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.
Khouw Keng Nio
Born in Java, Dutch East Indies, Khouw came from a wealthy "Peranakan" business family. Her father, the entrepreneur Khouw Kim Goan, founded "N.V. Merbaboe", a large livestock, milk and beverage conglomerate in late colonial Indonesia; and her mother was an indigenous Indonesian woman. Her better-known brother, Khouw Khe Hien (1907-1938), also a pioneering aviator, initially envisaged air transportation for the company's products as a more efficient alternative to land and sea transportation. This grew into a full-blown obsession, which ended with Khouw's brother causing an international sensation in 1935, when he flew his Indonesian-built aeroplane, Walraven 2, in a 20-day-long journey from Bandung to Schiphol, Amsterdam, and onwards to other European destinations.