Hoa lo / Hanoi Hilton Stories (Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monographs) - Softcover

Thien, Nguyen Chi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0938692895 ISBN 13: 9780938692898

Publisher: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 2007

Synopsis

Nguyen Chi Thien crafts seven stories in prose from his experience at the Hanoi Central Prison the infamous Hanoi Hilton where he spent six of a total of twenty-seven years of imprisonment in Communist Vietnam. Poetic testaments to the human spirit, this collection is further legacy of a great literary talent.

About this title

About the Author:

During the roughly fifteen years spent as a political prisoner in Vietnamese labor camps from 1960 to 1977, Nguyen Chi Thien composed hundreds of poems. Released following the fall of Saigon, Thien delivered a manuscript of these poems to the British Embassy in Hanoi. He was arrested at the gate and taken to Hoa Lo - the well known Hanoi Hilton Prison, where he spent six of an additional twelve years of imprisonment, often in solitary confinement. During this time, his collection of vivid poems, known as Hoa Dia-Nguc began to circulate in two Vietnamese editions, and eventually overseas. Some of the poems were set to music and popularized by Vietnamese folksinger, Pham Duy. In 1984, a bilingual edition of the poems translated into English by Vietnamese literature scholar Huynh Sanh Thong, was published under the title Flowers from Hell, by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University. In 1985, while it was still unknown if he were alive or dead, Nguyen Chi Thien was awarded the International Poetry Prize in Rotterdam on the basis of this book. He was released from prison in 1991, and lived in Hanoi until 1995 when he emigrated to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 2004.
The Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies now undertakes the publication of a collection of Nguyen Chi Thien's prose - stories written about his years in Hoa Lo

Review:

"Totalitariansm creates hell on earth. In Nguyen Chi Thien, that hell has found its Dante. Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories is a tribute to the power of the human spirit over tyranny and of art over oblivion." ---Michael Lind, Senior Whitehead Fellow, the New American Foundation, Washington DC

"The austerity, menace, and extremity of long imprisonment under conditions that are calculated to defeat the spirit and body have the capacity to produce great literature....
a magical blend of...close observation of one's constrained surroundings and of one's interior life together with the lyricism that hopeless situations can, paradoxically, produce." ---James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0938692895
• ISBN 13: 9780938692898
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296