He was born to a rice-miller mother (Lâm Thị Kén) and a Francophile primary schoolteacher father (Huỳnh Sanh Thinh) in Hóc Môn, close to Sài Gòn (now Ho Chi Minh City).

When the family moved into Sài Gòn itself, Thông enrolled at the prestigious Lycée Petrus Trương Vĩnh Ký where he studied French literature, specializing particularly in the works of Molière and La Fontaine.

In 1945, he joined the clandestine Vietnamese independence movement, opposed to the post-war re-establishment of French colonial rule in Vietnam.

Diplomatic pressure from the Americans resulted in his release, whereupon he fled to the United States as a political refugee, arriving in Athens, Ohio, in 1948.

[5] His translation of Flowers from Hell[6] by the Vietnamese dissident poet Nguyễn Chí Thiện won the 1985 prize at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam.