Kou Voravong
Kou Voravong grew up in Savannakhet and pursued a primary education there. He obtained the « certificat d'études primaires complémentaire indochinois » - Certificate of Indochinese Additional Primary Studies - (CEPCI) in 1930, went afterward to Vientiane and began his first-secondary-school year at the Collège Auguste Pavie. But because of a conflict which opposed him to French Colonial administration, his adopted father was sentenced to prison that same year. As reaction to this situation, Kou Voravong left school and returned to Savannakhet. As an out-of-school teenager, he practiced sports, especially soccer.
Katherine Y. Qiu
She was born in 1947 in Yumen City, China. She had seven siblings, many of whom were held as political prisoners after the coming to power of Mao Zedong in 1949. One of her siblings is believed to be historian Qin Hui, whose arguments about Chinese society and history contradicted Mao's beliefs (the name discrepancy is due to alternative spellings and mistranslations to English). In 1973, she travelled to the US to study at Stanford University, but after a year the Communist Party of China demanded that she return to China After this date, she secretly authored several texts criticizing the Maoist regime and published them via foreign publishers.