She grew up speaking neither Chinese nor Korean, something she regrets and discusses when addressing a multilingual audience.
During her junior year at UCLA, Wong went to France to study art history at the Université de Bordeaux.
in history in 1983, and later attended Yale Law School while occasionally working as a substitute teacher.
In 1991, she decided to attend a writing class in poetry taught by Myra Cohn Livingston through UCLA Extension.
She spent eighteen months honing her craft and attending writing classes before she was able to publish her first book, Good Luck Gold and Other Poems.