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Huyhn Quang Nhuong Huynh Quang Nhuong was born in 1936 in Mỹ Tho. He received his degree in chemistry from Saigon University in 1962 before being drafted into the South Vietnamese Army. In the war, Huynh was permanently paralyzed by a bullet wound. In 1969 he came to the United States for physical therapy. He stayed in the United States and studied at Long Island University, where he earned an MA in comparative literature in 1971. In 1973 he earned a second MA, in French, from the University of Missouri–Columbia. Huynh remained in Missouri and began to write professionally. His first collection of children’s stories, The Land I Lost, is based on Huynh’s childhood experiences in Vietnam. The book, which won several awards, including the William Allen White Children’s Book Award and the Friends of American Writers Award, was translated into German, French, Spanish, and Catalan. During the 1990s, Huynh gained recognition as a playwright. His plays were produced by such groups as the Black Theatre Group in Berkeley, California; the Organic Theater Group in Chicago; the Northside Theater Company out of San Jose, California ; and Stephens College in Columbia. He also published his second collectionofchildren’sstoriesin1997,WaterBuffaloDays.Hediedin2001. from The Land I Lost (1982) The Lone Wild Hog The wild hogs living in the jungle near our hamlet were a constant problem because they sometimes attacked people or cattle without provocation. As the guardian of all the buffaloes in our hamlet, Tank [the family’s water buffalo] once had to fight a huge wild hog when the herd was grazing at the edge of the jungle. He defeated the hog, but the victory was not an easy one. A fully grown male hog can weigh almost three hundred kilos, and its skin is covered by a thick coating of the sap from a tree we called the “oil tree.” A combination of instinct and parasitic itches causes a hog to rub itself up against the oil tree, which oozes sap when its bark is broken. The Huynh Quang Nhuong | 155 sap, when condensed and dried, becomes an extremely tough covering that acts like armor, making the wild hogs immune to wounds from short knives or bullets from small guns. The older the hog, the thicker its armor. The only part of the wild hog’s body that is not covered by this special sap is its throat and most of its neck, for dry sap would hinder its movement when it wanted to bend its head to drink or to eat roots. That is why the wild hog always rubs away any sap that drops on its neck or its throat. The head of the wild hog is its most powerful weapon. When a wild hog charges, it may knock down its opponent, but that usually does little damage. It is the follow-up slap of its head that is lethal. The tusks of the wild hog grow in such a way that the sideways slap of its head can rip away the abdomen of a pursuing hunting dog. And even though the tips of an old hog’s tusks will tend to curve in toward its head, when an old wild hog is cornered, it will break off the curved parts of its tusks by smashing them against a tree so that the jagged tips will point outward. Wild hogs live in groups and each group has a leader, or dominant male. Usually, wild hogs try to avoid people, fighting back only when cornered. But every once in a while there will be a lone male that either is not strong enough to challenge the dominant male of the herd and prefers to live alone, or has been a dominant male of a large group itself, but because of old age has been beaten by an upcoming young male and has had to leave its harem. And it is this lone wild hog that is the most ferocious animal of the jungle. Even a tiger avoids a lone wild hog unless it is very hungry, for the hog will attack every animal, or person, in sight. One day a young farmer from our hamlet was working in a cornfield near the edge of the jungle. He had his little daughter and his watchdog with him. His daughter was playing with the dog when suddenly the dog stopped playing and became very nervous. The farmer looked around. He saw a huge wild hog charging down...

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