John Jenkins Espey (15 January 1913 – 26 September 2000) was a novelist, memoirist and literary scholar, born in Shanghai where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries.
Selections from these books were included in Minor Heresies, Major Departures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), which collects "all that he wishes to retain" of these writings.
"I loved this man," he recalled to the Los Angeles Times, but when he visited his father in a Pasadena retirement home, he needed the fortification of whiskey.
A year after his wife's death in 1974, he began a literary and personal relationship with Carolyn See, who had been one of his graduate students, which lasted the rest of his life.
Under the pseudonym "Monica Highland," Espey, See, and Carolyn's daughter, Lisa See wrote three popular novels: Lotus Land (1983), 110 Shanghai Road (1986), and Greetings from Southern California (1988).