Pakistani novelist, playwright and spiritualist Bano Qudsia wrote novels, dramas plays and short stories in Urdu and wrote for television and stage inUrdu and Punjabi languages. She is best recognized for her novel Raja Gidh and her critically acclaimed play Aadhi Baat.
Hồ Xuân Hương was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê dynasty (1428 to 1789). She wrote poetry using chữ nôm (Southern Script), which adapts Chinese characters to write demotic Vietnamese. She is considered one of Vietnam’s greatest classical poets.
Du Yun is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, who works at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, musical theater, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise.
Piper’s distinctly confrontational ability to address pertinent topics around racial segregation and stereotyping have established her voice as one which is fearless, powerful, and hugely influential.
Ho Thi Que, the Tiger Lady of the Mekong Delta, was a master sergeant during the Vietnam War. Her South Vietnamese 44th Ranger Battalion, also known as “The Black Tigers” fought against the Viet Cong, who nicknamed her “Madame Death”.
Hōjō Masako, known as the “nun shogun”, exercised significant political power in the early years of the Kamakura period (1192 to 1333).
In 2015, Tu Youyou became the first first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first woman from the People’s Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. The pharmaceutical chemist and malariologist discovered artemisinin (also known as qīnghāosù 青蒿素) and dihydroartemisinin, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine. The resulting malaria treatment saved millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. While studying traditional Chinese and herbal medicines, she found a reference in ancient medical texts to using sweet wormwood to treat intermittent fevers, a symptom of malaria. Tu and her research team were able to extract artemisinin (qinghaosu) from wormwood in the 1970s. She even volunteered to be the first human subject to test the substance. Tu later became chief scientist at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, earning her position without a medical degree, a PhD, or research training abroad. In 2011, she became the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award for her discovery, which was called “arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century” by the Lasker Foundation. Tu’s work in the 1960s and 70s coincided with China’s Cultural Revolution, when scientists were denigrated as one of the nine black categories (or “Stinking Old Ninth”) in society according to Maoist theory (or possibly that of the Gang of Four).
Appearing in over sixty movies throughout her career, Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood. In addition to her roles in silent films, television, and stage, Wong landed a role in one of the first movies made in Technicolor. Internationally recognized, her legacy continues to influence entertainers around the world.
As a well-recognized chef, television personality, and restaurant owner, Joyce Chen introduced Chinese food to the American public. She made such a large impact on American culture, that her photo was included on a US stamp in 2014 and a “Festival of Dumplings” is held in Cambridge, Massachusetts every year to honor her birthday. By developing new ways of cooking authentic and healthy meals, her cookbooks, cooking classes, and microwavable “Soup Dumplings,” made it easy for people to learn how to make Chinese cuisine worldwide.
Corazon “Cory” Aquino went from a shy law school student, to the first female president of the Philippines. Supported by the People Power Revolution, Aquino successfully ran a peaceful movement that eventually led her to become TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1986. The only other woman that received that honor at the time was Queen Elizabeth II in 1952.