Tiếng Vọng Từ Hoả Lò        by Bùi Văn Phú  in Viet Tribune, November 30, 2007

Summary in English by Jean Libby, editor    VietAm Review

“Echo from Hoa Lo” by  Phu Bui, a student at UC Berkeley in 1981 and today a journalist and public school science teacher, was published in the Vietnamese language newspaper Viet Tribune on November 30, 2007. “Tiếng Vọng Từ Hoả Lò” is the story of the original event at Kroeber Hall on May 1, 1981, which discussed the plight of prisoners and the prison system in Communist Vietnam.

The students did this by arranging the event with the Amnesty International Campus Network, particularly Laola Hironaka.  They invited former prisoners from reeducuation camps who had made it to the United States as Boat People refugees to come. 

The students learned that the author of the anonymous poems “Tieng Vong Tu Day Vuc”, (Echo From the Abyss) which had surfaced among Vietnamese exiles in 1980 was Nguyen Chi Thien, still in prison in Hanoi at Hoa Lo.[1] They were the first to publicly proclaim him as the author with a recitation of his poems in Vietnamese and English translation, which was accomplished by Nguyen Khoa Thai Anh, another UC Berkeley student.  Phu Bui states:

From my part, before I made the layout for the flyer and produced the event program, I was very sure, with the help of Amnesty International, the author was Mr Nguyen Chi Thien. This name was on the flyer and the program of May 1. 1981.

In 1986 when AI launched the campaign on behalf of Mr Nguyen Chi Thien, the organization used the same photo as one on the cover of Hoa Lo / Hanoi Hilton Stories [published by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University in November 2007.]

Some of the poems which had been set to music by Pham Duy were performed by students who are pictured in the article with Nguyet Mehlert [2] of San Jose, who coached them for the performance.  The discussion with former prisoners took over two hours, well into the night.  The family of Phu Bui had a code of ordinary words sent in letters to and from Vietnam that had other meanings. 

The author Phu Bui describes the feelings of the students in creating the program just six years after the fall of Saigon.  The escape of Boat People had begun in 1978; by 1980 the Refugee Act [3] allowed admission of new exiles who would become Americans but were then suffering from the hardships of refugee camps in foreign Asian countries.  The audience at ViVo (Vietnamese Voluntary Foundation, Inc.) on November 17, 2007, was also reminded that Vietnam was at war again, with Cambodia and China, in 1979 when the young poet Nguyen Chi Thien bravely and brashly took his manuscript into the British Embassy in Hanoi and asked that his poems be published “in your free country.”[4]  The Vietnamese war with Cambodia was continuous for ten years between 1978 and 1988.   

The date of the 1981 program at UC Berkeley was May 1 – International Labor Day.  This date, which is commemorated in Europe but not in the United States, was an important one in the memories of the students and other émigrés.  Nguyen Khoa Thai Anh, now a high school civics teacher in San Francisco, read a legend in Vietnamese which advocates rights for labor freedom with a government call to the people to sacrifice.  Professor Nguyen Van Canh, then at Hoover Institution at Stanford University, cited parallels between the Land Reform of 1955 and 1956 in North Vietnam which “killed many capitalists” to the recent program (1977 and 1978) that had been applied to South Vietnam after defeat by the Communist regime. 

Poems by Nguyen Chi Thien chosen for singing (which was in Vietnamese) and for recitation in 1981 included the sardonic “I could eat tons of raw manioc/crunching them just like chocolate/Worse that pigs, you must think of me/I’m living in a VC jail”[5] which was published by QueMe in 1982.  The students also chose some about ordinary people:  “That woman, sixty years of age/But why can’t she be permitted to sell yams?/That man, seventy-two years of age/But why can’t he be spared of the tiresome meetings?” [6]  Not knowing the author, as they have the privilege 26 years later, they could not realize he was writing of his own parents, who died in 1970 and 1976.  They could only feel their own sorrow at leaving elderly relatives in Communist Vietnam upon evacuation while they were still children on April 30, 1975.

Phu Bui has traveled to Hanoi and been drawn to the Hoa Lo prison museum.  He writes that the reeducation camps are closed and the inmates relocated to other prisons.  There is still need for attention to human rights in Vietnam and for Prisoners of Conscience throughout the world.

Original article in Vietnamese:  

http://www.viettribune.com/vt/index.php?id=1679

Gratitude to phocDiem Truong of San Jose for translation