This week, in honor of Father’s Day, we travel with Alison Singh Gee to Yosemite National park in California, where she revisits memories of her father and finally musters the strength to stand up to an old nemesis.

Alison, a former Time Inc. journalist, wrote Where the Peacocks Sing, a Hong Kong-India memoir about her discovery that her Indian-journalist fiancé grew up in a 19th-century palace. She is a professor of creative nonfiction at Scripps College, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and Westways. She is working on a new memoir, about LA’s Chinatown.