Hien The Chu, born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, in 1966, left Vietnam in 1988 in a fishing boat overloaded with eighty-one people. After five days drifting in the Pacific Ocean, all eighty-one people were rescued and taken to Palawan Island in the Phillipines. These haunting stories depict Chu’s life in Vietnam, his imprisonment for trying to escape and finally his work as a Vietnamese-English translator in a refugee camp in the Phillipines. Chu shows us people living their lives at the extreme edge of affliction and suffering, where they invent remarkable ways of finding hope and spiritual strength.

"Black Market"
"Boat 52/110 Mindanao"
"Escape"
"Express Funeral"
"Fools"
"Green Chilies"
"New Year's Eve"
"The Prisoners of the Sea"

These stories are now published in the collection Rub Salt: Stories by Robert Charles Osborne, Peaches D. Ledwidge, Elizabeth Clark and Hien The Chu.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Edition: 1st Canadian ed.
Names: Chu, Hien The, 1966-
Publisher: Toronto: Life Rattle Press, 1996
Description: 51p.; 22cm
Series: Life rattle new writers series 1200 5266 4
Numbers: Canadiana: 979300223
ISBN: 978-0-9699507-3-X
Classification: LC Class no.: PS8555* LC Call no.:PS8555 H788 E96 1996 Dewey: C813/.54 21