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Ho is often recognized for the sensitivity and understanding with which she treats the feelings of her characters as well as for her depiction of Asian life and locale. Her books include stories for young adult readers and middle graders as well as picture books for younger children. In all of these works, Ho does not avoid the harsher elements such as poverty and violent death, but she also weaves the theme of the stabilizing influence of family throughout her work. A contributor in St. James Guide to Young Adult
Writers explained that Ho "creates a world of great beauty and gentleness, with loving family relationships and ancient customs. But she also creates a world of poverty, drought, dreadful injustice, starvation, and death. Her protagonists are set between these two visions, but in that situation they discover their pride, integrity, and determination to love the land and overcome injustice."
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In award-winning novels such as Sing to the Dawn, Rice without Rain, and The Clay Marble, Minfong Ho presents realistic depictions of her native
Southeast Asia. Characteristically focusing on strong female protagonists who interact with their families and friends against the backdrop of real events,
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had a deep impact on her. 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. While the student leaders were preoccupied with organizing the peasants into a political group in
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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 had mistrusted the stories about Thailand, Burma, and China she previously read, for she thought that their mostly idyllic portrayal of lives
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Although she does not avoid relatively mature subjects such as poverty and war, Ho's writings have been hailed as excellent reading materials for children and young adults. She has received many awards, including
Commonwealth Book Awards from the Commonwealth Book Council and Best Books for Young
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Minfong Ho, in her four novels, presented to her readers realistic depictions of her native
Southeast Asia. Despite being fictions, her stories were all set against the backdrop of real historical events that she herself had experienced or at least observed firsthand. Her optimistic central theme
180:, 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.
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the language of her "hands", and
English that of her "head". This multifaceted linguistic ability, coupled with her childhood experiences, has perhaps given her a unique insight into the world she writes about, which is not easily attainable by foreign writers.
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After the birth of her third and last child Ho shifted her focus to writing books for children. Collaborating with Saphan Ros, executive director of the
Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia, she published two books on traditional Cambodian
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is a
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
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in the kingdom. But she did not stay long under such circumstance. After marrying John Value Dennis, Jr., an international agriculture policy person whom she met during her
Cornell years, Ho left for her alma mater again, where she completed a
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for the next seven years. As a result, she is widely referred to there as a "local writer". Her works have been selected as teaching material for
English literature in lower secondary schools. Since 1990, Ho has been living with her family in
172:, to the Council for Interracial Books for Children for its annual short story contest. She won the award for the Asian American Division of unpublished Third World Authors, and was encouraged to expand the story into a novel.
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invaded the country. She also employed the theme of family unity in the face of adversity, as Dara persuaded her elder brother not to join the army but to return with family, sans their father, to restart life back at home.
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during her relief work on the Thai-Cambodian border. Once again, she presented a strong female protagonist, a twelve-year-old girl named Dara who was one of the thousands of refugees escaping to the border at the end of the
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remains similar throughout all four books. So do the central figures, who are all young girls facing harsh realities of life unimaginable by their more fortunate contemporaries in
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regime at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Her simple yet touching language and her optimistic themes have made her writing popular among children as well as young adults.
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In 1986, Ho gave birth to her first child, a son. And finally, a decade after returning from Thailand, she began writing fiction again. The result was
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by Hui Bing Ang "A stylistic analysis of Minfong Ho's Sing to the dawn : how it constructs its fictional world and positions the reader"
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their search for democracy, Ho became more aware of the emotional world of the women and children there.
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to Chinese parents, she was brought up both in Singapore and
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Maples in the Mist: Children's Poems from the Tang Dynasty
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Maples in the Mist: Children's Poems from the Tang Dynasty
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into English and compiled them into a picture book titled
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Selected works of Minfong Ho have been translated into
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