Jean Kwok

(Hongkong) Her debut, the novel Girl in Translation, almost immediately made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Even Oprah Winfrey called the debut of this Chinese American Dutch woman a must. In the Netherlands too her novel received a great deal of acclaim. In Almost Home Kwok describes the life of Kimberley Chang, a Chinese migrant girl. With her mother, a talented musician, she leaves Hongkong for Brooklyn, where she is exploited from the very start. They live in a slum, work themselves to death in a factory and in the meantime try desperately to master the language. Eventually, Kim succeeds in escaping poverty. As a young child Kwok moved from Hongkong to New York at an early age. She was five and didn’t understand a word of English. In the daytime she went to school, in the evening she worked in a factory. Kwok could escape poverty in the end because she was highly gifted. She got scholarships, which enabled her to study. She chose the sciences, went to work in a laboratory, and got to learn the Dutch poet and scientist Leo Vroman. Love brought her to the Netherlands. Before the publication of her successful debut – which was translated in more than ten languages – she taught English at the University of Leiden and worked as a translator.