Mai Khoi at the award ceremony for the 2018 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent.
Vietnamese folk singer Mai Khoi was arrested in March 2018 after returning from a tour in Europe (click here for the BBC report on her arrest). She has a pop song about Vietnamese girls and her love for Vietnam, but has turned into a searing critic of repression of freedom of speech. With her new band Mai Khoi & The Dissidents, her song “Re-education Camp” calls for the inventors of the camps to be the ones to sit inside and reflect on all the cruel things they have done. Using traditional Vietnamese instruments Mai Khoi and her bandmates performed live in Hanoi in April, 2017, but their message challenged the apathy and tendency to look away at the repressions going on.
Mai Khoi has received many awards for her activism. In 2018 she received the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in recognition of her democracy activism. Amnesty International named her one of 12 inspiring human rights activists to follow. In 2019 a documentary film was made about her titled “Mai Khoi and the Dissidents.”
Here is an ABC News interview of Mai Khoi from September 2016: