Stephen Ling's grandparents emigrated from China to Malaya (now Malaysia) in 1903 because the Malayan government was looking for the poorest of the poor in Fujian Province, China, to establish an "agricultural colony" in a remote corner in Malaya, primarily to grow rice to feed a rising population but more to curtail their importation of expensive rice from other Southeast Asian countries. He was born in Malaya and adopted by one of these families. They blamed the Japanese occupation for their life of poverty and servitude. He grew up with a mother who wanted him to be a farmer. Throughout his early teens, he fought against her because he suspected, early in his life, that there was something better awaiting him beyond the farm. Growing up Chinese is a book about his struggles against a culture or mother that endeavored to control and define his life and his future. Eventually, he obtained a scholarship to study in America. Crazy Americans focuses on his American dream and the few crazy Americans he met on board a cargo-cum-passenger ship from Singapore to Los Angeles. Eventually, he pursued journalism and economics at the University of Texas. The seven years he spent as a visiting professor in China would forever change his life and thinking. With This Is China (his sixth book), he wants to share his experiences in mainland China with anyone who has a desire to know and understand the lives and dreams of ordinary people in China in the twenty-first century. Prodigal Son (2020) is his first fiction about the impact of the new wealth on the modern youth in China. After the publication of Letter to Fellow Immigrants: A Memoir (one Chinese way to become an immigrant), he embarked on writing a book about the generation of men and women born in China between 1979 and 2015, the children of the one-child policy, titled Bonsai Kids because most parents have raised many of them like a gardener raises a prized bonsai tree. These children, especially those coming from middle-class families, are also labeled as little emperors and princesses because of the excessive attention they get from their parents and grandparents and the whole society because many of them are the only child of a family. Once, they became more popular than the beloved pandas in China. Stephen Ling lives in a country house outside Seattle because he loves the peace and quiet outside urban America. He grew up in a farm. He is now working on his second fiction, Living with a Stranger.