On Nov. 1 1995, Nguyen Chi Thien, one of the most respected Vietnamese poets, arrived in the U.S. with warm welcome and admiration from family members, friends and Vietnamese in the San Francisco area.
The 56 year old poet is known not only for his literary talent, but also for the sacrifices he has been willing to endure to speak out on behalf of his fellow-sufferers. He has paid a price of 32 years in communist prisons and seriously deteriorating health.
Mr. Thien was first sent to jail in 1958 when the Vietnamese communist government repeated the Chinese campaign of "Hundred Flowers Blossom" to discover and purge dissenting elements. Mr. Thien and other young writers, nevertheless, published their own papers pointing out serious wrongdoing committed by the government, especially during the Land Reform Campaign a few years earlier. For that "crime," Mr. Thien was imprisoned for 20 years.
During these years, this political prisoner, as later revealed in some of his poems, endured the extreme hardships of various forced labor camps and the maddening loneliness of years in solitary confinement. Despite all efforts to strike down his spirit, Nguyen Chi Thien created and committed to memory more than 400 poems describing human lives under the inhuman regime. Upon his release in 1978, these poems were quickly transferred onto paper and hand-delivered to the British embassy with the request that they be widely disseminated abroad so the truth about the regime in Vietnam could be known to the world.
For this second "crime," Mr. Thien was sent back to prison and not released until 1991, under heavy international pressure. He was put under house arrest and constant surveillance to the day of his departure for the U.S.
Mr. Thien's poems have gained both love and respect from Vietnamese around the world. After a Yale University project to translate and publish his poems in Vietnamese and English, Mr. Thien has been internationally considered one of the best Vietnamese poets of this century. Many Vietnamese have been written with lyrics derived from these poems. And recently, a well-known Austrian musician, Dr. Guenter Mattitsch, put 14 of Nguyen Chi Thien's poems to music. The compositions were performed in Klagenfurt, Austria on Oct. 20, 1995.
During three hours at the San Francisco airport before flying on to the home of relative's in Washington D.C., Mr. Thien responded to a number of questions by the local press. When asked what he intends to do in the days ahead, the poet said he will have his health problems taken care of and continue his life-long "duty" of fighting for a better life for his fellow-Vietnamese. Opposing evils, he said, is the responsibility of human beings to the end of time. The poet's greatest wish is to witness the true beauty of justice in his country in the near future.
