Searching for Sylvie Lee

Author Jean Kwok’s childhood shares many similarities with that of protagonist Sylvie Lee. As a young Chinese American girl, Kwok emigrated with her family from Hong Kong to settle in New York City. Her family was so impoverished that Kwok worked in a Chinatown clothing factory during her childhood. A gifted student, she earned admission first to Hunter College High School, a public secondary school for high-achieving students, and then to Harvard University. Although Kwok planned to study science, she switched majors on realizing that her true passion was literature. After the completion of her bachelor’s, she pursued a Master’s in Fiction from Columbia University before working for a time as an English professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She currently divides her time between the Netherlands and New York City and is a full-time writer.

Kwok is a best-selling author whose work examines the lives of immigrants and their communities in the United States and abroad. Although a writer of fiction, Kwok draws on her own experiences as a young immigrant in New York City and as a young adult in rigorous, gifted-and-talented school programming. She is thematically interested in the complex dynamics within immigrant families, the mixed loss and adaptation of home-country cultures, and the pervasive experiences of racism in the lives of immigrants of color.