Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Minyong Cho was 16 when her family immigrated to California. Soon after, her father was incarcerated for a month for physically assaulting her, and then she went to MIT on a full scholarship. By the time she moved to Ramallah through her PhD program at the University of Michigan, she had been analyzing her memories of child abuse every day for 13 years. Two chapters of her first and upcoming chapbook, Wall Down Ramallah, were published in LIT magazine and Ponder Review in June 2025.

In 2007 a 32-year-old Korean woman went to Ramallah to finish her dissertation in Islamic art history. While there, she sifted through her memories from being a child in Seoul, to answer one question that gnawed at her: why did her parents abuse her but not her sister? While in Jerusalem, she experienced a kind of psychosis that made her homeless for days and unable to sleep. After leaving Jerusalem under suspicious, troubling circumstances and somehow making her way to New Jersey, she felt free from her memories for the first time in life. Wall Down Ramallah explores this painful moment in her life and how she migrated in time and space to take down her personal walls to become content with the idea of permanently being outside of any “home.”