Word: jade
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...Maya filed their teeth (it's unclear whether they used an anesthetic), sometimes into a T shape and sometimes to a point. They also inlaid their teeth with small, round plaques of jade or pyrite. According to Coe, young men painted themselves black until marriage and later engaged in ritual tattooing and scarring...
...pepper. When he smiles, crinkles arc downward from his hazel eyes. He wears loose vests even though there doesn't seem to be any pudge to hide. Otherwise, there's nothing flashy about him: just a pair of old Timberlands on his feet, a wedding ring with a tiny jade heart on his hand and that cheeky irreverence well known to fans of the Fab Four...