South Wind Changing

by Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh

Book Overview

A Time magazine "Best Book" of 1994 This is the compelling personal narrative of Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh, who was born in South Vietnam in 1958. He survived the war in Vietnam to become a university... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555973051
• ISBN13: 9781555973056
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 305 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

One of first few 1.5 Vietnamese-American generation writers

An exceptional book, recommended for junior and senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. I also recommend Lac Su's I LOVE YOUS ARE FOR WHITE PEOPLE - a memoirI Love Yous Are for White People: A Memoir (P.S.)

A harrowing escape.

The author was a college student when the communists invaded Saigon and sent him to a reeducation camp. He was neither a politician nor a military man. There he witnessed the cruelty of the wardens who starved, beat, and killed prisoners whenever they liked it. He was able to escape from the camp while accompanying an injured Viet Cong cadre to the hospital. He escaped to Thailand by boat and went on to graduate from Bennington College and Brown University after flipping burgers for some time. This memoir describes the events from the time he was a highschooler in Vietnam until his enrollment at Bennington College. The resilience and courage of the author could only equal his academic success and his lyric prose.

This Wind Cries Unmerrily

This is a powerful story of survival and eventually escape from the jungle re-education camps of post-war Viet Nam. See, perhaps for the first time, the untold side of this tragic piece of history. Huynh's prose is precise and poetic, at times transcending the brutal realism of the story in order to reach the spiritual core that held him together through his experience. This is an important book for anyone who is interested in this time period, and more importantly, where we, the US and Viet Nam, will go from here.