A List
2/7/05

NOVEL BY SLU PROF, ACCLAIMED VIETNAMESE WRITER, PUBLISHED

CANTON – The Family Wound, a novel by St. Lawrence University Assistant 
Professor of English Ngoc Quang Huynh, has been published by Starborn Books, 
Wales. It is described as "a young Vietnamese woman's desperate search for 
inner peace after surviving the horrors of war and the corruption and 
violence left in its wake."
	The Friends of Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries will hold a 
celebration of the book's publication, featuring a talk by Huynh, on Friday, 
April 29, at 4 p.m. in the Josephine Young Room of Owen D. Young Library.
	Huynh was born in 1957 in South Vietnam. He attended Saigon University 
until he was thrown into a concentration camp simply, he says, for being 
a student. After a year of torture and extreme degradation he managed to 
escape, and eventually found a new life in America. His first book, the 
memoir South Wind Changing (Graywolf Press 1994), was named by Time 
magazine as a "best book."
	The Family Wound, while dealing with imprisonment, escape and flight 
to America, is fiction, with a young woman as the protagonist. She is in love 
with a student teacher, but her family forbids the union, and he vanishes; 
she is subsequently pressured by her mother to take a job with a corrupt 
Vietcong official. After suffering extreme abuse she finds herself accused 
of murder and is forced to flee. The central portion of the book is a kind 
of inner journey with touches of magic realism, and marks the transition or 
emancipation from the "old" world of Vietnamese tradition, culture and 
society to the "new" world of the United States where she eventually comes to 
live. But the past, with all its pain and guilt, is a wound that will not 
heal, until at last, not without further tragedy, she finds her way to a 
kind of peace.
	Huynh spoke no English when he arrived in the United States in 1978. 
After a series of factory and cleaning jobs, he went on to complete a bachelor's 
degree at Bennington College and earned the M.F.A. at Brown University. 
He attended Cardiff University in Wales for his doctoral program, and taught 
at several colleges before joining the St. Lawrence faculty in the fall of 
2004. Huynh is co-editor of the 2001 book Voices of Vietnamese Boat People: 
Nineteen Narratives of Escape and Survival and a National Endowment for the 
Arts and Vermont Arts Council Fellow.

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