Nguyễn Chí Thiện, born in 1939 in Hanoi, Vietnam, is a dissident poet who spent a total of twenty-seven years in prison.
Thien was educated in private academies and was a supporter of Viet Minh revolutionaries in his early life. In 1960, however, he challenged the official account of World War II - that the Soviet Union had defeated the Imperial Army of Japan in Manchuria, ending the war - while teaching a high school history class. Thien told the class that the United States defeated Japan when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and served three years and six months in reeducation camps. Thien began composing poems in prison and committed them to memory. After a brief release in 1966, he was jailed again for composing politically irreverent poems. He denied the charges, and spent another eleven years and five months in labor camps.[1]
In 1977, two years after Saigon fell, Thien and other political prisoners were released to make room for officers of the Republic of Vietnam. Thien used the opportunity of his release to write out his memorized poems.
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. He was imprisoned yet again, this time in the "Hanoi Hilton", Hoa Lo prison for six years, then six more years at other Communist prisons in northern Vietnam.
During his imprisonment, Thien’s poems, translated into English by Huỳnh Sanh Thông of Yale, won the International Poetry Award in Rotterdam in 1985. He was adopted as a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International in 1986. Twelve years after bringing his manuscript to the British Embassy, he was released from jail. 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 also 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 following internment in Heart Mountain camp for Japanese Americans in 1945.
He immediately wrote Hoa Dia Nguc II, poems composed in his memory (not allowed pen and paper) from 1979 to 1988. They were published in bilingual editions, then complete in Vietnamese in 2006.
In 1998 Nguyen Chi Thien was awarded a fellowship from the International Parliament of Writers. He lived in France for three years, writing the Hoa Lo Stories, prose narrative of his experiences in prison. These were translated and published in English as the Hoa Lo / Hanoi Hilton Stories by Yale Southeast Asia Studies in 2007.
Thien's original manuscript was returned to him in early 2008 by the widow of Prof. Patrick Honey of the University of London, who had shared the material with many Vietnamese exiles, but always guarded the original work.