Grant and Tammy have been married since 1998 and they are the proud parents of Natalie, Sean, and their dog Jirachi.  They met in college and are both graduates of the University of California, Berkeley. 

In 2008, the week before Thanksgiving, their seven year old daughter Natalie was diagnosed with AML, a rare form of leukemia. Natalie passed away in December 2011.

As they went through years of grieving, they wrote a book titled “The Way of Fishing and Love.” Their book was a way to communicate with each other during a difficult period of sadness, despair, and confusion. It started with a love letter from Grant to Tammy and developed into a unique narrative of how fishing and love brought together their different approaches to grief.

Grant’s more reserved Japanese-American traditions clash frequently with Tammy’s emotional Chinese aesthetics but that doesn’t stop them from writing together or working at loving each other.