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One woman’s story of tenacity and faith, Anne sits before a
bonsai tree created by her mother, its branches decorated with yellow paper flowers fashioned by her brother Francois.
The sister who would not give up –
a conversation with Anne Nguyen Thi Ham-Tieu, sister of Archbishop Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and just named by the Pope as a cardinal-designate. Story by
Dan McAloon
In multicultural Australia there are a million immigrant stories. While each story is unique all share the common element that in seeking to find a better life the immigrant
leaves behind home and country, sometimes forever.
For Anne Nguyen Thi Ham-Tieu, 60, leaving her homeland of Vietnam was not something she had planned to do. Born in the city of Wue, one of eight children in
a Catholic family with a long tradition of public and religious service, Anne’s arrival in Canberra in 1961 to work in the new South Vietnasmese embassy was to be the first step in a long diplomatic career.
“I always wanted to be in foreign affairs,” she says today, looking back at the young woman who came to Canberra with the first Vietnamese embassy. “I’d learned English and when the opportunity of the embassy job in
Australia came up, really, I thought I would be here for a while, just get the hang of it, and move on to another posting at home or elsewhere.”
But this was not to be. South Vietnam, a country created some
years before through the United Nations’ splitting Vietnam into north and south, had spiralled into a vicious civil war. Through her family Anne was directly linked to the dominant political figure of the day, the
conservative nationalist president Ngo Dinh Diem, an uncle on her maternal side.
As a Catholic in a Buddhist country, Diem’s hold on power was sustained by the powerful military backing of the US through
Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and a domestic population of refugees, most of whom were Catholic and who had left their homes in the north with the aid and encouragement of the United States.
By 1960
South Vietnam’s military, reinforced by US armaments and personnel, was locked in war with the emergent National Liberation Front (Viet Cong). Diem’s regime had polarised his people. By early 1963, Buddhist monks
were demonstrating by immolating themselves.
As the year wore on the Kennedy administration grew jaded with Diem, withdrawing its support from him and encouraging the army coup which deposed him. On November
1, 1963, President Diem and his brother were killed by the Vietnamese military who took over from him. As significant as his death was for the politics of Vietnam, within 11 days of Diem’s murder was overshadowed by
President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas
Anne says what she remembers most from those dark days is the trepidation she’d feel when the ABC radio news theme played before a news bulletin. “It was always
the worst news. The first report of my uncle’s death was that he had committed suicide, which being Catholic he could not think of.” The coup leaders would later revise cause of death to “accidental suicide”, as
reported in The Catholic Weekly at the time. “From the outset we knew he and his brother had surrendered peacefully to their captors and were killed later,” she says. In a letter that would change the course of her
life from that point on, the sister who had identified the president’s body, urged her to stay away as the situation under the new regime was dangerous for the family.
Her older brother Francois, a priest,
also urged her to stay in Australia where she might exert some influence on events. “He wrote to me, ‘Stay there, maybe one day you can save the family’.”
Her brother is well known today as Archbishop
Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, newly named by the Pope as a cardinal-designate. Yet at the time of writing neither brother nor sister could have guessed that
it would be Anne in the decades ahead who would be instrumental in leading the movement which would finally obtain the archbishop’s own freedom.
Anne did not return to Vietnam. Instead she studied political
science and languages at the Australian National University, and later became a school teacher. Lacking permanent residency, her status remained tenuous and had to be renewed annually. “Yes, I had a sense of
isolation being the only Vietnamese at the university, but I also had my faith and many friends in the Church. There was the support of the Australian bishops, of my local parish and the kindness of the Ursuline
nuns who took good care of me when I was at university.”
With the coming of the Whitlam government Anne’s 10 years of residency was recognised under a policy change which made her eligible for Australian
citizenship. In 1973 she was granted citizenship. “As soon as I got my citizenship I went back to see my parents. It was a very emotional time. I was there for Christmas and I spent a lot of time with my brother,
now a bishop, in his diocese. He was coming to Australia for a conference the following year and he saw me off at the airport with the words ‘I’ll see you next year in Australia’, but he never made it.”
Meanwhile she sponsored her parents’ migration to Australia. At the end of months of tense negoti-ations, they arrived safely in Sydney on Anzac Day 1975, five days before Saigon, capital of South Vietnam fell to
the communists. Within a few months Anne learned that her brother, appointed Archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City by the Pope, had been jailed by the communists. He was to spend the next 13 years in captivity, mostly in
isolation. Throughout his long ordeal the one person who fought most tirelessly for his release was Anne.
“As long as I can remember my brother had wanted to be a priest. As a boy, in the drawer of his
bedside table he’d made a model of an altar in paper. He’d always been a role model of charity and kindness, a good man. I had to do what I could.”
The Australian Catholic Bishops gave the family their full
support. Anne remembers a Mass at Kensington to which she and her parents were invited. “That was very beautiful. The bishops gave such tremendous aid to my parents, who of course spoke no English.”
Years of
lobbying for the release of Archbishop Thuan followed. From many who helped, Anne recounts with gratitude the efforts of former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, who wrote to her personally saying he would do his best
to help. She is also indebted to the tireless work of Amnesty International and the International Society for Human Rights. “I went all over the world lobbying for his release and everywhere people were so kind. We
printed thousands of letters and petitions. I bought a lot of postcards printed with my brother’s photo, the kind that people in the post offices back in Vietnam would see uncensored.”
In 1984 she drew
strength from a “miraculous” series of events that led to her meeting John Paul II in the Vatican when one the Pope’s private secretaries, Mons Vincent Tran Ngoc Thu, arranged an audience at the last moment. Anne
wrote out a letter asking for the Pope’s prayers and intervention on behalf of her brother.
In 1988 Archbishop Thaun was released by the communists after 13 years spent in jail. At the Papal Nuncio’s
residence in Bangkok Anne was finally reunited with her big brother. It was a heartfelt meeting, the archbishop looking gaunt after the effects of his long imprisonment, Anne smiling broadly with pride. Looking back
on her life, Anne says she could not have predicted where Providence would lead her, or the inner strength she would require to survive and complete the tasks she felt compelled to undertake as a dutiful daughter
and sister.
But, she said: “Always there was the sustenance of my faith, often a sense of a guardian angel beside me.”
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