South Wind Changing - Hardcover

Huynh, Jade Ngoc Quang

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555971989 ISBN 13: 9781555971984

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1994

Synopsis

The author recounts his life in Communist Vietnam, his emigration to the United States, and his adaptation to American culture and society

About this title

About the Author

Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh was born in 1957 in the Mekong Delta region of South Vietnam. He attended Saigon University in 1974 until the North Vietnamese Army took control of the south in 1975. After enduring a year of inhuman conditions and torture in a labor camp, he managed to escape and finally reached a refugee camp in Thailand. In 1978, Huynh flew to the United States. Since his arrival, he has worked in a series of factory and cleaning jobs, completed his B.A. at Bennington College, and received an M.F.A. from Brown University.

Reviews

In 1975 Huynh, a country boy from the Mekong Delta, was about to begin his studies at Saigon University when he was arrested by the conquering communists (the charge: he was an intellectual) and sent to a labor camp. Huynh's engaging memoir turns on developments that seemed miraculous to him--and will to the reader, too. First, he befriended an ailing guard and created for himself an opportunity to escape. Joining the "boat people" of Vietnam, he ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after a series of ordeals that included an ugly confrontation with pirates. Next, he made his way to the U.S., where he worked at a series of low-paying jobs and dealt with culture shock. Virtually homeless with two brothers and a nephew in his charge, Huynh wandered the country until he found himself in Bennington, Vt., where he felt welcome and secure. There he worked as a part-time janitor. Another miracle provides the wonderfully satisfying conclusion to his memoir: Huynh received a scholarship to Bennington College in 1984 and has recently earned a Masters in Fine Arts from Brown University. His simple but powerful story is given added poignance by Huynh's recollections of the family, the life and the land he had to leave.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Tragic, sometimes thrilling but terrifying life of a young Vietnamese whose woes abroad have nonetheless landed him in the US, where he graduated from Bennington and in 1992 received an MFA from Brown. ``Jade'' Ngoc Quang Huynh's 12 childhood years on the Mekong Delta went by like a dream compared with the hell that befell his family of 17 children when the Tet offensive exploded on New Year's 1968. Then, between the black-pajamaed Viet Cong psychopaths threatening the Huynhs and the American choppers shooting up the delta, Jade and his family found themselves swimming from one wave of horror to the next--through bursting bullets, mined roads, and sharpened stakes--while attempting to reach a second family dwelling in Vinh Binh City. Once there, they had nothing, while the war went on ``like a chronic disease.'' Eventually, Jade lost six brothers and sisters as well as other family members. At 18, he was attending Saigon University when the city fell to the invaders, and he soon found himself facing indoctrination, then being sent to a labor camp simply for being a student. There, he was given explosively dangerous work clearing mines, was tortured and lived among men tortured incessantly, starved, ate lizards, rats, and crickets to stay alive, watched men murdered by proselytizers for Ho Chi Minh, buried the dead, built dikes for rice fields, and hoped for a Cambodian invasion in which he might escape during the confusion. After three years, he escapeed and ended up in a refugee camp. A lost brother, a pilot whom he thought dead, turned out to be alive in Mississippi, sent money, and told him to relocate in the States. He learned English flipping Big Macs at McDonald's, and at last began his US education. Amid nature's beauty, hope survives an incredible bloodbath. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555971989
• ISBN 13: 9781555971984
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328