何敏枫

何敏枫（1951年1月7日—）是一名美国籍华裔的童话作家。何敏枫出生于缅甸仰光，父亲是经济学家及外交官，母亲是一名化学家。她从很小的时候就已经去到泰国生活及读书，直至大学时代去了台湾的东海大学读书，后来又转到美国的康乃尔大学修读经济学的学士学位课程。毕业后，她去到新加坡，在海峡时报担任记者。两年后又到泰国的清迈大学任教英文。其后她结婚及修读硕士课程。同时间，她一直在柬埔寨及泰国等落后国家从事人道工作。80年代中期，她回到新加坡的新加坡国立大学工作，90年代初则去到美国纽约，一边从面文学教授，一边从事童话创作。写作方面，自大学时代，何敏枫已经开始创作，并于1975年出版了第一本书，此后出版了多本童话书，并屡获美国及东南亚等地的童书奖。

Minfong Ho (born January 7, 1951) is a Singaporean–American writer. She received the Cultural Medallion, the highest arts accolade in Singapore, in 1997.

Early life

Minfong Ho was born in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), to Ho Rih Hwa, a Singaporean economist, diplomat and businessman, and Li Lienfung, a Singaporean chemist and writer. 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, and a Master's Degree.

It was at Cornell that she first began to write, as a way to combat homesickness. She submitted a short story, titled Sing to the Dawn, 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 She won the award for the Asian American Division of unpublished Third World Authors, and was encouraged to expand the story into a novel.

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 there misrepresented the Asia that she came to know during her childhood. 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.

After graduating from Cornell University in 1973, Ho returned to Asia and began working as a journalist for The Straits Times in Singapore. She left two years later for Chiang Mai University in Thailand, where she taught English. The three years she spent in Chiang Mai 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 their search for democracy, Ho became more aware of the emotional world of the women and children there.

However, on October 6, 1976, Ho witnessed the massacre of student protesters in a military coup d'état which restored military rule 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 Master's course in creative writing while working as an English literature teaching assistant. She had also spent some time in relief work along the Thai-Cambodian border in 1980.

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 Rice without Rain, a story centering on Jinda, a seventeen-year-old girl from the fictitious Maekung Village which was caught up in the political winds sweeping across the country when a group of university students from Bangkok arrived to encourage the landless farmers to take up a rent resistance movement. Set against the very same historical background as Ho had experienced herself, Jinda's realization that the peasant class was but pawns in the ongoing political tug-of-war and her journey to find her own path in life told the untold stories during those years of turmoil that shrouded Thailand.