Gabriel Monteros is the winner of The Short Story Project’s competition “My Best Story”, 2018. He is a Latino American from Southern California. He describes the neighborhood he grew up in as a working class, multi-ethnic, and sometimes violent place. He studied Mandarin Chinese in college and spent most of his 20’s working in Zhejiang, China for a local company. Through his travels, he developed deep personal and emotional ties to Asia and Africa, and he tries to convey the meaningful experiences he collected there through his writing.