Ruru Hoong is a PhD candidate in Business Economics at Harvard University, but spends more time reading, writing and dancing tango than anything else. She extensively researches AI/technological change and 19th Century tea/opium economic history, themes that influence her fiction. She has lived a peripatetic life hopping between Singapore, Shanghai, the Bay Area, London, and Cambridge, MA. She is a 2020 graduate of Faber Academy in London and is currently editing her first speculative fiction novel — a dual narrative exploring the role of the Modern Woman in 1920s/2020s Shanghai & Southeast Asia through the lens of tea.