Minfong Ho is an award-winning Chinese-American writer. Her works frequently deal with the lives of people living in poverty in Southeast Asian countries. Despite being fiction, her stories are always set against the backdrop of real events, such as the student movement in Thailand in the 1970s and the Cambodian refugee problem with the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime at the turn of 1970s and 1980s. Her simple yet touching language and her optimistic themes have made her writing popular among children as well as young adults. Minfong Ho was born in Rangoon, Burma , to an economist father... and chemist mother, who were both of Chinese descent. Ho was raised in Thailand, near Bangkok, wolled in Tunghai University in Taiwan and subsequently transferred to Cornell University in the United States, where she received her Bachelor's degree in economics. Ho is the daughter of the businessman and diplomat Ho Rih Hwa, and chemist/bilingual writer Li Lienfung. It was at Cornell that she first began to write, as a way to combat homesickness.
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