Concept

Lensey Namioka

Résumé
Lensey Namioka () ( or ; born June 14, 1929) is a Chinese-born American writer of books for young adults and children. She writes about China and Chinese American families, as well as Japan, her husband's native country. She was born as Lensey Chao in Beijing, the daughter of linguist Yuenren Chao and physician Buwei Yang Chao. The family moved frequently in China. In 1937, the Chaos were living in Nanjing, and fled westward in the face of the Japanese invasion. They eventually made their way to Hawaii, then to Cambridge, Massachusetts. When she moved to the United States from China at age of nine, Lensey Chao initially knew no English. Because it used the same numerals regardless of languages, math seemed easier to her than other school subjects. Lensey Chao attended Radcliffe College and the University of California at Berkeley, where her father was a professor of Asian Studies, to study mathematics. Here she met and married Isaac Namioka, a fellow graduate student who was born in Japan. Namioka ended up earning a bachelor's and a master's degree in math. Lensey Namioka is the only person known to have the first name "Lensey". Her name has an especially unusual property for a Chinese person born in China: there are no Chinese characters to represent it. When Lensey's father was cataloging all of the phonemes used in Chinese, he noted that there were two syllables that were possible in the Chinese language, but which were used in no Chinese words. These syllables could be written in Gwoyeu Romatzyh as "len" and "sey." His third daughter was born soon after, so he named her "Lensey." Namioka's first love has been reading and writing adventure stories. As a child, she read Chinese martial arts novels, as well as Sherlock Holmes stories and The Three Musketeers. At the age of eight, she wrote her first book on pieces of scrap paper that she sewed together with thread. It was about a woman warrior called the Princess with a Bamboo Sword. In the 1970s, on a visit to Japan, Namioka visited Namioka Castle.
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