Having Freedom to Write Stories of Oppression : Vietnamese Author Recounts Hardships of His Homeland

Santa Ana writer Bui Nhat Tien, 50, does not look like a man who has been through hell.

But the mild-mannered novelist, who won Vietnam’s National Literature Award in 1961 and served as vice chair of South Vietnam’s PEN Club from 1965 until the 1975 Communist takeover, carries harrowing memories of his escape from his country.

Known among Vietnamese readers simply as Nhat Tien, he has written 10 novels and 11 collections of short stories. He’s also written one nonfiction account of how he and others seeking to escape Vietnam by sea survived vicious attacks by pirates in 1979 and 1980.

“Pirates on the Gulf of Siam,” which has been translated into English, is a compilation of testimony about the torture and murder of boat people trying to reach sanctuary. It was co-written with writers Duong Phuc and Vu Thanh Thuy and published in 1981 by the San Diego-based Boat People SOS Committee, a refugee-assistance group.

Since arriving in the United States in 1980, Nhat Tien has also written two short story collections, “Tieng Ken” (“Sound of a Trumpet”) (1982) and “Mot Thoi Dang Qua” (“A Period Is Passing By”) (1985).

“Nobody can make a living by writing these stories” about Vietnamese in Southeast Asia and the United States, Nhat Tien said. Yet he’s impelled to continue as “a way to preserve the culture, to transmit the message” of Vietnamese roots from one generation to another.

Many writers would be satisfied at having written three books and seen them into print in 6 1/2 years, particularly while settling into a foreign country, starting to learn a new language and acquiring new job skills.

But Nhat Tien is not content with his literary output. In Vietnam before 1975, he wrote one book a year, he said.

Here he must find what little writing time he can in between his daytime job, family life and political activities. In June, he organized Project Deliverance, a group of 15 people, mostly Vietnamese now in this country, to help refugees living in the Dong Ruk relocation camp in Thailand near the border of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (Cambodia).

The group, which writes articles about refugees’ problems and letters to U.S. and Thai politicians and the United Nations, was the inspiration for a UC Irvine class geared to helping refugees still in Southeast Asia.

Married to fellow short-story writer Do Phuong Khanh since 1954, Nhat Tien and his wife have seven children. Two live with the couple, along with Do’s parents.

Both writers work in the computer repair department of an Anaheim electronics company. Nhat Tien, who works Monday through Saturday, can write only during late-night hours and on Sundays.

He writes mostly fiction rather than non-fiction, he said, because “the people who are resettled here--if they read (their undisguised stories), they’d remember” and be hurt.

In Vietnam, Nhat Tien was a high school physics and chemistry teacher as well as an author. The Communists allowed him to continue teaching, but he was forbidden to write.

“It was very dangerous to be writing at this time,” Nhat Tien said. “The policy of the new government (was that) every book--even just a dictionary--nobody can keep inside the house (because) every book has an idea inside it that does not fit into the new regime.”

Nhat Tien’s home library of 2,000 books was taken away from him, he said.

“If they found out I am writing something like this one,” he said, holding up the manuscript pages of “One Day on Ko Kra,” an excerpt from the diary he kept during a particularly tormented part of his journey from Vietnam, “they could put me in jail.”

While he could not write short stories, Nhat Tien could write poems. “I would write them and hide them (under furniture in his house), but I could feel safety only one or two hours” after hiding the pages. So after a while, “I put them in the fire” rather than risk discovery if a security officer should unexpectedly search his house, he said.

Nhat Tien’s three sons escaped from Vietnam on boats in 1975 and 1979. In October, 1979, he and two daughters boarded a small boat with 78 other people and also set off for Malaysia. (Five months later, his wife and two other daughters left Vietnam on another boat.)

Nhat Tien’s group of refugees never reached its destination. Bad weather forced the boat into the Gulf of Thailand, where the engine died. Drifting for 10 days, the party ran out of food and water. Then they were repeatedly attacked by Thai fishermen, who first robbed and then assaulted them, according to Nhat Tien’s account of the journey in the “Pirates” book.

Later the fishermen towed Nhat Tien’s boat to Ko Kra Island, just off the coast of Thailand, and dismantled it, leaving the refugees on the island. Different bands of fishermen returned at intervals to torture the men while interrogating them about any valuables they might have hidden on the island and to rape the women.

The “Pirates” book also tells how other groups of Vietnamese were brought to the island, where Nhat Tien’s group was kept for 21 days before being rescued by a navy patrol boat directed by a U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees representative. The refugees were taken to Songkhla, a Thai refugee camp.

Their troubles were not over, however, for some Thai pirates made raids into the camp to intimidate potential witnesses against them and to continue raping the women, Nhat Tien said. Nevertheless, many of the Vietnamese, including Nhat Tien, testified against seven pirates who were brought to trial.

Nhat Tien said that the Thai government didn’t release the results of that drawn-out trial and that he doesn’t know if the pirates were ever convicted.

Today Nhat Tien, who became a U.S. citizen in October, is deeply involved with Project Deliverance and Boat People SOS, which funds rescue operations of refugees in the South China Sea.

“The (number of) boat people is diminished, less than some years before,” Nhat Tien said, but “as long as communism stay in my country, boat people continue to escape.” However, based on what he hears in the Vietnamese community, Nhat Tien said, he estimates only 10% to 20% of those who set out from Vietnam reach their destination.

Bringing about change in refugees’ situations is “very hard,” but “you have to continue to work (for the refugees) because you feel better than do nothing,” he said.

Nhat Tien said he hopes that more of his writing will be translated into English so Americans can read it and understand the situation of the Vietnamese clearly.

“A Period Is Passing By,” which has been published only in Vietnamese, contains a number of stories about Vietnamese life in the United States, Nhat Tien said. “When they (Vietnamese) come in, they get in a lot of trouble” adjusting to the new country.

Other tales are set in Vietnam. In one such story, “A Holy Bag,” Nhat Tien tells of a Buddhist woman in North Vietnam in the late 1940s who gives her husband a silk bag that’s been blessed in the temple. She believes that the bag can keep the man safe while he fights the French. However, the husband is killed in battle, and a friend takes the bag home.

Later the woman gives the pouch to her son before he goes off to fight the South Vietnamese in the early 1960s, but he, too, dies and the bag is again returned.

When the woman’s grandson is drafted into the war against Cambodia in the late 1970s, he refuses to take the holy bag. “The grandson, he sees clearly the fate of the Vietnamese people, and he tries to find a way to stop the war,” Nhat Tien said. The story ends with the young soldier being sent off to fight but planning to escape from the army to seek refuge in Thailand.

Nhat Tien, who is also the unpaid editor of Tuoi Hoa, a magazine for Vietnamese teen-agers for which his wife also writes, wants to write a novel about “families who become enemies because they belong to two different systems” within Vietnam.

When they’re available, his books sell well within the Vietnamese community. His last book of stories, published in Vietnamese in an edition of 2,000 by private investors, is now out of print.

Some of Nhat Tien’s stories have been published in Vietnamese-language magazines and newspapers in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. Four have been translated into English.

“The thing that strikes me most about Nhat Tien’s style,” said translator James Banerian of San Diego, “is his tendency to describe rather simple, ordinary folk and to sort of speak for the conscience of his people. His stories strike the emotions very well.”

Banerian included his translation of one Nhat Tien story, “A Pot of Gruel,” in his anthology, “Vietnamese Short Stories: An Introduction” (Sphinx Publishing, 1986).

Banerian noted that Vietnamese literature is seldom translated into English and receives little attention in this country. “It’s just sort of sad . . . we don’t seem to think that they (Vietnamese) as a people are important and we should be listening to them,” he said.

“Nhat Tien was a famous writer in Vietnam,” said Tan Le, vice president of the Vietnamese Student Assn. at UCI.

Le, who read some of Nhat Tien’s work when he was a young boy in Saigon, said: “I still remember one of his stories, called ‘The Bird Is Singing in Its Cage,’ which was very moving.

“Nhat Tien is one of the writers who writes very realistically. What happens in his stories happened in Vietnam--he’s not abstract at all!”

Today Nhat Tien says, apparently without irony, that he was “lucky” to have lived for several years under Vietnam’s Communist regime.

“A Vietnamese writer who came here in 1975 cannot write about a Communist officer, because he cannot imagine” what such a person is really like, he said, smiling. “But I have five years under communism, so I can write it.

“That was lucky--suffering, but lucky!”

(excerpt): T he old man took some matches from his pocket and lit one in front of him. The flame lasted only a moment, but it was long enough for him to observe the face of the woman. He was aghast, as if he himself had been caught red-handed in some improper action. The woman he recognized was not a stranger to the hamlet. Her husband had been an officer in the military hospital nearby. Although Old Quoi had not been in the army at the time, he had once been taken to that clinic in an emergency. The old gentleman never forgot the kind face of the young officer breezing through the room, skipping over formalities to help this new patient in his plight. Later, after his release, Old Quoi took his wife to the camp for military families so that both of them could shake his hand. The officer smiled amiably and would not let him say much. He was always busy. You might even see him at times filling a jeep with his wife and children and taking them to market. To the eyes of all, this was a happy family, with a young wife, lovely as a flower, and five pretty children following after like a flock of chicks.

But then came the great disaster. The husband was sent to a re-education camp. His wife was driven from the camp for military families to live with her children in a field under a makeshift tent with others in similar circumstances. From a captain’s wife she had become a thief tearing through hedges, exposed in the tiny light of a match, which, though showing her face for only an instant, nonetheless revealed her life’s shame . . . .

--From ‘A Pot of Gruel,’ by Nhat Tien, from his ‘Vietnamese Short Stories: An Introduction,’ Sphinx Publishing, 1986.