Background Gary Soto was born on April 12, 1952, in the farming community of Fresno, California, to Mexican-American parents. In his essay "Being Mean" he talks of how his father and grandfather worked at the Sun Maid Raisin Factory and his mother peeled potatoes at Reddispud. Soto'...

As the train pulled up to the station in Xin He, I marveled at the changes that a couple of years had wrought in Xin Jiang. It was the summer of 1999 and I had just graduated from High School. I was on a trip with my mother to Xin Jiang, the northwestern-est province in China, to visit friends an...

Humans are social creatures by nature; they have a need or requirement to socialize with others. According to the Cambridge University Press, the definition of socialize, for the purposes of people or animals, "is to train them to behave in a way that others in the group think is suitable"...