Yee-lut Kwok was born in Hong Kong 1971.
Life was rough in Hong Kong, nobody could find jobs, there wasn’t enough food, the education system was virtually nonexistent, and everyone lived in constant fear of a Chinese invasion. In 1977 her mom went to visit family in Beijing they’d been separated from by the Chinese Civil war. There the streets were flooded with communist protestors because of the Cultural Revolution, this was so concerning that the same year she decided to move the family to America. Yee-lut was almost five when she left Hong Kong and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York.
In Brooklyn, she was packed into a one bedroom apartment with 11 family members and a mean street cat. Her dad work long hours as a cook in a Chinese restaurant leaving before she woke up and getting back after she’d gone to bed. Money was tight, food was hard to come by, and she was constantly bullied. Brooklyn wasn’t the sort of place they wanted to stay for the rest of their lives.
When she was nine years old, Yee-lut, her older brother, and her parents moved from Brooklyn to Durham, North Carolina. There, her dad found another job as a cook and her mom did data entry at an insurance company to get health insurance for her family since they couldn’t afford it otherwise. Brooklyn had been brimming with other non-English speaking immigrants so she’d only had to know Cantonese, however North Carolina was a vastly different situation. In the year it took her to learn English, her grades dropped significantly because she literally couldn’t understand the material.
Eleven years later she began studying chemistry at NC State, when she was a senior undergrad student she met research assistant Hao Hong. Three years after she’d graduated, Dr. Hong called and asked her if she wanted to help him start a business. Together the two of them founded Asymchem, a pharmaceutical company. Twenty years later, she’s the head of the US branch and the company recently went IPO in November 2016. She married Bernard Hsu in 1999 at which time she changed her name to Elut so people would be able to more easily pronounce it. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her family and three dogs and considers herself lucky to have been able to build a stable life in the US.
