Together with her students and colleagues, Ho spent several periods living and working in nearby villages, as part of the ongoing student movement to alleviate rural poverty. The three years she spent in Chiang Mai had a deep impact on her. She left two years later for Chiang Mai University in Thailand, where she taught English. In Sing to the Dawn, Ho brought her readers into a realistic rural Thailand through the eyes of a young village girl Dawan, whose struggle to convince those around her to allow her to take up a scholarship to study in the city reflected the gender discrimination faced by girls in rural Thailand.Īfter graduating from Cornell University in 1973, Ho returned to Asia and began working as a journalist for The Straits Times in Singapore. She had mistrusted the stories about Thailand, Burma, and China she previously read, for she thought that their mostly idyllic portrayal of lives there misrepresented the Asia that she came to know during her childhood. This she did, and through the process Ho began to see writing as "a political expression," as she once wrote in Interracial Books for Children Bulletin. She won the award for the Asian American Division of unpublished Third World Authors, and was encouraged to expand the story into a novel. She submitted a short story, titled Sing to the Dawn, to the Council for Interracial Books for Children for its annual short story contest. It was at Cornell that she first began to write, as a way to combat homesickness. Ho was raised in Thailand, near Bangkok, enrolled in Tunghai University in Taiwan and subsequently transferred to Cornell University in the United States, where she received her bachelor's degree in economics.
Minfong Ho was born in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), to Ho Rih Hwa, a Singaporean economist, diplomat and businessman, and Li Lienfung, a Hunan-born chemist and bilingual writer, who were both of Chinese descent. Her simple yet touching language and her optimistic themes have made her writing popular among children as well as young adults. 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 the 1970s and 1980s. Her works frequently deal with the lives of people living in poverty in Southeast Asian countries.
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