Sing to the Dawn
short story by Minfong Ho
Sing to the Dawn is a story by Chinese-American author Minfong Ho, which was originally published as a short story and was awarded first prize by the Council of Interracial Books for Children in New York City in 1975. It was later extended to a full-length novel.
Plot summary
Dawan, a young village girl, gets first place in an examination and wins a scholarship to study in a city school. Her brother, Kwai, places second in the examination and is initially jealous, creating a rift between the two previously-close siblings. This hostility is further exacerbated by Dawan's father, who feels that the city is no place for a girl, and that Dawan should give in to Kwai and let him go to the city instead of her.
Dawan eventually overcomes these obstacles and proves to herself and to others that she is fully capable of handling the scholarship and the responsibility it entails. But she faces the disapproval of her father, who remain's convinced that city life and further schooling are not for a girl.
Adaptations
Sing to the Dawn was adapted into a critically acclaimed musical by Singaporean composer Dick Lee in 1996 and was directed by Steven Dexter. The musical has proved extremely popular after its initial run, and has been restaged several times, including a restaging by the Singapore Management University's production house in 2003 and a joint production between Raffles Institution and Raffles Girls' School in 2004.
A full-length feature animation based on the book was produced in collaboration by MediaCorp Raintree Pictures, the Media Development Authority of Singapore and Infinite Frameworks, and was released on 30 October 2008, with the Chinese title of 曦望.
“Sing to the Dawn” enters the record as short story by Minfong Ho. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sing, Dawn and short can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7522785. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1996, 2003 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sing to the Dawn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.