Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok is a contemporary Chinese American writer and the author of the national bestseller Girl in Translation. Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York when she was five years old. While living in a roach-infested apartment without central heating, she worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She was accepted to Hunter College High School, a public secondary school for intellectually gifted students. Upon graduation, she won early admission to Harvard University, where she worked as many as four jobs at a time, and received a BA in English with honors, before going on to earn her MFA in fiction at Columbia University. She then moved to The Netherlands and worked for Leiden...