Profile:
Vietnamese singer/songwriter Trinh Vinh Trinh will accept the WPMA "Life of Peace" award nomination on behalf of her brother Trinh Cong Son (1939-2001). Singer/songwriter Trinh Cong Son first gained fame in South Vietnam in the 1960s for his enchanting love ballads and gripping anti-war songs, which prompted the American folk singer Joan Baez to dub him "the Bob Dylan of Vietnam." "No one else better reflects what's in the hearts of the Vietnamese," says an intellectual about the 600 songs that Son has published since he wrote Wet Eyelashes in 1959 about a girl mourning the death of her mother.

Son grew up in Hue, the son of two poets. His father made a living selling bicycles and motorcycles, but in 1945 he was arrested for supporting the Viet Minh resistance against French colonial rule. After his release four years later, Son's father moved his family to Saigon, where he was killed in a traffic accident in 1955.

He hid to escape the military draft when he wrote his first anti-war song in 1965, as the US was sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam to fight a growing communist insurgency. Until the war ended a decade later with the defeat of the Saigon government, Son continued hiding in the houses of his friends in Saigon, Dalat and Hue to avoid arrest. Occasionally, he came out of hiding to perform in universities, protected from the police by students who shared his anti-war sentiments.

His popular Lullaby sold two million records in Japan in 1969 and won him a gold record award. "Rock gently my child, I have done it twice," he sang about a mother mourning the death of her soldier son. "This body, which once was so small/That I carried in my womb, that I held in my arms/Why do you rest at the age of 20 years?" Fearing that such powerful lyrics would demoralize its troops, the South Vietnamese government banned his songs and confiscated his recordings.

Son ran into a buzz-saw of protest when, after communist tanks crashed into the gates of Saigon's presidential palace on 30 April 1975, he accepted an invitation to sing on the radio one of his reconciliation songs about arms extending from north to south Vietnam. Many anti-communists accused him of being a traitor.

Son's troubles did not end with the return of peace. He went to the countryside near Hue, in central Vietnam, to visit some friends. When Son tried to return to Ho Chi Minh City, the new name for Saigon, the authorities in Hue would not let him leave. Instead he was sent to live with a peasant family near the Truong Son Mountains, where he planted rice and manioc in fields littered with unexploded munitions. It was not until late 1979 that he was allowed to move back to Ho Chi Minh City. Since then, Son has tried to put this experience behind him.

Son's songs, particularly those written before 1975, are still widely admired among the two million Vietnamese living abroad. Much of his appeal comes from his ability to capture the heartbeat of Vietnam.