PROVIDENCE -- The poet Huang Xiang sacrificed more than 12 years of his life in prison for doing what many Americans take for granted: expressing opinions critical of the government.

Now in exile in Pittsburgh, the 64-year-old Chinese poet, calligrapher and political agitator is still speaking out against human-rights abuses.

"We have a duty," Huang told an audience at Brown University last night, "to oppose anyone who tries to trample our freedom of expression."

Huang's lecture and poetry performance was sponsored by Brown Amnesty International, as part of a weeklong series of events to raise awareness of human-rights abuses in China. Huang was introduced by Xu Wenli, a visiting senior fellow at Brown, who spent 16 years in jail in China for helping lead a democracy movement.

Huang lectured and performed his poems last evening through a translator.

Letters on Huang's black T-shirt quoted from a poem he wrote in the 1960s to express his rage over the lack of free expression in China. He performed the poem last night in Chinese, much of it at the top of his lungs.

His words translate this way:

"I am a wild beast hunted down

"I am a captured wild beast

"I am a wild beast trampled by wild beasts

"I am a wild beast trampling wild beasts

"Even though barely a bone is left

"I want this detestable age to choke on me"

Huang said he still has scars from prison beatings during his six jail terms for dissent.

In 1978, he wrote his political poems on huge sheets and publicly posted them in Beijing. "And so the Democracy Wall Movement was born," he said. His participation in the movement led to his arrest.

"Because I like to dream, I call myself dreamer," he said. "Because of my dreams, I was thrown in jail six times," where he says he was hung up and whipped with bamboo sticks.

He also performed the poem "Singing Alone," written during incarceration:

"Who am I

"I am the lonely soul of a waterfall

"A poem

"Dwelling forever in Solitude

"My drifting song is a dream's wandering

"Trace

"My only audience

"The still"

Publishing his work in China has been forbidden since the 1950s, he said. "The Chinese people do not have freedom of speech." He said it's the duty of the Western world to help the people of other nations earn basic freedoms.

He escaped to the United States in 1997 and applied for asylum, according to a lengthy profile of Huang by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

He has covered the exterior of his home in Pittsburgh with his poetry, painted in huge Chinese characters. The house "has become my dream nest," he said. "Only since I have come to America have I enjoyed freedom of expression."