South Wind Changing.

Dinh-Hoa Nguyen

South Wind Changing is the powerfully told story of a young Vietnamese who has survived all adversities in his war-ravaged native land and truly represents an entire generation of Vietnamese Americans of the early immigrant waves following the fall of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975. Jade Ngoc Quang Huynh - actually his Vietnamese first name is the disyllabic Quang-Ngoc (Shining Gem), brutally broken up by ignorant Immigration and Naturalization Service clerks - is one of the seventeen children of the Huynh clan in a Mekong Delta village. Growing up in a war that took away six of his siblings, Jade tried both to hang on to the various charms of Vietnamese pastoral life - riding on buffalo-back, flying kites, chasing grasshoppers across ricefields - and to pursue his idealistic dream of education for all Vietnamese children. During the awakening brought about by the 1968 Tet offensive, the family were caught between Government helicopters shelling their farmstead on the one hand, and VC guerrillas on the other, whose wounded he and his brother had to help evacuate.

The author gives vivid descriptions of his life in communist jails, where the common diet consisted of plants, tubers, and crickets, and obedience to the work-detail guards was imperative. Whether watching a fellow prisoner die of a snakebite, preparing rat traps, helping bury the dead, or taking part in the defense against Cambodian raiders, Jade found his courage and optimism sustained by thoughts of family support and, notably, by the love of his parents and siblings. He nurtured hatred for the regime that sent him to remote camps for "education in communist ideology and psychological and physical retraining," and he contemplated every possible means of revenge.

When he was finally able to escape, thanks to the sympathy of Chu Tu, a dedicated communist cadre who had fought the French invaders, Jade lived the life of a real fugitive, battling starvation and planning a getaway overseas. His second escape, however - together with 124 boat people - took him only to Thailand, following several perilous encounters with pirates. The aid of honest plain peasants helped sustain him until he was finally permitted to leave the refugee camp for the United States. He has since lived in Tennessee, Mississippi, and California and has driven across the entire country. He finally settled in Vermont, where American hosts helped him enroll at Bennington College. He worked his way through college in the truest sense of the expression: learning how to make hamburgers at McDonald's, clean bathrooms, wash dishes, and work in electronic factories. His English studies and his love for British and American literature prepared him well for a writer's career.

Though his writings were far superior to the average sophomore or junior compositions, he has by no means become "a fine writer," as Elle magazine pretends. Indeed, South Wind Changing's appeal is due mostly to its content, a deeply moving human story - one which, incidentally, every Indochinese refugee (Vietnamese, Lao, or Khmer) could turn out with proper prompting and ghost editing. Jade's English style can still be further honed, and better familiarity with classical and modern Vietnamese literature - as well as with his mother tongue in terms of cultural literacy - would take him very far indeed among the ranks of Asian American writers. That will come, but it will take time.

Dinh-Hoa Nguyen Southern Illinois University, Carbondale