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<\/a>\u201cEach person only has a life, but if I had the chance to choose again I would still choose my way.\u201d<\/p>\n
They are the words of one of Vietnam\u2019s most influential bloggers \u2014 known by her online pseudonym, Mother Mushroom<\/a><\/strong><\/em> \u2014 minutes before she was handed the shock sentence of a decade in prison. Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh directed her defiant comments at her 61-year-old mother, who was watching a live feed in a room next door as she was not allow into the courtroom.<\/p>\n The 37-year-old was accused of defaming Vietnam\u2019s communist regime in her blogs and interviews with foreign media.<\/p>\n \u201cI clapped my hands in the room, where 20 security officials looked at me with very angry eyes, but I was not afraid; I was OK, very proud of her,\u201d said Nguyen Thi Tuyet Lan.<\/p>\n Arrested in October while attempting to visit another dissident in prison, Quynh, 37, has already spent nine months behind bars, in what her lawyer said were desperate conditions.<\/p>\n She subsisted only on a diet of anchovies and spinach soup for the first seven months, and was denied both sanitary pads and underwear, Vo An Don said.<\/p>\n After Quynh was arrested on 10 October, her mother heard nothing about her whereabouts or wellbeing until a brief reunion in prison hours before her 29 June trial for crimes against the state.<\/p>\n The months had taken their toll on her daughter, Lan told the Guardian in a phone interview from her home in the southern coastal city of Nha Trang<\/strong>. Quynh appeared sickly during their meeting, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cI said: \u2018My dear daughter, now I believe you are still alive.\u2019 But she looked weak with very pale skin,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n Vietnam<\/a> is infamous for its limits on freedom of expression, yet Mother Mushroom\u2019s detention and unusually lengthy sentence raised fresh alarm among the country\u2019s blogging community, which avoids the censorship of state-control print media. The US state department quickly called for all prisoners of conscience to be released immediately.<\/p>\n While Quynh has been branded a \u201creactionary\u201d by the state for her anti-government blogging, her friends and family defend her as a champion of free expression in a country where dissent against single-party<\/em> rule is outlawed.<\/p>\n \u201cMy daughter has done a normal thing in an abnormal society, so she has to pay the price of prison and being denounced,\u201d Lan said.<\/p>\n Quynh rose to fame in Vietnam\u2019s blogosphere in the late 2000s for her doggedly independent citizen journalism. A founding member of the underground Vietnamese Bloggers Network, she is especially passionate about environmentalism, police brutality and Vietnam\u2019s dispute with China<\/a> over control of the South China Sea.<\/p>\n Lan said her daughter\u2019s political awakening began after studying foreign languages in university.<\/p>\n Upon discovering the pluralistic online world, Quynh came to her mother with difficult questions.<\/p>\n \u201cShe asked me: \u2018Mum, do you know this or that [about the government]?\u2019 I said I did, she questioned me, \u2018Why didn\u2019t you tell me?\u2019\u201d recalled Lan.<\/p>\n \u201cI told her I knew, but in this society we are living in, it is not the society where you can speak out, and they will denounce you.\u201d<\/p>\n Quynh has since become a prominent figure outside Vietnam, and has championed efforts in Vietnamese civil society to hold political discussions on Facebook. The government has become so angered by the movement that it has called on<\/a> all companies in Vietnam to stop advertising on YouTube and Facebook.<\/p>\n In March the US first lady, Melania Trump, awarded Quynh the International Women of Courage Award<\/strong><\/em>, which Vietnam said \u201cwas not appropriate and of no benefit to the development of the relations between the two countries\u201d.<\/p>\n Quynh\u2019s friends described her as frank and hot-tempered but true to her word.<\/p>\n \u201cShe always spoke out what she was thinking, so that\u2019s why it\u2019s not good for her when she caused trouble with such a personality, but she was a person who always does what she says she will,\u201d said Trinh Kim Tien, a 27-year-old Ho Chi Minh City-based activist.<\/p>\n Quynh\u2019s last posts on Facebook, her favoured blogging medium before her detention, were a combination of repostings of articles by other activists and brief, poetic, biting attacks on the state.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat kind of a society is it where people responsible for their [high] positions, where the officials consider the citizens more stupid than pigs?\u201d she wrote on 29 September.<\/p>\n Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for the New York-based Human Rights Watch<\/strong><\/em>, said her involvement in protests against the Taiwanese-owned Formosa Ha Tinh Steel plant in north-central Vietnam, which was linked to a catastrophic fish die-off in 2016<\/a>, was the last straw for the authorities.<\/p>\n \u201cMother Mushroom\u2019s prominent ties to the anti-Formosa<\/strong><\/em> movement, which the government is increasingly viewing as a security challenge to its authority, means she became the ideal candidate for a heavy sentence designed to sideline her and intimidate others,\u201d Robertson said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>