Lensey Namioka née Chao 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.
Life
Childhood
Born as Lensey Chao in Beijing, China, the daughter of linguistYuenren Chao and physicianBuwei 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 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.
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. The experience inspired her to learn more about the Samurai. This study culminated in The Samurai and the Long-nosed Devils, which was published in 1976. Namioka expanded this book into a whole series of books about samurai in sixteenth-century Japan. Namioka has also written a series of books about a Chinese American family named Yang, and several books about young women and girls facing difficult choices, as well as travel books about Japan and China.
Namioka has won many awards for her work. For instance,Ties That Bind, Ties That Break was named one of the American Library Association's 10 Best Books for Young People, and also won the California Young Reader Medal and the Washington State Governor's Writers Award. She also won the Washington State Governor's Writers Award in 1990 for Island of Ogres.
Origin of her first name
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 cataloguing all of the phonemes used in Chinese he noted that there were two syllables which were possible in the Chinese language, but which were used in no Chinese words. These syllables could be written in English as "len" and "sey." His third daughter was born soon after, so he named her "Lensey."
