Raised in Hong Kong and Japan, Karen worked for a decade as a reporter and writer for Tokyo-based The Daily Yomiuri, NHK Radio Japan, and Kyodo News. A graduate of Tokyo’s Sophia University, she also holds an M.A. in Chinese literature from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times (Chinese edition), The Japan Times, The International Herald Tribune, NPR, South China Morning Post, and the New Delhi-based Mint, among others.Now based in the US, she also works as a lecturer of Chinese language and culture and is a regular contributor to literary journals and film-related magazines.

Xue Mo, the pen-name of Chen Kaihong, was born in Liangzhou, Gansu province. A renowned cultural scholar and author, his writing is deeply influenced by his native roots in western China, and combines hallucinatory realism with the depiction of the reality of rural life in China.

In her groundbreaking new book, Wyman explores the lives of her "sisters" who grew up in the Bay Area's Ming Quong Chinese orphanage—revealing secrets, pain, and the lifetime legacies of friendship. Bamboo Women tells twenty-one inspiring stories of coming-of-age from the women of Ming Quong, a home for orphaned Chinese girls in the San Francisco Bay Area. Wyman introduces us to her "sisters" and how their bonds of love and friendship carried them through life, love, loss, career, and family. Nona Mock Wyman is the author of Chopstick Childhood (In a Land of Silver Spoons).

Kwanten was born in Berlin on 8 January 1944, during the Second World War, to a Jewish mother who secretly observed her faith under Nazi rule. Shortly after his birth, Kwanten's mother took him to live in Belgium, and he grew up in Brussels, receiving his education at a Jesuit school.During the early 1960s Kwanten worked as a pilot in the Belgian Air Force, flying the Super Starfighter jet aircraft. However, after he was seriously injured in a crash during landing he transferred to the Belgian Intelligence Service. Whilst working for the intelligence service he also studied at Ghent University and the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 1968 he went to the United States to continue his studies. He studied for a PhD at the University of South Carolina, and completed his dissertation on "Tibetan-Mongol Relations during the Yuan Dynasty, 1207–1368" in 1972.He taught at Ramapo College in New Jersey between 1972 and 1974, and was an associate professor for Chinese and Inner Asian History at the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies of Indiana University from 1974 to 1978. He was subsequently appointed associate professor of Chinese and Central Asian History and Philology and Curator of the Far Eastern Library at the University of Chicago. During the late 1970s and early 1980s Kwanten published a number of articles on the extinct Tangut language, as well as a book-length study of the Chinese glosses in the 12th-century Chinese-Tangut glossary, Pearl in the Palm. He also raised the possibility that the Tangut language was not a Sino-Tibetan language as is generally thought, but may belong to the Altaic language family.