Value Dennis, a soil scientist, with whom she has
had three children.
In the mid-1970s, Ho worked as a journalist in
Singapore and as a university instructor in Taiwan.
In the early 1980s, she worked with Catholic Relief
Services in the camps along the Thai-Cambodian
border. She has subsequently been a writer-in-
residence at Singapore University, and she has
conducted writing workshops at sites around the
world as well as in the K-12 schools near her cur-
rent home in Ithaca, New York.
With young girls as protagonists, Ho’s stories
offer a realistic and sensitive view of Southeast Asia.
Her first novel, Sing to the Dawn (1975), focuses
on an ambitious girl in a rural Thai village who
wins a scholarship to a prestigious urban school.
Her father and brother initially try to discourage
her from accepting the scholarship because they
fear for her safety in the city. For this debut novel,
Ho received the first prize from the Council of
Interracial Books for Children. Rice without Rain
(1986), Ho’s second novel, received truly interna-
tional recognition. The novel treats the coming
of age of a 17-year-old Thai girl whose family be-
comes involved, at great cost, with reformers from
an urban university who encourage the villagers to
protest the disadvantageous economic conditions
that have long defined their lives. The novel deals
compellingly with such subjects as endemic pov-
erty, political radicalism, and state violence. For
this novel, Ho received several awards including
the first prize from the National Book Develop-
ment Council of Singapore and a Best Books for
Young Adults citation from the American Library
Association. Ho’s third novel, The Clay Marble
(1991), depicts the challenges faced by Dara, a
12-year-old Cambodian girl who flees the Khmer
Rouge to a refugee camp just across the border
in Thailand. The protagonist makes friends with
Jantu, who creates great toys out of mud includ-
ing a “magical” clay marble. When the camp is
disrupted by Vietnamese bombing and Jantu later
dies from friendly fire, Dara matures quickly to be-
come assertive; when her brother wants to join the
military, she persuades him to return home with
the family.
In her most recent novels, Gathering the Dew
(2003) and The Stone Goddess (2003), Ho chron-
icles the experiences of Cambodian girls whose
families must confront much more directly the
terrors of life under the Khmer Rouge, before find-
ing refuge as emigrants to the United States.
Ho is also the author of the short-story collec-
tion, Tanjong Rhu and Other Stories (1986), and
four picture books for children—The Two Broth-
ers (coauthored with Saphan Ros, 1995), Hush!: A
Thai Lullaby (1996), Brother Rabbit: A Cambodian
Tale (also coauthored with Ros, 1997), and Peek!: A
Thai Hide-and-Seek Book (2004). In addition, she
has translated Maples in the Mist: Children’s Poems
from the Tang Dynasty (1996).
Martin KichHolthe, Tess Uriza (1966– )
Born to Filipino immigrant parents in San Fran-
cisco, Holthe had an atypical journey toward her
impressive debut novel, When the Elephants Dance
(2002), which was written while she was work-
ing full time as an accountant. Although Holthe
grew up in a household where storytelling tradi-
tions and other aspects of Filipino national culture
were an important element of her life, she did not
originally consider becoming a writer. Instead, fol-
lowing the advice of her parents, she went to the
University of California at Davis for a pre-medi-
cal degree. She dropped out of her program and
returned to San Franciso to complete a degree in
accounting from Golden Gate University. Always
interested in writing, she once took a writing class
“for fun.” In this writing class, she put together a
series of myths, legends, and family stories, which
later became the basis for her first novel.
The book provides a detailed account of life in
the Philippines during World War II, when Japa-
nese troops invaded the country and subjected it
to a brutal occupation. Much of the novel focuses
on the horrors of that occupation. As Holthe
writes in the opening lines, “ ‘When the elephants
dance, the chickens must be careful.’ The great
beasts, as they circle one another, shaking the treesHolthe, Tess Uriza 107