"Asian Americans will always be on the borderline between two cultures, never fully accepted by one or the other," says Laurence Yep, award-winning writer for children and adults. He's clear about the dilemma and quick to find the advantage. "You lose a certain amount in true belonging. On the other hand, because you learn to look at everything with two sets of eyes, you develop a certain flexibility and nimbleness of mind and a sensitive seeing that makes for the basis of good writing."

Yep's work and his comments continually show his ability to see with a prismatic eye. He's an accomplished playwright, a researcher and collector of folk tales, a novelist who's written historical, fantasy, and SF for children and even Star Trek books for adults. He lectures around the country and is a professor of creative writing at Berkeley. He pours one vision into another, blending his disparate visions into a special brand of storytelling.

Yep has just won a second Newbery honor award for Dragon's Gate (HarperCollins, $15.00; ages 11 and up), the story of Otter who's pampered and protected by his adoptive parents during the mid- nineteenth century reign of the Manchu's in China. Like many, Otter idolizes his Uncle Foxfire, a village hero who dreams of freeing China from Manchu tyranny. Otter wishes desperately to go with his uncle to earn monies in the Land of the Golden Mountain. Once there Otter's dreams end and a nightmare begins.

Yep began Dragon's Gate twenty years ago, at the same time as he began his first Newbery Honor book, Dragonwings (HarperCollins, $3.95; ages 11 and up) but it has taken twenty years to write. Yep, who's amazed by how many of his Chinese American students do not know their own history, realizes it's taken me this long to really understand the shape of Chinese American history."

Yep's novels are most often conflict driven, but generally have a great deal of hope. He wonders if that wasn't another reason Dragon's Gate took so long to write. "There was no way to write optimistically about a situation in which people are basically enslaved."

Otter, Dragon's Gate 's main character, is a spoiled, narrow-visioned boy who earns his hero status the hard way by chiseling a railroad path through the Sierra Nevada mountains. Like many of Yep's other characters, Otter often finds himself in an alien world.

Yep grew up reading SF books about alien worlds. "I never bothered to read Homer Price , I couldn't get past the first chapter where every kid had a bicycle and everyone left their front door unlocked. Growing up in a Black neighborhood and going to Chinatown, Homer Price seemed like a fantasy book to me. In fantasy and science fiction a child is taken from an everyday world, brought to a strange new world, learning a strange new language and customs. That was something I did every time I went to Chinatown from my neighborhood. Fantasy and SF ultimately talk about surviving and adapting. As an Asian-American I really had no models and SF let me talk about myself as an alien or an alienated hero and develop an emotional vocabulary that way."

Yep has developed part of this vocabulary from looking into the past. His published folk tale collections The Rainbow People (HarperCollins, $16.00) and The Tongues of Jade (HarperCollins, $14.95) have been lauded. "I found a collection of tales done in the forties by John Lee as a WPA project. Most of them wouldn't have worked for an American audience in their present form, so I retold them."

Yep's wife, Joanne Ryder, herself the author of twenty picture books, convinced him that some of the folk tales could stand on their own.

This year Yep published five shorter works of fiction, a rainbow of theme, period, and characters, many with a folk tale flavor. His novella for beginning novel readers, Ghost Fox (Scholastic, $13.95; ages 7-11) is a retelling of a 17th century Chinese tale of a young boy who is determined to outwit the ghosts who inhabit his mother's soul.

Scholastic also published The Boy Who Swallowed Snakes (Scholastic, $14.95; ages 4-8) an playful original picture book that has the feel of a folk tale. In it, Little Chou courageously swallows poisonous ku snakes and his pure heart keeps him from harm later suffered by a greedy man.

Yep goes through anywhere from fifty to one hundred stories before he finds one that has "all the right elements that say 'tell me' He understands why "some of these stories have been around for almost a couple millennia; there was a reason why they've worked for such a long period of time."

The Shell Woman and the King (Dial, $13.99; ages 5-9), a Chinese folktale illustrated by prize-winning Chinese painter, Yang Ming-Yi, comes from an 18th century collection. The story tells of Uncle Wu, an lonely fisherman marries a beautiful girl who can turn herself from shell to human and possesses the love and purity to undo a tyrant. The Man Who Tricked a Ghost (Bridgewater Books,$15.95; ages 5-9), is a Chinese ghost story from the 3rd century AD in which Sung, the hero, outsmarts a shape-shifting ghost by spitting on it. The Butterfly Boy , based on the writings of Chuang Tzu, a fourth century B.C. philosopher, tells of a boy who's appreciated by his village for his unique way of seeing. (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $16.00; ages 6-11)

Yep is presently working on two pictures books that come from his own life. "It's tricky trying to work from family memories, trying to find a story that would work and move other people." He's working on a book about his memory of lighting Chinese New Year's firecrackers and pretending he was making stars.

Another story focuses on his father's watch. "It was passed on to my father by his Irish godfather and even when he was picking fruit and needed the money he didn't pawn it. I still have it."

Yep has been stunned by the number of Asian-American books being published. He credits consciousness created by the multicultural year of the reader, "the trickle-down effect of Amy Tan", more Asian-Americans entering the humanities, and "the twenty-five years we've had to become self-aware and develop an emotional vocabulary."