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Hardy C. Wilcoxon

Hardy C. Wilcoxon has resided in China and Hong Kong and wrote about Vietnam for VQR following his time there. A graduate of Amherst and Yale University where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English, he is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Beijing Foreign Studies University.

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Vignettes of Vietnam

Winter 1995 | Essays

Smiles and politeness, the mollifying oils of Asia, flow as freely in Vietnam as in China, but beneath the civilities, life in Vietnam seems comparatively violent. Instructions on the door of our fancy Saigon hotel, The Rex, after some obscure moralizing ("Avoid smoking when lying") asked my wife and me if we wouldn't mind leaving our "poisons, explosives and inflammables" at home with our poultry.

Chinese Students and the Burden of the Past

Summer 1990 | Essays

Just hours before the tanks and armored personnel carriers clattered and blasted their way down Changan Avenue and into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, loudspeakers in the square crackled into life, and, as in Auden's "The Shield of Achilles," a "voice without a face" began repeatedly to declare, "in tones as dry and level as the place": Go home and save your life.