Nguyễn Tường Tam better known by his pen-name Nhất Linh was a Vietnamese writer, editor and publisher in colonial Hanoi. He founded the literary group and publishing houseTự Lực Văn Đoàn in 1932 with the literary magazinesPhong Hóa and Ngày Nay, and serialized, then published, many of the influential realism-influenced novels of the 1930s. In 1935, Tam published a satirical travelogue about his time in France, Going tothe West. His aim was to show that the French colonialists did not grant to the working classes in Vietnam the same rights they accorded to workers in France. However, scholars writing from the prospective of Postcolonialism have criticized Tam’s analysis as ineffective, since he embraced the French “ideal of progress” and a simplistic “program of modernisation through Westernisation,” which would not have been workable in Vietnam. In the 1940s he organized a political party, Đại Việt Dân Chính. Tam fled to China where he was arrested on the orders of Chang Fa Kwei, who at same time had arrested Ho Chi Minh. This faction soon merged with the larger Đại Việt Quốc Dân Đảng and later this too merged into the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng. After release from China Nhat Linh returned to Vietnam in 1945, to become Foreign Minister in the first coalition government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He was chief negotiator with the French in Dalat in April 1946 and was to have led the delegation to France. However fearing Viet Minh assassination he fled to Hong Kong and resided there 1946-1950. On his return to Vietnam, to the South, avoiding politics and concentrated on literary activities. This did not prevent the accusation of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime of involvement in the 1960 attempted coup. Nhat Linh denied this, and the police having found no evidence did not seek to arrest Tam till 1963. Tam committed suicide by ingesting cyanide, leaving a death note stating "I also will kill myself as a warning to those people who are trampling on all freedom", the "also" probably referring to Thich Quang Duc, the monk who had self-immolated in protest against Diem's persecution of Buddhism a month earlier.
