Patch Xiong just published his first book!
Check out the articles at
Hmong Today
http://www.hmongtoday.com/PatchXiong.aspx
&
Asian American Express
http://aapress.com/ethnicity/hmong/patch-xiong-publishes-first-novel/
Check out his website
http://patchxiong.com/
Dead Promise
Author: Patch Xiong
Infinity Publishing: $12.95
Inspired by a Hmong folktale, Dead Promise, the first novel from St. Paul resident Patch Xiong is a tragic love story about a young couple torn by family and war.
Xiong learned a tragic love story from his late father, about a young couple during the Vietnam War. An orphan, Cheng, is determined to be with the girl of his dreams, PaNou, the daughter from a wealthy family and outside of his social standing. Their story is of love and pain – two faces of one coin.
Dead Promise follows their budding romance as their world and their lives crumble around them as the Hmong people fight in the Secret CIA War. Cheng must decide to whether to fight or to stay with the love of his life.
Xiong states that as a boy, his father would coax him to massage his calves with stories of Hmong folklore. After he was gone, Xiong said it was his obligation to document this story as his legacy. His father’s stories were what kept him going during his own darkest moments, he adds.
Patch Xiong was born in Laos, and at two months his family escaped to Thailand where they lived at Ban Vinai Refugee Camp until coming to Minnesota as refugees when he was 4 years old. He studied computer programming until his family moved to Alaska following the sudden loss of his father in 2001, where he completed a business degree from Alaska Pacific University.
Xiong is a founding member of Alaska Writer’s Guild, an organization dedicated to helping published and unpublished writers. He returned to St. Paul in 2008, and is currently working on three upcoming novels, Rainflower; ILLUME: Land of Light; and Sweet Toothpaste.
Dead Promise is available online at infinitypublishing.com, bbotw.com and amazon.com.
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Some people call it insanity, some people call it an active imagination but Patch Xiong calls it fate. On a night when he was going to commit suicide he was saved by a woman. This woman was Pa Nou, a character based on a short story he had imagined in his head, a story based on a Hmong folklore his father told him as a child and Pa Nou told him he couldn’t die or her story would die too. Dead Promise was recently published in late December of last year and it is the book based on Pa Nou, the woman who literally saved Xiong’s life.
This is just the story within the story however; a story that has come full circle. And to fully understand it, one has to start at the beginning.
“My father was the greatest storyteller I ever knew,” said Xiong, “He would always tell me Hmong folklores as a child to bribe me to massage his calves.”
And so it was that Xiong grew up with his father’s stories in his mind and writing his own stories for hobby while graduating from Minneapolis Business College with an Associates in Computer Programming.
“I had just graduated and was 20 years old,” said Xiong. “I met a girl and we were going to get married. Her family lived in California and so my father and I went there to negotiate the dowry. The first day we spent in California was all about the dowry negotiation and it went very well. The second day we went to a water park. I remember it was a gorgeous afternoon and so my father told us to take a picture of him and as soon as the camera snapped my father just fell.”
Xiong’s father would later be pronounced dead at the hospital.
“I was so traumatized and I turned to my fiancé and I told her she didn’t have to come back with me if she didn’t want to. But she said she wanted to be with me and so we came back to Minnesota but then nobody would pick us up because of what happened. People labeled us bad luck and we were basically kicked out of the family.”
After being homeless for a brief period after being kicked out, the couple decided to move to Alaska to try to start over. Things wouldn’t end up going well though, as after 5 years of marriage his wife left him and she joined the Army.
“I hit rock bottom after she left me. I was depressed. I thought about killing myself every day. I was seeing two psychiatrists but that didn’t help. One day I decided I was going to finally do it and kill myself. I wondered if I should overdose or shoot myself and then that’s when it happened that I saw Pa Nou. She came to my room and spoke to me. I know it sounds crazy but it happened. She told me I couldn’t die or her story would die too.”
So Xiong decided to live, and he started writing Pa Nou’s story, a story about a young couple torn apart by war, the story that would eventually become his recently released book Dead Promise.
Maybe it’s crazy that Xiong saw a character from his imagination literally talk to him, or just part of an active imagination or fate in some way. Whatever the reason is, it’s pretty amazing the son of a storyteller would have his life saved by the stories he was once told and in turn would become a storyteller too.
To buy a copy of Dead Promise, visit Amazon.com, Buybooksontheweb.com or visit Patchxiong.com.
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