Trịnh Công Sơn

Biography

On the morning of 30 April 1975, when President Dương Văn Minh announced the surrender, Trịnh Công Sơn went to Saigon radio and sang “Joining Hands” (“Nối vòng tay lớn”). He had written this song about reconciliation between North and South back in 1968. He then made an address to the people of the South, urging them to stay in the country. After that his life went in a direction quite different from what one might have expected.

He was born on 28 February 1939 in Buôn Ma Thuột, in Đắk Lắk Province; by some accounts, in 1940. His family came from the area around Huế, and he grew up in Huế, where he attended a French lycée and the Providence school. His father had been imprisoned for speaking out against the French, and at ten the boy spent a year living with him in Huế, in Thừa Phủ Prison. He took his baccalaureate in Saigon, at the Lycée Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the philosophy stream. In 1957, during judo practice with his younger brother, he suffered a serious chest injury and lay at home for almost two years. In those months, by his own account, he read philosophy and literature and studied folk songs, and he got up from his bed with a different passion, for music. His first songs, “Sương đêm” (“Night Dew”) and “Sao chiều” (“Evening Star”), were written at eighteen. The first to be printed was “Ướt mi” (“Tearing Lashes”), published in September 1960 and performed by Thanh Thúy.

In 1961, to avoid the draft, he enrolled at a teacher-training school in Qui Nhơn, where he studied child psychology and pedagogy, and from 1964 to 1967 he taught at a primary school in Bảo Lộc. His love songs appeared there, among them “Còn tuổi nào cho em” (“How Many Years Are Left for You”) and “Mưa hồng” (“Pink Rain”). When teachers began to be conscripted in 1967, he went into hiding and returned to Saigon, where he lived among other draft evaders in shacks behind the Faculty of Letters. There, in the Quán Văn café, he began to sing with Khánh Ly, and her voice, he said, suited his songs. In 1967 came the collection “Songs of the Yellow Skin” (“Ca khúc da vàng”), which included “Ngủ đi con” (“Lullaby”) and “Gia tài của mẹ” (“Mother’s Legacy”), and in 1968 “Vietnamese Prayers” (“Kinh Việt Nam”). The authorities of the Republic of Vietnam banned some of his songs; one of the orders dates from February 1969. On the other side, too, there was distrust of them: they were called “pacifist and sentimental”. “Ngủ đi con” was issued on two million records, and his songs were also heard in Japan. He was called “the Bob Dylan of Vietnam”.

After 1975 his position changed. His family left, and he stayed. Accounts differ: by some, he spent two years in political re-education; by others, he worked for several years in a “new economic zone”, planting sweet potatoes and ploughing fields strewn with unexploded shells. In Huế a campaign was mounted against him; it was debated whether he deserved credit or blame in relation to the revolution, and he was made to write a self-criticism. Some of his songs were banned. Khánh Ly and other singers continued to release them abroad.

I would not present this life as a turn from disgrace to recognition: the bans on his songs were lifted one by one, and some remain restricted to this day. From the early 1980s he was writing again, at first sending songs to Khánh Ly for publication abroad, then receiving permission to publish at home. He worked at the Ho Chi Minh City music association and at the magazine “Sóng Nhạc”, and was a member of the Vietnam Musicians’ Association. In 1991 the children’s collection “Cho con” (“For the Child”) appeared. “Joining Hands” was permitted for public performance only in 2017.

He died on 1 April 2001 in Ho Chi Minh City. Many thousands of people came to pay their respects, and he is buried in the cemetery of Quảng Bình Pagoda.