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Jade Ngọc Quang Huỳnh Jade Ngọc Quang Huỳnh was born in 1957, one of seventeen children of a prosperous farming family. He grew up in An Tan, a small village on the Mekong River in the southern delta of Vietnam. Like many civilians, he experienced the war as a tug-of-war, where “at night the VC controlled the village and during the day the Southern Government controlled it. We were trapped in the middle as victims.” After reunification, his father was tried but acquitted for the crime of inherited wealth, and all of Huỳnh’s brothers were sent to labor camps. He was allowed to return to his university studies in Saigon, but in June of 1975 was inexplicably arrested himself and sent to a re-education camp. The selection here describes his experiences in the camp where he remained for a year before he was able to escape. After several attempts to escape Vietnam, he succeeded in 1978, despite harrowing encounters with Thai pirates at sea and hostile Thai authorities on land. He reunited in Mississippi with a brother who had emigrated the previous year and worked for several years in factory and fast-food jobs before completing his BA at Bennington College and then his MFA at Brown University. In 1994 his first book, South Wind Changing, was named one of Time magazine’s top five books of the year. Frustrated with the American publishing industry, he brought out his second book, The Family Wound, with a Welsh press in 2004. He has taught at Cardiff University in Wales, Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and the Community College of Vermont. He is now an assistant professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. from South Wind Changing (1994) The area around the labor camp began to change: we were turning the jungle into gardens. We grew sugarcane, bananas, corn, lettuce, tomatoes, hot peppers, and yucca root. We had the right to grow them but not the right to eat them. Like when the guards said we could defecate, but not urinate, on pain of castration. We tended the garden and watched the produce grow, our mouths watering. I felt like I was half dead and half alive. 114 | from South Wind Changing We harvested the corn, salads, and cabbages, sorted the good and bad, and brought them to the highway for the VC to take away to sell. We didn’t know where or to whom. We had to steal anything we could eat; we even picked edible leaves we found on the road or wherever we worked. We caught crickets or lizards and ate them raw because we could not let the guards see this. If the guards saw you, you would find yourself at the “guillotine center,” the place where the VC held our meeting each evening. The guard tied the thumb of your left hand to your right toe and the right thumb to your left toe and let you stay at the guillotine center for a few hours, donating blood to mosquitoes. If the guard wanted to kill you he would leave you there all night. You died in horror, your face sunken, pale as a banana leaf from loss of blood, your mouth wide open. I could tell you about beatings, but they seemed almost routine: we were beaten whenever the guard felt like it. I didn’t know what to think anymore. I became numb and indifferent. I lived day by day and consoled myself with the thought that perhaps I was being punished for being cruel to others in past lives. I missed my family terribly and I wondered what had happened to them. What was my mother doing right now? I bet she was crying and I hoped she hadn’t become blind because she was getting old. She had eleven children and eight of them were in jail. What did she think? How could she bear that kind of life? How about father? I bet he was worrying as always and getting skinnier. I knew he wouldn’t cry. What could I say to my sisters and brothers? I prayed to my Buddha to help them and myself: I heard the temple gong bang with its harmonious and warm sound, soothing me. “Hey, I’m starving. Do you want to cook some yucca root?” Hung whispered . We were squatting in our hut. “We don’t have any,” I answered...

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