Whitney, Phyllis A.

Phyllis A. (Ayame) Whitney was born to American parents in Yokohama in Japan, where her father worked for an export company. The family also lived in the Philippines for a while. When they moved to China, she was put in a missionary school by the Yangtze river. In 1918, after her father had died, she moved with her mother to the USA. Two years later, her mother died too, and that marked the start of a period with move after move for the teenager; by the time she was twenty, she had lived in four different countries and in a row of American states. The journeys too, and within, the USA have inspired Whitney in several of her books.