Attracted by the profits from the growing trade in rubber and rice, several thousand Europeans settled in Saigon in the hopes of carving out their own fortunes. There they competed with Chinese merchants and a newly affluent Vietnamese bourgeoisie in providing goods and services for the growing population. With its textile mills, cement factories, and food processing plants, Saigon was rapidly becoming the primary industrial and commercial base of all Vietnam. In the downtown area, imposing buildings erected in the French provincial style housed the bureaus of colonial officials. Wide avenues, laid out in grid fashion, were lined with plane trees to provide protection from the hot tropical sun. Behind high stucco walls were the imposing homes of the Europeans and those few Vietnamese who had managed to take advantage of the presence of the foreign imperialists. The remainder of the population—factory workers, stevedores, rickshaw pullers, rootless peasants from the surrounding countryside—huddled in squalid slums along the Ben Nghe canal or along the edges of the city.
On arrival in Saigon, Thanh took up lodgings in an old granary. The owner, Le Van Dat, was a manufacturer of woven sleeping mats and had ties with members of the Duc Thanh school in Phan Thiet. There Thanh apparently located his father, who was temporarily living at the warehouse until he found more permanent accommodations. Eventually, through other contacts from the school, Thanh moved to a building on Chau Van Liem Street, near the Saigon wharf, a rat’s nest of wooden shacks with tin roofs nestled between a canal and the Saigon River. With his father’s encouragement, Thanh now began to make plans for going abroad. In March, he heard about a school established by the French in 1904 to provide vocational training in carpentry and metalwork. Perhaps in the hope of saving sufficient funds to finance a trip abroad, Thanh briefly attended the school. However, when he discovered that he would need to complete the entire three-year program to obtain competence, he abandoned his classes and took a job selling newspapers with a fellow villager from Kim Lien named Huang.
The workers’ village where Thanh had been living was not far from Saigon’s Nha Rong pier, where great ocean liners docked en route to Europe and other ports in Asia. He decided to find a job on one of those liners as his ticket to travel abroad. Ho Chi Minh described it many years later in his autobiography, allegedly written by the fictitious Tran Dan Tien:
While I [an alleged friend of Thanh, quoted by the author] was finishing my studies at the Chasseloup-Laubat school in Saigon, … I met a young man from central Vietnam. I had met him at a friend’s house. Being of the same age, we soon became buddies. I took him in front of the cafés frequented by the French, where we watched the electric lights. We went to the movies. I showed him the public fountains. So many things that young Quoc [Nguyen Tat Thanh] had never seen. One day, I bought him some ice cream. He was astonished because it was the first time he had ever eaten it.
A few days later, he suddenly asked me a question:
“Hey, Lê, do you love your country?”
Astonished, I replied, “Well, of course!”
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes.”
“I want to go abroad, to visit France and other countries. When I have seen what they have done, I will return to help my compatriots. But if I leave alone, there will be more risk if, for example, I get sick.... Do you want to come with me?”
“But where will we find the money for the voyage?”
“Here’s our money,” he said showing me his two hands. “We will work. We’ll do whatever is necessary to live and travel. Will you join me?”
Carried away by enthusiasm, I accepted. But after long reflection on what our adventure would entail, I didn’t have the courage to keep my promise.
I haven’t seen him since. I have always thought that he went abroad, but by what means I can’t tell you. Much later, I learned that that young patriot full of ardor was none other than Nguyen Ai Quoc [Ho Chi Minh], our future president.28
During the next few months, Thanh frequently went to the harbor to watch the ships entering and leaving. There were two steamship companies whose ships operated out of Saigon—Messageries Maritimes and Chargeurs Réunis. The latter employed Vietnamese to serve as waiters and kitchen helpers on its vessels, and its advertisements stated that the itineraries included such romantic cities as Singapore, Colombo, Djibouti, Port Said, Marseilles, and Bordeaux. Through a friend from Haiphong who worked with the company, Thanh was able to obtain an interview with the captain of the Chargeurs Réunis liner Amiral Latouche-Tréville, which had just arrived at Nha Rong pier from Tourane. He had already packed two sets of seaman’s clothing in a small suitcase, which had been given him by a friend in Phan Thiet.
On June 2, a young man who called himself simply “Ba” showed up at the pier. Captain Louis Eduard Maisen was skeptical about the applicant, who looked intelligent but was frail in build. When Ba insisted that he could “do anything,” Maisen agreed to hire him as an assistant cook. The next day Ba reported for work and was immediately assigned a full day of work, washing dishes and pans, cleaning the kitchen floor, preparing vegetables, and shoveling coal. On the fifth, the Amiral Latouche-Tréville passed by the marshy banks of the Saigon River out to the South China Sea en route to its next destination, the British naval port of Singapore.29
Why had Nguyen Tat Thanh decided to leave on his long journey abroad? In remarks to the Soviet journalist Ossip Mandelstam many years later, Thanh (by then operating under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc) remarked, “When I was about thirteen years old, for the first time I heard the French words ‘liberté,’ ‘égalité,’ and ‘fraternité.’ At the time, I thought all white people were French. Since a Frenchman had written those words, I wanted to become acquainted with French civilization to see what meaning lay in those words.” Later he gave a similar response to a question from the U.S. journalist Anna Louise Strong:
The people of Vietnam, including my own father, often wondered who would help them to remove the yoke of French control. Some said Japan, others Great Britain, and some said the United States. I saw that I must go abroad to see for myself. After I had found out how they lived, I would return to help my countrymen.”30
Hagiographers in Hanoi have made much of scattered remarks contained in his reminiscences characterizing his decision to leave Vietnam as a mission to save his country. Given his notorious proclivity to dramatize events in his life for heuristic purposes, it is advisable to treat such remarks with some skepticism. Still, there seems little doubt that as he left Saigon in the summer of 1911, he was full of patriotic passion and keenly aware of the injustices committed by the colonial regime against his compatriots. To Thanh, there seemed to be no solution to such problems inside the country. Perhaps they could be found abroad.
II | THE FIERY STALLION
Although Nguyen Tat Thanh’s activities following his departure from Saigon are not well recorded, evidence suggests that he spent most of the next two years at sea. Exposure to the world outside Vietnam had a major impact on his thinking and attitude toward life. Over a decade later, when he began to write articles for French publications, his descriptions of the harsh realities of life in the colonized port cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were often shocking, dealing with the abject misery in which many people lived and the brutality with which they were treated by their European oppressors. By the beginning of the twentieth century, much of the world had been placed under colonial rule, and the port cities of Africa and Asia teemed with dockworkers, rickshaw pullers, and manual laborers, all doing the bidding of the white man. It may have been during this period of travel abroad that the foundations of his later revolutionary career were first laid.
The trip on the Amiral Latouche-Tréville from Saigon to Marseilles lasted several weeks. Conditions at sea were often harsh; the ship was small for an ocean liner, measuring only about 400 feet long and weighing less than 6000 tons. In his autobiographical writings, which are virtually the only source for this period in his life, Thanh recalled storms with waves “a
s big as mountains,” which on occasion nearly washed him overboard.
His days at sea were often long and tedious. He rose early in the morning and did not finish work until after dark. As he recounted in the third person many years later:
As a cook’s help he had to work daily as follows: From 4 o’clock in the morning he cleaned the big kitchen, then lit the boilers in the hold, brought the coal in, fetched vegetables, meat, fish, ice, etc., from the hold. The work was pretty heavy because it was very hot in the kitchen and very cold in the hold. It was particularly arduous when the ship was tossing in a rough sea and he had to climb up the gangway with a heavy bag on his shoulders.1
Yet Thanh seemed to bear it all with good humor and enthusiasm. In a letter written to one of his acquaintances in Saigon, he joked: “The hero goes joyfully through his day doing what he pleases, polishing the brass and the washroom and emptying the buckets of human waste.” After finishing his chores about 9:00 P.M., he read or wrote until midnight, or sometimes helped illiterate shipmates write letters to their families. The Vietnamese agronomist and journalist Bui Quang Chieu, later a leading figure in one of the chief rival organizations to Ho Chi Minh’s communist movement, recalled meeting him on the voyage and asking why someone so intelligent should wish to seek employment that required such hard labor. Thanh smiled and remarked that he was going to France to seek a reversal of the recent dismissal of his father by the imperial government.2
After stops in Singapore, Colombo, and Port Said, the Amiral Latouche-Tréville docked in Marseilles harbor on July 6, 1911. Here Thanh received his wages—about ten francs, a sum barely adequate to feed and house him in a cheap hotel for a few days—and disembarked with a friend to get his first glimpse of France. For the first time, he saw electric trams (“running houses,” as the Vietnamese then called them). For the first time, too, he was addressed as “monsieur” when he stopped at a café on the city’s famous Rue Cannebière for a cup of coffee. The experience inspired him to remark to his friend: “The French in France are better and more polite than those in Indochina.” At the same time, he discovered that there was poverty in France, just as there was in French Indochina. Then, as now, Marseilles was a rough city, its streets filled with sailors, vagabonds, merchants, and thieves of all races. Seeing prostitutes board the ship to consort with the sailors, he remarked to his friend: “Why don’t the French civilize their compatriots before doing it to us?”3
Thanh returned to the ship before it departed for Le Havre; it arrived there on July 15. A few days later it sailed to Dunkirk, and then eventually returned to Marseilles, where it docked in mid-September. From there, he wrote a letter to the president of the French Republic. The incident is sufficiently curious to present the letter in full:
Marseilles
September 15, 1911
Dear Mr. President:
I have the honor to request your assistance in being admitted to take courses at the Colonial School as an intern.
I am now employed with the company Chargeurs Réunis (Amiral Latouche-Tréville) for my subsistence. I am entirely without resources and very eager to receive an education. I would like to become useful to France with regard to my compatriots, and at the same time to enable them to profit from instruction.
I am a native of the province of Nghe An in Annam. In anticipation of your response, which I hope will be favorable, please accept, Mr. President, my profound gratitude.
Nguyen Tat Thanh
Born in Vinh, 1892 [sic],
Son of M. Nguyen Sinh Huy (doctor of letters)
Student of French and Chinese characters
The Colonial School, which had been established in 1885 to train officials for government service in the French colonies, contained a “section indigène” for colonial subjects, with about twenty scholarships available for students from French Indochina. Some scholars have wondered why a young man like Nguyen Tat Thanh, who so clearly opposed French rule over his country, would wish to enter a colonial school to be of service to France; they have speculated that he might have been prepared to sell his patriotism for a bureaucratic career. Yet in light of his past attendance at the National Academy in Hué, there is nothing especially surprising in Thanh’s behavior. Although his hostility to French colonial rule in Indochina seems already well established, he had clearly not decided what route to take for the liberation of his country and, by his own account, was still eager to obtain an education in order to improve his understanding of the situation. In a letter written sometime in 1911, he told his sister that he hoped to continue his studies in France and return to Indochina in five or six years. Moreover, as his letter to the president indicates, his ultimate objective was to be useful to his own country. It may have been that, not for the last time, he was willing to disguise his real intentions in order to seek his ultimate objective.4
From Marseilles, Thanh returned to Saigon on the Amiral Latouche-Tréville. He left the ship when it arrived in mid-October and attempted to establish contact with his father. Sac had not found steady employment since being dismissed from his position at court, and on one occasion may have been arrested for drunkenness. After working for a while on a rubber plantation in Thu Dau Mot, near the Cambodian border, he began selling traditional medicines throughout Cochin China. Although he may have been in the vicinity of Saigon when his son arrived, there is no indication that either was aware of the other’s whereabouts. On October 31, 1911, Thanh wrote a letter to the French résident supérieur in Annam, explaining that he and his father had been separated by poverty for more than two years and enclosing the sum of fifteen piastres to be forwarded to him. He received no reply.5
From Saigon, Thanh went back to sea and returned to Marseilles, where he learned that his application for admission to the Colonial School had been rejected. The application had been forwarded to the school authorities, who replied that candidates for admission had to be recommended by the governor-general of Indochina, a regulation that undoubtedly removed Thanh from consideration. He then decided to remain with the ship until it went into dry dock at Le Havre. Most of the sailors signed on with another ship and returned to Indochina; Thanh remained in Le Havre and accepted employment as a gardener at the home of a shipowner in Sainte-Adresse, a small beach resort (later to be portrayed on canvas by the French impressionist painter Claude Monet) a few miles west of the city. In his free time, he read journals in the shipowner’s library and studied French with the shipowner’s daughter. Sometimes he went into town to visit with other Vietnamese. At some point, he may even have traveled to Paris to meet Phan Chu Trinh. According to some reports, his father had given Thanh a letter of introduction to his fellow pho bang graduate before Thanh’s departure from Vietnam. Trinh, after his release from prison in Indochina, had arrived in Paris sometime in the spring of 1911. If they did meet, they undoubtedly discussed the exciting news from China, where revolutionaries under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen had just overthrown the Qing dynasty and established a Western-style republic.6
Thanh got along well with the family of his host, and the latter was able to help him return to the employ of the shipping company Chargeurs Réunis on a ship leaving for Africa. Although a friend warned him that it was hotter in Africa than in Vietnam, Thanh still suffered from wanderlust (“I want to see the world,” he replied) and decided to go. During the next several months, he visited countries throughout Africa and Asia, including Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, India, Indochina, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sudan, Dahomey, and Madagascar.
He was fascinated by what he saw, and learned what he could while his ship was in port. As he reported in his reminiscences:
Ba was observant of everything. Every time the boat was in the port, he did his utmost to visit the town. When he came back, his pocket was full of photos and matchboxes, for he liked to collect these things.
He was often reminded of the horrors of the colonial system. At Dakar, he saw several Africans drown while being ordered by the French to swim out to the ship
during a storm. He later wrote:
The French in France are all good. But the French colonialists are very cruel and inhumane. It is the same everywhere. At home I have seen such things happening in Phan Rang. The French burst out laughing while our compatriots drowned for their sake. To the colonialists, the life of an Asian or an African is not worth a penny.7
During his years at sea, Thanh made visits to several ports of call in the Western Hemisphere. Many years later he told a Cuban acquaintance that he had visited Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. At some point, his ship stopped at port cities along the East Coast of the United States, including New York City, where Thanh decided to leave the ship and seek employment. He eventually stayed several months in the United States.
Ho Chi Minh’s visit to America remains one of the most mysterious and puzzling periods in his entire life. According to his own account and in recollections to acquaintances, he spent a period of time in New York City, staring in awe at the modern skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline and strolling with friends in Chinatown, where he was impressed by the fact that Asian immigrants in the United States appeared to have equal rights in law if not in fact. He worked as a laborer (earning, he claimed, the princely salary of forty dollars a month) and as a domestic servant to a wealthy family, yet found time to attend meetings of black activists such as the Universal Negro Improvement Trust in Harlem, an organization founded under the sponsorship of the famous Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey. Many years later, he told a delegation of peace activists who were visiting Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War that he had been strongly moved by the plight of black peoples around the world and had contributed generously to the movement.” Asked by a member of the delegation why he had gone to New York, he replied that at the time he thought that the United States was opposed to Western imperialism and would readily agree to assist the Vietnamese people in overthrowing the French colonial regime. Eventually he concluded that there was no help here.8
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