READER: Ho Minfong, 55, writer. She is in town for the Asian Children's Writers and Illustrators Conference, which ended yesterday.

The Singaporean was born in 1951 in Myanmar (then Burma), the eldest of three children of the late industrialist and diplomat Ho Rih Hwa. Her brother Kwon Ping is the founder and chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, while her youngest brother Kwoncjan is an architect.

Educated in Thailand and Taiwan, she received a bachelor's degree in economics from Cornell University in 1973.

While battling homesickness in college, she wrote a short story set in Thailand, Sing To The Dawn, which she later expanded and published as a novel in 1975.

After working as a journalist in Singapore and as an English lecturer in Thailand, she returned to Cornell to do a master's in creative writing.

She was the first writer-in-residence at the National University of Singapore in 1984, and has published nine books and one translation of Chinese poetry. She has also won several local and international awards.

She and her husband have lived in Ithaca, New York, since 1994, and have three children.

What are you reading now?

I've been reading lots of books related to the conference. One really good book is Lenore Look's Ruby Lu, Brave And True. It's about an eight- year-old Cantonese girl, and though it's a mainstream children's book, she uses words like mong cha cha (Cantonese for confused).

Ruby also says her little brother smells like a dan tat (Cantonese for egg tart), and a glossary at the back tells you what that is. But Look writes in such a clever way that you can half-guess what it is. It's lovely to have that matter-of-fact synthesis.

If your house was burning down, which book would you save?

I would save my copy of 300 Tang Poems. Tang poetry is chantable, it is singable, and it's not a coincidence that the simpler ones were traditionally used to teach Chinese kids their lessons.

Take the poem, Traveller's Song by Meng Jiao. It's easy to remember as it has rhythm, it has rhyme and it even teaches that your mother loves you very much. It always brought my mother to tears.

My mother started teaching us the poems when we were very little. We were in Thailand, so we didn't know lots of things in the poems, like what frost was.

I dedicated my book of translations (Maples In The Mist: Children's Poems From The Tang Dynasty, 1996) to my mother, and also to my children, on the condition that they would let me teach them all the poems. They agreed as they thought it would be cool to have their names in print, but they didn't get through more than three poems each.

Ruby Lu, Brave And True by Lenore Look (US$3.99 or S$6.20) is available at www.amazon.com, while 300 Tang Poems (US$29.99 or S$46.80) is available at www.shop.com. Ho's books are available at major bookstores.

This story was first published in The Straits Times on November 19, 2006.