulated me on my speech and on my work. As I was a student and she was a famous World War II historian, this experience had the effect of encouraging me in my work. After graduating from the Columbia program, I began to freelance in New York. My first freelance pieces were for the Village Voice.  I wrote a profile piece about the American playwright Charles Ludlam, which he liked better than the profile that was done about him in The New Yorker. I took very seriously my mission of explaining China to the West. I wrote two books, both of them on Chinese language for Westerners. I felt that if Westerners could look at the language and make sense of it, they would have more understanding of the way Chinese think. My first book was for Harper Collins and sold well and went through several editions. My second book was for Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and was entitled Chinese Writing: An Introduction. I was 27 years old. I had three photographers working for me taking pictures of the calligraphy collection of the modern Chinese painting master C. C. Wang. He later donated his collection to the Metropolitan Museum to form the basis of their Song and Yuan collections.  He subsequently had a wing of the Met dedicated to him. The book won an American Library Association Notable Book Award and went through several editions. These books are still popular and are read today. I had been advised by my teacher of Chinese history, that if I wanted to make a name for myself, I should write about the Mongol Empire. The Chinese considered it a Dark Age, which it most decidedly was not. I met an important literary agent at the Community of Writers in California, who encouraged me to write about the Mongol Empire. It was important to global history and it was little known and little understood. So began my years of independent scholarship, fu research and writing. My freelance writing career began. For four years, I wrote a column on the historical backdrop to current events for the Sunday opinion section of the Orlando Sentinel. The columns ran on the Knight-Ridder wire and were featured in the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. My journalism has been published in the New York Times and Times Book Review, the Sunday magazines of the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and San Jose Mercury-News. She has been published in China News Digest, a worldwide computer based news service published in 43 countries. I reviewed the new software for Chinese and Japanese language learning and wrote a cover piece, china.com, on China and the Internet for The National Interest, a foreign policy magazine. I married and continued postgraduate work at UC Berkeley and Mills College. I produced television, five-minute features on the arts for Weekend Extra, a magazine show on KRON-TV, San Francisco's ABC affiliate. I interviewed the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. He had forgotten he was to do an interview and was teaching a class. He told me he was going to do the interview anyway and we rolled.  My pieces were cut into a ninety-minute special and aired on KRON after their original airing. In 1980, Dianne Feinstein, then Mayor of San Francisco, invited to be a member of a Cultural Delegation to the People's Republic of China. I worked on arts exchange in music, painting and dance.   I divorced and moved back to Florida where I worked with record producer Bob Greenlee, founder of King Snake Records, and created the script for a documentary film about swamp blues entitled Scratch My Back. The film went unproduced for financial reasons, but featured the New Orleans bluesman Kenny Neal. It was the story of two generations in a black musical family. Kenny is currently thinking about producing the film. I continue to review important books on the Mongol Empire, featured on my blog on my author website and referred to in my Twitter feed. My social media are currently undergoing a re-design.. I have finally completed the Silk Road Series: The Heirs of Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan). The books are ready for publication. Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde: The Mongol Khans Conquer Russia Princess Sorghagtani: The Woman Who Changed Global History Taifun: Khubilai Khan Invades Japan By Sea I am submitting screenplays based on the narrative histories.  The success of the television series Shogun shows that global audiences like epic historical stories about Asia when the Asian culture has an authentic representation. The Mongol Empire represents the first era of global history, when the roads opened, and the monopoly on trade and banking of the Muslim world was broken. Europe got into the China trade. Capital flowed into Europe and science was reborn. This was the beginning of the rise of the West. It is an important story and it has not been told. I have just returned from Venice, where I was invited to lecture on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo's death. The subject of my lecture was one of my standalone stories, Cobalt Blue: Marco Polo in Dadu.  Historical fiction sometimes brings history alive more vividly than history, and this was the way I chose to tell a little known period in the life of Marco Polo, when he was envoy and spy for the Great Khan, charged with making the conquest of Southern Song and the reunification of China for the first time in 400 years, benevolent and fair, the incorporation of a long-lost brother rather than a triumphant conquest. But the empire was cracking up and so was the Great Khan. He was turning into the King Lear of Asia. I have written the standalone stories at the suggestion of an eminent scholar who told me that he wanted companion texts to assign to his students in global history classes, because these classes were the students' first encounter with Asia. So I was back to telling stories to young people, which is where my career began. I found it liberating and exciting. It has been the job of my life to explain Asia to the West.