I left my native Indonesia to attend convent school in England. There, when I was about ten or eleven, I started writing stories in collaboration with my best friend. The two of us continued turning out story after story for three or four years.
          For a very long time after I grew up, I did not write anything. I have been living in America, busy working for a living, getting married and divorced and raising three children. After my youngest child went off to college, I wrote a novel that even I knew was bad. So I took some creative writing courses at City College of San Francisco.  One thing led to another, and a few years later, I found myself graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1991 with a degree in English (BA).  Only in the last five years have I been able to dedicate the large amounts of time and energy my writing seems to demand. Frankly, it tends to take over my life, but in return, it has helped me to rediscover the joy this kind of work brings to me.