Lien Chao came to Canada in 1984. She is the author of Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English (1997), winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism. Her other publications include Tiger Girl: Hu Nü (2001), a creative memoir about growing up in Mao’s China; The Chinese Knot and Other Stories (2008); and two previous collections of bilingual poetry, Maples and the Stream (1999) and More Than Skin Deep (2004).