Shipwrecked in Vermont

By John Skow

A little over 10 years ago, a beat-up '67 Pontiac Firebird with California plates rumbled into Bennington, Vermont, and died. The driver was a 26-year- old Vietnamese refugee, a re-education camp survivor who a few years earlier, on his third try, had escaped from Vietnam by boat. In the U.S. he had taken to calling himself Jade because Americans could not pronounce Ngoc Quang Huynh. With him were two teenage brothers and a nephew. They were headed not to Vermont but simply "east," to find a place to settle. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, sheltering in a church basement, Jade had a bad dream and decided to move on. The old buildings of Buffalo, New York, were depressing. Albany was O.K. but didn't feel right.

The dying car chose Bennington. Jade put a $230 deposit on a shabby apartment and paid $5 for a hot plate at the Salvation Army. He had $10 left. He got the teenagers enrolled at Mount Anthony High School. An adviser there helped him with college applications. His English was shaky, but Bennington College gave him a full scholarship. He studied English and American literature: The Waste Land, Dover Beach, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. He read Shakespeare and daydreamed about writing books. When he graduated after three years, he had managed to write, in formal and rather literary English, the first draft of a haunting memoir of his youth in Vietnam.

This remarkable account, reworked and eased of learner's stiffness, is now published as South Wind Changing (Graywolf Press; 320 pages; $20). The author's childhood was pastoral and amazingly peaceful. Although an older brother was a military pilot, the war at first did not touch the island in the Mekong Delta where his large, prosperous family grew rice. But fighting swept through with the Tet offensive of 1968, when Jade was 12, and afterward "the war continued on and off like a chronic disease." He had passed his university exams when the North won its victory and the Americans flew away, and therefore, as a suspect intellectual, he was sentenced to a re-education camp. Brutality in the camp was casual and causeless; what was learned in addition to parroted Marxist self-criticism was fear, hunger and aching homesickness. Jade and the others trapped rats for their guards' suppers and stayed alive by holding back some of the meat.

Opportunity for escape came in the form of a strange, dreamlike journey in which Jade helped a wounded prison guard reach a hospital (where North Vietnamese doctors shrugged and amputated a nearly healed leg). Jade managed to slip away into the chaos of a broken society. A boyhood friend sheltered him, and they scrabbled to find money for an escape by boat to Thailand. Twice they were turned back. Before the third attempt was successful, pirates boarded their boat, stole everything and raped the women. Jade and one of his brothers found their way to a refugee camp and spent months becalmed there, far down a long list of prospective emigres to the U.S. Then their pilot brother, whom they had thought dead, sent a letter and money; he was already in the U.S.

Years later, safe in Vermont, but tormented by the thought that he may never see his parents in Vietnam, he wrote, "I sat on the hill, surrounded by trees in their spring blossom, looking over the pond at Bennington College, listening to the gentle voice of Arturo Vivante blending with the morning air as he lectured on Tolstoy's great novel War and Peace. I felt like one of the characters."