“Writers on writing aim for the heart”  by Mark Panek.  Review of Beyond Words, Asian Writers on their Work in the Daily Yomiuri Online, December 23, 2006. 

“When writers get it right, the particular becomes the familiar, and suddenly we find ourselves, say, locked in a dark prison cell somewhere in Vietnam secretly composing an anthology of poems in our heads along with the political prisoner-poet Nguyen Chi Thien.”

Mark Panek is the author of Gaijin Yokozuna: A Biography of Chad Rowan published by the University of Hawaii Press.  In a special to The Daily Yomiuri, Mr. Panek is reviewing a collection of 20 East Asian writers and poets edited by Frank Stewart and Brent Fujinaka which was published in Summer 2006.

"An Autobiography" by Nguyen Chi Thien, published in Beyond Words, Asian Writers on their Work is the first original work in English by the dissident poet who immigrated to the USA in 1995. 

The "Autobiography" was first published in Dan Duffy's Viet Nam Literature Project, which is where the editors at Manoa read the material and asked to publish it.  Mr. Duffy, the director of VNLP, featured Nguyen Chi Thien as his first author and arranged lectures for him at Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities.  Check it out at www.vietnamlit.org, which is permanently linked on this blog.

Congratulations to Mr. Nguyen Chi Thien on this academic approval of his first original work in English.  As his assistant for English language materials, I can attest that it is indeed his writing.  I prepared it first from hand-printed sheets by Mr. Thien on legal pads, then it was critiqued by Dan Duffy for his publication.  Following that, the lectures that Mr. Thien prepared for Yale University student lecture were transcribed onto disk by a friend in Westminster.  I was able to include whole sections of this original writing in the manuscript  for Manoa editor Brent Fujinaka, who edited it for the collection.  . 

Additionally, some portions of  "Phung  Cung," one of the stories written in Vietnamese for Nguyen Chi Thien's Hoa Lo Stories in 2000 and translated into English by Nguyen Kiem Phong of Canada, were included.  These were enhanced by interview by Jean Libby, which was transcribed verbatim.  Phung Cung was another Vietnamese poet who was imprisoned with Nguyen Chi Thien -- both without trial and both because of the political nature of their poetry by the Communist regime of Viet Nam.  Phung Cung was the author's best friend in life, and died in Hanoi in 1997.  The editors at Manoa were emphasizing the creative processes of the Asian writers in the collection; the experience of the two poets at Yen Bai Prison and Nguyen Chi Thien's memory of it brought new vitality to the original work. 

Thank you, Mark Panek, for responding to "An Autobiography" by Nguyen Chi Thien as a "writer who got it right."  There are copies of the full magazine available on Viet-Am Review editor Jean Libby's Internet Bookselling site.  You can find more information on http://www.atozproductions.com/Borderlands.html 

JL