About the author
Mike Millard, a veteran journalist with roots in the Pacific Northwest who has written and edited for newspapers, magazines, wire agencies and websites, worked in Asia for more than two decades and has traveled widely in Europe as well. After a tour in the Navy during the Vietnam War era, he lived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, went to rock'n'roll shows and attended City College before obtaining a degree from the University of Oregon and another from Syracuse University in New York state. In his early years he worked as a logger, an oilfield roughneck, a farmhand, a miner and a janitor in a Las Vegas church with beautiful stained-glass windows. While living in Japan and Singapore, Millard immersed himself in the traditional cultures of the East and their burgeoning economies as well, wrote two mostly forgotten books and made some lifelong friends. He now lives in the Seattle area, where the local deer enjoy grazing on a flourishing garden he tends with his wife, Miwa. Their son, Emerson, is a software engineer.