Kwok is a Chinese American author who emigrated with her family from Hong Kong when she was a young girl. They settled in New York City and were so under-resourced that Kwok worked in a Chinatown clothing factory during her childhood. She was an intellectually gifted student and was accepted first into Hunter College High School, a public secondary school for high-achieving students, and then to Harvard University. Although she planned to study science, she switched majors upon realizing that her true passion was English. After the completion of her bachelor of arts, she pursued a master of arts in fiction from Columbia University and worked 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’s work examines the lives of immigrants and their communities in the United States and abroad. Although a writer of fiction, her novels draw 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 cultural dissonance, language, complex dynamics within immigrant families, the way that home country cultures are alternately retained and lost, and the pervasive experiences of racism in the lives of immigrants of color.