A List
4/18/05

'FAMILY WOUND' AUTHOR TO SPEAK AT ST. LAWRENCE EVENT

CANTON -- The Friends of Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries at 
St. Lawrence University will celebrate the publication of The Family 
Wound, a novel by Assistant Professor of English Ngoc Quang Huynh, 
with a public reception on Friday, April 29, at 4 p.m. in the Josephine 
Young Room of Owen D. Young Library. Huynh will speak at the event, 
which is open to the public, free of charge.
	The Family Wound, Huynh's first novel, 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." 
Starborn Books, Wales, recently published the book.
	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.

-30-
Back To News Releases
Back to St. Lawrence Homepage