South Wind Changing

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.)

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 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.