at Fontvannes, in the Foret d’Othe, near Troyes in Aube province southeast of Paris. For the next seven years, he focused on writing, and completed The Miracle of Mindfulness, The Moon Bamboo, and The Sun My Heart. Nhất Hạnh began teaching mindfulness in the mid-1970s with his books, particularly The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975), serving as the main vehicle for his early teachings. In an interview for On Being, he said that The Miracle of Mindfulness was "written for our social workers, first, in Vietnam, because they were living in a situation where the danger of dying was there every day. So out of compassion, out of a willingness to help them to continue their work, The Miracle of Mindfulness was written as a manual practice. And after that, many friends in the West, they think that it is helpful for them, so we allow it to be translated into English." Campaign to help boat people and expulsion from Singapore When the North Vietnamese army took control of the south in 1975, Nhất Hạnh was denied permission to return to Vietnam, and the communist government banned his publications. He soon began to lead efforts to help rescue Vietnamese boat people in the Gulf of Siam, eventually stopping under pressure from the governments of Thailand and Singapore. Recounting his experience years later, Nhất Hạnh said he was in Singapore attending a conference on religion and peace when he discovered the plight of the suffering of the boat people:So many boat people were dying in the ocean, and Singapore had a very harsh policy on the boat people… The policy of Singapore at that time was to reject the boat people; Malaysia, also. They preferred to have the boat people die in the ocean rather than to bring them to land and make them into prisoners. Every time there was a boat with the boat people [that came] to the shore, they tried to push them [back] out into the sea in order [for them] to die. They didn't want to host [them]. And those fishermen who had compassion, who were able to save the boat people from drowning in the sea, were punished. They had to pay a very huge sum of money so that next time they won't have the courage to save the boat people.He stayed on in Singapore to organise a secret rescue operation. Aided by concerned individuals