About the Author
Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya was born in the rural village of Pastura, New Mexico, to Martin and Rafaelita Anaya as the fifth of seven children. He also had three half-siblings from his parents� previous marriages. At a young age, his family moved to Santa Rosa, New Mexico. When he was a teenager, his family moved again, this time to Albuquerque, where Anaya graduated from high school in 1956. He attended grammar school for two years and dropped out before finishing, but he graduated from the University of New Mexico a few years later. Anaya worked as a public school teacher in Albuquerque from 1963 to 1970. During that period, he married Patricia Lawless. Afterward, he worked as the director of counseling for the University of Albuquerque for two years before accepting a position as an associate professor at the University of New Mexico. When Anaya was a freshman in college, he began writing poetry and novels. His wife encouraged him to pursue his literary endeavors, and over a period of seven years, he completed his first novel entitled, Bless Me Ultima. East Coast publishing houses rejected the novel repeatedly. Finally, in 1972, a group of Chicano publishers accepted his book. Bless Me, Ultima went on to win the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol award and is now considered a classic Chicano work.

About this Book
In her second novel, Law-Yone has created another Asian female protagonist ravaged by the inhumanity of a cruel and crazy world dominated by impotent old men. The heroine grows up in the small, insular town of Irrawaddy and dreams of one day making it in the big wide world. Her only claim to fame is her knack for the Tango, which gets her the attention of the then-incubating strongman of the country, the Supremo. Her marriage and her life are irrevocably lost when she is kidnapped by an ethnic guerrilla group fighting for independence and the Supremo refuses to bail her out. Even though the novel is set in an imaginary country called Daya, the almost surreal mixture of East and West, the totalitarian tendencies, the ethnic strife, and the general lack of sense in daily life aptly suggest a number of South Asian countries.