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Khanh Ho Khanh Ho was born in Nha Tranh in 1971. He emigrated at the age of four, settling in the Los Angeles area. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, earning his MA, BA, and PhD there. After graduate school he spent three years traveling and writing before joining the Creative Writing Faculty at Grinnell College, Iowa, in 2006. “It Was His Story” (previously unpublished) He was a war child. His parents were smashed to bits and an American couple adopted him. Everywhere he walked, people knew; it was a very small town. They didn’t have to say they knew either. He could read it in their eyes. He knew they talked about it when he wasn’t around. It was no longer even scandalous. It was just a run of the mill secret. By the time he was old enough to know, he knew he was that war child whose parents were smashed to bits. It loomed before him, an unknown conversation waiting to happen, yet, strangely, he felt that the conversation had already taken place. It loomed and everyone knew about it. Once, he had overheard one of the kids at church talk about his parents. “They were smashed to bits.” The kid was one of those kids who was always ready to stand up and say God had spoken to him. The boy ran home crying; then he told his mom and felt like a coward that he had to tell her. He had wanted to keep it inside but he couldn’t keep it inside. It was too much, much bigger than what was inside his inside. He got home and then it was out and his mother was very kind and told him not to take it personally. Later on that night, he heard her talking to his father and she was crying . “Children can be so cruel,” she was saying, but this time it was in a whisper—hiss—sweet with the breath of vengeance and he could tell she was taking it personally. His mother was a hypocrite. He was no better, either. He knelt in his bed against the wall and felt like a thief the entire 248 | “It Was His Story” time. He shouldn’t be listening to his mother’s business, but at that age, anything of his mother’s, it seemed, was his business. When he was eighteen, he joined the army. He couldn’t wait to get out of that stinking little town so they could stop telling his story. They were thieves, those people. It was his story and he didn’t think it was fair that people should feel that they had the right to tell it. ...

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