to the tiger cages, but I’ve made acquaintance with you through my mother, your letters to her, and the newspapers. I still remember the gentleman who spoke with me. I don’t know his name, but he seemed very nice. If you happen to meet him, please remember me kindly to him. [The gentleman was Tom Harkin, who was himself elected to Congress in 1974 as a representative from Iowa.]
I think that you are well informed about my conditions of living. Like more than a hundred of thousands of political prisoners in South Vietnam, I’m suffering a hell on earth. For six years in prison, I have lost health, knowledge, intelligence, memory. I’m ashamed to admit that you know Vietnamese better than I know English. Six years constantly seeking for affronting torments and repressions, seeking for the way to be able to live in peace, but not a minute serene!
And in the result, I’ve been sent to the Bien-Hoa lunatic asylum. Here I read you and write to you. It’s really a great comfort for me, but a strain too. I can’t concentrate for a long time.
I’m longing for hearing from you soon.
Cordially yours,
Thieu Thi Tao
That letter is sane if anything is sane. But it is nevertheless a letter about insanity.
Thieu Thi Tao is the age of my children, and a thousand years older. She has suffered paralysis. She has felt her mind slip away. Her sister contracted tuberculosis.
And the money that trained the men who tortured her, the dollars that kept her in a cage, came from my country. They were American tax dollars. The brand name proudly printed on her shackles is Smith & Wesson. The cage she lived in was very likely made in America.
Thieu Thi Tao is one of thousands, tens of thousands, who are subjected to this brutality.
She is a political prisoner. A prisoner of politics. The politics of the United States of America, which supports this most corrupt and most cruel regime. There lies the real insanity.
Thieu Thi Tao modestly asks to be remembered kindly to her American friend. I ask that you remember her and that in your kindness you demand of your representatives in Congress an end to her confinement, an end of support for the government that has made her life a hell on earth, an end of our insanity.
—1974
I had a letter from Don Luce the other day (January 1997). He had new information about Thieu Thi Tao. His ’97 letter reads: “She is now an agricultural scientist/botanist. She is married and has one daughter. She still has to wear a neck brace because of being hung from a hook as ‘punishment’ 25 years ago … The people who were in the cages have a club of former prisoners and meet regularly (and often challenge present policies)…”
Conversations in Moscow
As I live my talky, asking, and answering life in the United States, I often remember the First Amendment, how pleasant it’s been to me and how useful to my country. I was taught to love it and wonder at its beauty by my parents, prisoners once of the Czar. And I do love it, though I also love literature, and it has made our literature one of the most lively and useless in the world. Of course, it’s been good to write letters to the newspapers. Some are published. It has been pleasing to stand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and hand out informational pamphlets, leaflets of protest, to assemble in rage a couple of times a year with tens of thousands of others.
The elected or appointed leaders of our country have often applauded our enactment of these freedoms. They were then able (with clear consciences) to undertake and sustain the awful wars we spoke and assembled against for ten years.
In October, as a delegate to the World Peace Congress from the War Resisters League, I visited the Soviet Union, where a different situation exists. Literature is taken very seriously. Poets and storytellers are dealt with as though their work had an important political life. But a Russian cannot distribute a dissenting leaflet to other
I think that you are well informed about my conditions of living. Like more than a hundred of thousands of political prisoners in South Vietnam, I’m suffering a hell on earth. For six years in prison, I have lost health, knowledge, intelligence, memory. I’m ashamed to admit that you know Vietnamese better than I know English. Six years constantly seeking for affronting torments and repressions, seeking for the way to be able to live in peace, but not a minute serene!
And in the result, I’ve been sent to the Bien-Hoa lunatic asylum. Here I read you and write to you. It’s really a great comfort for me, but a strain too. I can’t concentrate for a long time.
I’m longing for hearing from you soon.
Cordially yours,
Thieu Thi Tao
That letter is sane if anything is sane. But it is nevertheless a letter about insanity.
Thieu Thi Tao is the age of my children, and a thousand years older. She has suffered paralysis. She has felt her mind slip away. Her sister contracted tuberculosis.
And the money that trained the men who tortured her, the dollars that kept her in a cage, came from my country. They were American tax dollars. The brand name proudly printed on her shackles is Smith & Wesson. The cage she lived in was very likely made in America.
Thieu Thi Tao is one of thousands, tens of thousands, who are subjected to this brutality.
She is a political prisoner. A prisoner of politics. The politics of the United States of America, which supports this most corrupt and most cruel regime. There lies the real insanity.
Thieu Thi Tao modestly asks to be remembered kindly to her American friend. I ask that you remember her and that in your kindness you demand of your representatives in Congress an end to her confinement, an end of support for the government that has made her life a hell on earth, an end of our insanity.
—1974
I had a letter from Don Luce the other day (January 1997). He had new information about Thieu Thi Tao. His ’97 letter reads: “She is now an agricultural scientist/botanist. She is married and has one daughter. She still has to wear a neck brace because of being hung from a hook as ‘punishment’ 25 years ago … The people who were in the cages have a club of former prisoners and meet regularly (and often challenge present policies)…”
Conversations in Moscow
As I live my talky, asking, and answering life in the United States, I often remember the First Amendment, how pleasant it’s been to me and how useful to my country. I was taught to love it and wonder at its beauty by my parents, prisoners once of the Czar. And I do love it, though I also love literature, and it has made our literature one of the most lively and useless in the world. Of course, it’s been good to write letters to the newspapers. Some are published. It has been pleasing to stand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue and hand out informational pamphlets, leaflets of protest, to assemble in rage a couple of times a year with tens of thousands of others.
The elected or appointed leaders of our country have often applauded our enactment of these freedoms. They were then able (with clear consciences) to undertake and sustain the awful wars we spoke and assembled against for ten years.
In October, as a delegate to the World Peace Congress from the War Resisters League, I visited the Soviet Union, where a different situation exists. Literature is taken very seriously. Poets and storytellers are dealt with as though their work had an important political life. But a Russian cannot distribute a dissenting leaflet to other
Similar Books
