Nguyen Chi Thien
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nguyen Chi Thien, born in 1939 in Hanoi, Vietnam is a dissident poet who spent a total of twenty-seven years in imprisonment.
Thien started school in private academies. After the defeat of the French in 1954 he cheered the Viet Minh revolutionaries as they also returned to the city, proud to invite soldiers home to supper. In December, 1960 Thien unwittingly stepped over the line while covering the high school class of a sick friend.
Thien noticed the history textbook taught that the Soviet Union had defeated the Imperial Army of Japan in Manchuria, bringing an end to World War II. He told his students the United States defeated Japan when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nguyen Chi Thien paid for this remark with three years and six months in reeducation camps, on a sentence of two years. He met other literary men in jail, composed poems in his head and learned them by heart. In 1966 he was returned to prison after a short release.
This time the police charged him with composing politically irreverent poems that circulated in Ha Noi and Hai Phong. He denied it, and spent another eleven years and five months in labor camps.
Authorities never brought him to trial, for lack of evidence, but they had the right man. The tubercular youth had become an outlaw whose every step and breath counted the beat of verses, poetry against oppression. In 1977, two years after Saigon fell, Thien and other political prisoners were released to make room for officers of the Republic of Vietnam. He had been composing poems all the while, and now seized the opportunity of freedom to write them down and bring his art to the world.
Two days after Bastille Day, on July 16, 1979, Thien dashed into the British Embassy at Hanoi with his manuscript of four hundred poems. He had prepared a cover letter in French, but the embassy of France was too closely guarded.
British diplomats welcomed him and promised to send his manuscript out of the country. When he got out of the Embassy, security agents waited for him at the gate. Dragged to Hoa Lo prison, the famous Ha Noi Hilton now empty of US flyers, he spent another twelve years in jail and prison camps, often in stocks in solitary darkness.
While the author lay in irons, Thien’s poems won the International Poetry Award in Rotterdam in 1985. Six years later the poet was released from jail, as the socialist world collapsed in 1991. He lived in Hanoi under close watch by the authorities, but his international following also kept an eye on Thien.
Human Rights Watch honored him in 1995. That year he emigrated to the United States, due to the intervention of Noburo Masuoka, retired Air Force colonel, a career military officer who was drafted into the U.S. Army from an internment camp for Japanese Americans in 1945.
