Well, sort of.

The 40-year-old San Francisco resident has published two children's books in recent years, both about the Filipino-American experience.

Robles is a part of a crop of recently published authors who are writing about growing up in the United States as an Asian — telling stories beyond Chinese-American and Japanese-American experiences.

Robles said he first began thinking about writing children's books after his son was born.

He asked himself, "What would I want him to know if I wasn't around, about himself, about his culture?" He found the answer in his two "Lakas" books, named after his son: "And this is it."

His most recent book — "Lakas and the Makibaka Hotel," published in April, features Lakas romping through town and meeting a diverse cast of characters. There's an Elvis impersonator ("There's always some guy who looks like that in the Filipino community," says Robles), a "buckateer" (one who drums using buckets), and more.

The story translated in Tagalog on one page, and in English on the other.

In the end, Lakas befriends all of them, gathers them together and prevents developers from tearing down their low-income housing.

And in many ways, it reflects Robles' real life, he says. "Makibaka" means "struggle" in Tagalog. The story is based on the Trinity Plaza Hotel struggle to maintain low-income

In the 1970s, Robles' uncle, Al Robles, organized Filipino tenants to help save the last standing building in San Francisco's Manilatown that housed manongs, or elderly Filipinos, many of whom were bachelors.

"Instead of knowing all the historical dates, historical this, historical that, it's the feeling from the book (that I wanted him to know)," says Robles.

Robles isn't the only Asian American publishing books about historical or personal experiences in recent years.

Of 64 children's books published in 2005 about Asian and Pacific Americans, 60 were written by Asian Americans. Compare that with four years ago, when 46 of 91 books about Asian Americans were written by Asian-American authors, according to the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which gathers data on multicultural children's books.

While there has been a drop in the number of books about Asian-American authors published, there has been an increase in children's books written by Asian Americans, and the fluctuation in total books published is not atypical.

"In the last 10 years, or whenever our American consciousness opened up to multiculturalism, all of a sudden you have publishers realizing that those are markets that are wanting books," said Dana Goldberg, executive editor of San Francisco-based Children's Book Press, a nonprofit that began publishing multicultural and multilingual children's books in 1975.

Three of four books this year published by this small outfit are by Asian-American authors: "The Closet Ghosts" by Uma Krishnaswami and illustrated by Shiraaz Bhabha; "Lakas and the Makibaka Hotel" by Anthony Robles, illustrated by Carl Angel and translated by Eloisa D. de Jesus; and "A Place Where Sunflowers Grow" by Amy Lee-Tai.

Harvey Dong, store manager of Berkeley's Eastwind Books, said he has been seeing more Asian-American children's books in recent years with more diverse authors.

"Before, schoolteachers would come here, and they would have trouble finding books," he says.

Like Robles' books, children's books are now documenting the stories and experiences of Vietnamese, Indian, Hmong and others outside the more dominant narratives of Chinese and Japanese Americans.

The No. 1 seller in Asian-American books published by Children's Book Press is "Nine-In-One, Grr! Grr!" a folk tale about the Hmong people from Laos, written in English.

Truong Tran, 37, published a book in 2003 called "Going Home, Coming Home," illustrated by Yangsook Choi.

The story is about a girl named Ami Chi, named after one of his nieces, traveling to Vietnam for the first time.

Tran, who was born in Vietnam and came to the United States when he was 5, returned to Vietnam in 1999. Unlike himself, most of his young readers are born and raised in the United States.

"The reality is, they're going there for the first time," said Tran, who lives in San Francisco.

He said he had his nephews and nieces in mind when he wrote the book.

The reality is that Tran's story is also very personal. Though Tran is bilingual in Vietnamese and English, he says the fear of losing his native tongue is constantly in the back of his mind.

"I wrote it in hopes that (young Vietnamese Americans) will find a connection with the Vietnamese language and explore identity through language," he says.

Tran, like many children's book writers, says he does not bank on making a living from writing children's books. He also has published four volumes of poetry, and his day job is as a poetry instructor at San Francisco State University and at Mills College in Oakland.

Visit the Asian Branch Library in Oakland's Chinatown, and on any given afternoon or Saturday the place is crawling with children, families and elders.

Vivian Yee, who oversees the children's book collection for Oakland Public Libraries, said she has noticed more diversity in recent years.

For example, several books about Chinese and Korean adopted children. More books about children learning English-as-a-second-language. Stories about growing up mixed race. Many by Chinese Americans, including historical narratives such as Milly Lee's "Landed" about a Chinese family's experience being detained at Angel Island during the early part of the century.

And more books by Indo-Americans.

Krishnaswami, 49, said she first entertained the thought of writing a book after she had her child almost 19 years ago.

"There was this gap that I came across," said Krishnaswami about the books she was searching for.

Krishnaswami, who lives in New Mexico, has published nine children's books, including some re-telling of folk tales to original picture-book stories.

like her most recent one, "The Closet Ghosts," about a girl named Anu who moved into a new place and seeks the help of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god.

Approximately 5,000 children's books are published each year. Of those, Asian-American, Latino, African-American and American-Indian children's books are a tiny fraction — less than one percent.

Though there have been more children's books published from diverse ethnicities, stories about Filipinos, Hmong and Vietnamese, for example, are still rare.

Robles' two Lakas books are the only bilingual Tagalog/English books currently in print. And they don't go into the field hoping to hit the jackpot — they do it because it's a deeply personal experience.

In fact, Robles, who is Filipino, Irish and black, doesn't speak Tagalog, but says he sometimes wishes he could. He hopes that his books will encourage parents and children to read together and open up discussions between generations.

Robles, Tran and Krishnawami are not the only ones writing for a younger generation.

Li Keng Wong, a resident of San Leandro who grew up in Oakland's Chinatown, published "Good Fortune: My Journey to Gold Mountain" this year, a memoir of her family's experience immigrating to the United States from China, geared toward middle-school kids.

Wong, a retired elementary teacher from New Haven Unified, says she wrote the book because "I wanted people to understand the early immigrants and how hard they struggled."

It's the first book that Wong's ever published — at 80 years old.