Ton That Thien - Exile in Canada: 1975 -

Exile in Canada: 1975 -

Thien believed that without the leadership of President Diem, South Vietnam would be doomed and this conviction remained with him following the 1963 coup d’état. By early 1975 as it became apparent that the anti-communist South's fall was inevitable, he knew too well that under communist rule a normal life - particularly one of independent political discourse – would be impossible. Communist practice would require him to write a "confession" stating that he had betrayed his country and his people, and this was an act he could not accept. Due to his political background his daughter would not be allowed to access high school or university. He would have to undergo "socialist re-education" and would be barred from his journalism and teaching professions. Although assured by a man known to have connections with Hanoi that he would be "welcomed by the Revolution", the painful memories of Tet 1968 in Huế were still fresh in his mind and he made plans for an emergency evacuation. At the same time, he felt it was his duty to fight on to keep South Vietnam free as long as possible and remained until the fall of Saigon was imminent.

As the communist forces closed in on Saigon, Thien put his escape plan into effect: with the help of a foreign friend, he smuggled his family out of Vietnam to Paris. There, thanks to the connections of a brother-in-law, he was able to get asylum. The husband of a sister of his wife who had settled in Canada happened to be in Paris at that time and urged him to move there. Fluent in both French and English, with a good educational background and a great deal of professional experience, he had no difficulty finding employment and settling down in his new country.

Thien became a professor in linguistics at the Universite de Trois-Rivières, Québec. In these years he travelled extensively to academic conferences in Europe, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, China, the USSR, and Australia. He also served as a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and a senior visiting fellow at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1989 he wrote The Foreign Politics of the Communist Party of Vietnam: A Study of Communist Tactics, published by Crane Russak, New York. In 1990, a monograph was published in Singapore by the Information and Resource Centre titled "Ho Chi Minh a Nationalist? Ho Chi Minh and the Comintern". BBC Radio's Vietnam service occasionally invited him to make comments in the 1980s and 1990s as did BBC television for a documentary on Ho Chi Minh.

In 1992, Thien retired in Ottawa, Ontario and continued to write articles on Vietnamese affairs for Vietnamese newspapers abroad.