“Why did the fish die?”: The questions and Facebook posts that led Vietnam to imprison a mom blogger.
A body of writing, some 400 Facebook posts about fish deaths, China’s intervention in the South China Sea, and police brutality in Vietnam.
The document was later criticized by the police: “[It] bears a hostile viewpoint against the people’s police force.” In October 2015, she shared a post about an account of police brutality, adding the heading: What should we do when someone had died at a police station?
In one 2016 rallying effort (link in Vietnamese), she painted a fish symbol on her son’s face and took her children with her to protest, and called on others to also join in.
When some commenters criticized her for involving her children, she responded (link in Vietnamese) with a long post, excerpted below: “There are thousands of people in Saigon and Hanoi showing up in public to protest for a clean environment.
Some people even said that the children have no awareness of environmental protection, why let their photo be taken with those messages and slogans to protect the ocean and the nature… Hence, I would like to have a few words, not to argue whether it is right or wrong; but to let you have a perspective of how to respect other people’s opinion which is different from that of yours.
Afterwards, my daughter agreed that we need to raise people’s awareness about protecting the ocean environment.
However, I have a different perspective that my children cannot contract diseases or die because he or she walks under the heat of the sun for just one day, but if my kid grows up and is completely ignorant about this society, then his soul is really rotting and dying slowly.” She was detained and allegedly assaulted by police several times before her current incarceration.
Numerous rights groups have called for her release, including Human Rights Watch, Civil Rights Defenders and Pen America.
“Her activism has been motivated in part by her strong views that her children should inherit a country where human rights, environmental protection, and rule of law are meaningful and part of everyday reality, and not just rhetoric spouted by the ruling Communist Party,” wrote Phil Robertson, who is the deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, a US-based advocacy group that has called for Nguyen’s swift release.