Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  The Vietnamese were no more satisfied with French domination than with Chinese. The most resentful Vietnamese lived in Nghe An Province, located in Annam in central Vietnam, a low coastal plain bordered by the Annamese mountains. Nghe An and the surrounding provinces were the most densely populated areas of Vietnam, and by far the poorest. The soil was leached and dry, the weather alternating between torrential monsoon rains and hot summer winds.

  The French called the Nghe Annese the “Buffaloes of Nghe An” because of their reputation for stubbornness. The Vietnamese referred to them as the “People of the Wooden Fish.” The Vietnamese love a special sauce known as nuoc mam. They alternate layers of fish and layers of salt in a barrel and let the brew ferment in the heat several weeks. The fish decompose into a mush and the fluid into a salty brine. Nuoc mam is to Vietnamese fish what catsup is to American french fries. The Nghe Annese were too poor to afford fish, the proverb says, so they carried a wooden fish in their pockets to dip into nuoc mam at restaurants. Nghe Annese, the jesters claimed, licked the wooden fish until they were kicked out, only to repeat the culinary charade somewhere else.

  But Nghe An, with its neighboring Ha Tinh Province, was not known only for its poverty. Year after year the prizewinning poets, musicians, and scholars at the imperial court at Hue came from Nghe An and Ha Tinh. They were thinkers and tinkerers, creative people who looked at life from unique perspectives, refused to believe what they were told, and insisted on having things proven to them. Their skepticism bred unhappiness. By the 1800s the best schools at Hue no longer accepted applicants from Nghe An and Ha Tinh, no matter how high their scores. Central Vietnamese, “the people of the wooden fish,” were troublemakers, dreaming of a better world.

  Born in 1890 as Nguyen Sinh Cung, Ho Chi Minh grew up in Nghe An. Near his birthplace was the den, a monument to Le Loi. The Vietnamese believe that the spirit of an honored individual lives on in a den. Ho Chi Minh visited the den as a child and listened to tales of how Le Loi had expelled the hated Chinese. His father, Nguyen Sinh Sac, was the son of peasants who became a scholar and a ferocious anti-French nationalist. His sister was a renowned balladeer, and her folk songs railed at China and France. Sac passed the mandarin examinations and found a job at the imperial palace at Hue, but the imperial court was full of pro-French Vietnamese sycophants or tradition-bound mandarins. “The French,” said Phan Boi Chau, an early twentieth-century nationalist, “used honeyed words and great rewards to entice the Vietnamese. They offered high government positions and benefits of all sorts to make some of us into their hunting dogs.”

  For a while in the late 1890s and early 1900s Nguyen Sinh Sac was a minor government official in Hue. Ho Chi Minh’s mother died in 1900, and Sac, along with his two sons and a daughter, lived in a tiny, dingy one-room apartment facing the opulent splendor of the Palais de la Censure where the Vietnamese emperor and the mandarin court ruled Vietnam. Ho bore the brunt of ridicule from the children of the court mandarins, and he developed a spontaneous dislike for intellectual snobbery. Throughout his life, he frequently quoted the poet Tuy Vien: “Nothing is more contemptible than to seek honors through literature.”

  Although the Vietnamese had thrown off the Chinese yoke in 938, over the centuries they gradually adopted the Chinese mandarin system to govern the nation. Eventually, mandarin teachers and bureaucrats became a self-conscious elite. To pass the civil service examinations and secure the best jobs, Vietnamese scholars immersed themselves in the Chinese language and Confucian values, which gradually distanced them from Vietnamese peasants. The mandarins also adopted many Chinese institutions—a centralized tax system, a judicial hierarchy, and the royal palace architecture complete with gates, moats, bridges, and pools. Confucianism promoted rule by a paternalistic elite committed to morality and fairness, and it demanded unswerving obedience from the governed. The essence of personal behavior is obedience, submissiveness, and peaceful acquiescence in the social hierarchy.

  The mandarin system was also conservative to a fault. Mandarins were suspicious of all change. They opposed science, technology, industrialization, and democracy, any one of which might dislodge them from their positions of privilege. A popular late nineteenth-century Vietnamese poem reflected the growing resentment of the mandarin class:

  Becoming a mandarin you treat your servants as dirt,

  And steal every bit of money the people have.

  Although you scoop in who knows how much money,

  Do the people get any help from you?

  On top of the mandarin elite, the French imposed the colonial bureaucracy. They ruled Vietnam through local clients—French-speaking Roman Catholic Vietnamese, who soon became a new elite, competing with the mandarins for influence. Eventually, the French abolished the mandarin examinations, prohibited the teaching of Chinese, and displaced the mandarins as power brokers. Except for the French bureaucrats themselves, the Francophile Vietnamese enjoyed the finest homes, the best jobs, the fanciest clothes—the good life.

  The French viewed the Vietnamese as children at best and savages at worst. They refused to learn the Vietnamese language, and in 1878 they declared French and quoc ngu, the Latin alphabet Father Alexandre de Rhodes had developed, the official languages of the colony. They replaced the local legal code with their own version of Roman law. Convinced that the word “Vietnam” was symbolic of protest, the French outlawed it, insisting that “French Indochina” was the proper term. Centuries-old Buddhist pagodas were often bulldozed when prime land was needed to construct Roman Catholic churches.

  The imposition of the French language and French law accelerated the alienation of peasant land. There were widespread poverty and millions of landless peasants in Vietnam before the French, but most peasants owned at least a small plot, and historically the emperor had discouraged the development of large estates. But between 1880 and 1930 the French changed landholding patterns. Many peasants lost their property because they could not pay high French taxes, could not contest claims against the land in French courts, or fell into debt to French or Vietnamese creditors who foreclosed on their property. The number of landless peasants, tenant farmers, and debt peons rose. In Tonkin nine percent of the population came to own 52 percent of cultivated land, and 250 people owned 20 percent. They included French settlers and wealthy Vietnamese. It was the same in Cochin China. Tenant farmers paid up to 70 percent of their harvest to the landlord, and farmers borrowing money to finance production on their own land paid interest rates of 100 percent. French companies had monopolies on the production of alcohol, opium, and salt, robbing peasant farmers of another source of income.

  With imported rubber trees, the French created a new industry. By 1940 there were more than six hundred rubber plantations in Vietnam, but a handful of French companies controlled them. Poverty forced thousands of Vietnamese peasants to leave home for years to work the French plantations. The taxes imposed by the top-heavy French bureaucracy added to the poverty. “French imperialism,” Ho Chi Minh declared in 1920, “conquered our country with bayonets. Since then we have not only been oppressed and exploited shamelessly, but also tortured and poisoned pitilessly.... Prisons outnumber schools and are always over-crowded.... Thousands of Vietnamese have been led to a slow death or massacred.” Though not so eloquent, millions of Vietnamese felt the same way. To them France was a nation of police, soldiers, pimps, tax collectors, and labor recruiters.

  Almost as bad was the Vietnamese elite who did the French bidding. For any Vietnamese to succeed in the French colony, he or she had to be a French-speaking Roman Catholic who carried out the edicts of the empire. If these Vietnamese were not mandarins in their educational background, they were just as elitist, just as hierarchical, and just as conservative. They got the best government posts, the finest homes, and the largest estates. Ho Chi Minh referred to them as colonis indigeniae [indigenous colonists]: “If you take the largest and strongest member of the herd and fasten a bright substance to its neck, a gold coin or a cros
s, it becomes completely docile.... This weird... animal goes by the name of colonis indigeniae, but depending on its habitat it is referred to as Annamese, Madagascan, Algerian, Indian.”

  Nguyen Sinh Sac’s job at the imperial court had given him a living but no dignity. Indeed, he came to view the post as a dishonor. “Being a mandarin,” he said many times, “is the ultimate form of slavery.” Sac refused to let Ho Chi Minh even study for the examinations. He refused to speak French, arguing that doing so “would corrupt my Vietnamese,” and openly advocated the abolition of the mandarin class and the disintegration of the French empire. Nguyen Sinh Sac was one of Nghe An’s most troublesome children. The French fired him.

  The father passed on those passions to his children. His daughter Nguyen Thanh worked in Vinh supervising a French military mess hall and smuggled rifles and ammunition to the De Tham guerrillas, a group already fighting against the French. When French police convicted her of treason, the mandarin judge gave her a life sentence and an epitaph: “Other women bring forth children, you bring forth rifles.” Her brother Nguyen Khiem was just as militant. He repeatedly wrote eloquent letters to French officials protesting Vietnamese poverty and calling for freedom. But it was the other son—Nguyen Sinh Cung, later known as Ho Chi Minh—who realized Sac’s dream.

  At five years old, Ho was running messages back and forth to members of the anti-French underground. The house was a beehive of political talk, always around the theme of Vietnamese independence. A frequent visitor, and occasional fugitive, was Phan Boi Chau, the most prominent of Vietnam’s early nationalists. Among other acqaintances of Nguyen Sinh Sac was Phan Chu Trinh, the constitutionalist who wanted to overthrow the mandarin bureaucracy.

  The Nguyen Sinh Sac family was also a “brown canvas” household. The traditional dress of the Vietnamese was the ao dai, the non, and the quoc. For women, the ao dai was a long dress worn over black or white trousers that fit loosely around the legs. A rectangular piece of material formed a panel reaching down from the waist in the front and the back. For men the dress was only knee length. The embroidery on the cloth indicated the station in life of the wearer. Gold brocade was reserved for the imperial family. High-ranking mandarins used purple embroidery, and low-ranking mandarins used blue. Peasants could have only the plainest cloth. The non was the ubiquitous conical hat made of latania leaves, and the quoc were the wooden shoes. Radicals adopted brown canvas clothes as a symbolic protest against mandarin authority and a gesture to blur class lines. By the late 1880s large numbers of men in Nghe An wore brown canvas, in spite of mandarin edicts to the contrary. For much of his life Ho Chi Minh wore brown canvas clothes except at the most formal occasions.

  Long before Ho Chi Minh ever heard of Karl Marx and communism, he viewed society through the lens of class conflict, a philosophical inheritance from an egalitarian family. Years later, The Communist Manifesto resonated with Ho Chi Minh, fitting nicely into an intellectual schema decades in the making. When the time came for Ho Chi Minh to become a communist, he played the role enthusiastically.

  Phan Boi Chau, a nationalist whose ideas formed much of the discussion in the household, had been born in Nghe An in 1867. His father, though passing the mandarin examinations, refused to work for the government, becoming a teacher in a small village. Phan Boi Chau joined the Scholars’ Revolt in 1885, a resistance movement of Vietnam’s emperor Ham Nghi and a number of mandarin officials against French rule. In 1893 he participated in Phan Dinh Phung’s unsuccessful Nghe Tinh uprising against the French.

  By the early 1900s Phan Boi Chau was convinced that Vietnam could enter the modern world only if the French were expelled from Indochina. For a teenaged Ho Chi Minh, Phan Boi Chau must have been an imposing figure. Phan Boi Chau’s round face and wire-rimmed spectacles gave him a scholarly, almost mandarin look, as did the full goatee. But he was no simple scholar. He was a man of intense passion and commitment. “The French,” he said, “treat our people like garbage.... The meek are made into slaves, the strong-minded are thrown into jail. The physically powerful are forced into the army, while the old and weak are left to die.... The land is splashed with blood.” There was also an ascetic look to Phan Boi Chau, as if he had transcended mundane pursuits for a grander cause. If Vietnam was to flower, France must fall.

  In 1907, a few years after visiting with the family of Nguyen Sinh Sac, Phan Boi Chau led the abortive Poison Plot, in which low-ranking Vietnamese soldiers tried to poison French officers in Hanoi. The conspiracy was uncovered before it took too large a toll, but Phan Boi Chau became known as the first violent revolutionary in modern Vietnam. He spent years moving about in Japan, China, and Siam, with French police always on his trail. The Chinese arrested him in Shanghai in 1913. He was released from prison in 1917 and spent the rest of his life in China. He died there in 1940.

  As a nationalist, Phan Boi Chau was rivaled only by Phan Chu Trinh, another Nghe Annese. Born to a well-to-do family in 1872, Phan Chu Trinh passed the mandarin examinations. A meeting in 1903 with Phan Boi Chau changed his life. Phan Chu Trinh resigned his government post two years later, convinced that the Vietnamese emperor and his mandarin “lackeys” would doom Vietnam to oblivion. But he parted company with Phan Boi Chau on two accounts; Phan Chu Trinh did not believe in radical violence, and he was convinced that the imperial court and mandarin bureaucracy, not the French empire, should be destroyed first. He wanted to work with the French in replacing the mandarins with a modern, democratic political and educational system.

  Although neither Phan Boi Chau nor Phan Chu Trinh was able to implement his ideas in the early 1900s, they left a rich legacy. From Phan Boi Chau came the conviction that only revolutionary violence would dislodge the French, and from Phan Chu Trinh came the certainty that the mandarin system was rotten, corrupted by its elitism and its hostility to the modern world and its technology. Ho Chi Minh would eventually have to decide which to destroy first—the French empire or the mandarin court—but by the time he was a young man he already knew his destiny. Nghe An had produced yet another radical.

  Ho Chi Minh left Nghe An Province at the end of 1910. He spent nearly a year in Phan Thiet teaching at a school financed by a nuoc mam factory. Late in 1911 he headed south to Saigon, where he enrolled in a vocational school, but he was unhappy learning a trade that the French would use only to exploit him. He left school early in 1912, signed up as a mess boy on a French ocean liner, and left Saigon for the other side of the world. Traveling under the alias of “Van Ba,” Ho Chi Minh got a glimpse of much of the world in the next several years. In North Africa he saw what France was doing to the Algerians; in South Africa he noted what the English and the Boers were doing to the blacks; and in other ports of call he observed the imperial rule of the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. He worked in New York City, whetting his curiosity about American democracy, and on the eve of World War I, Ho was in London working as a cook at the Carlton Hotel.

  Ho Chi Minh moved to Paris in 1918 and quickly immersed himself in anticolonial politics. There were 100,000 Vietnamese in Paris, and Ho found good restaurants in which to eat his favorite dishes. He met the exiled Phan Chu Trinh and listened to him preach against the evils of the Vietnamese imperial court at Hue and the virtues of democracy and industrialization. Ho Chi Minh met frequently with French socialists, pressing them on the question of empire, trying to discern whether they really wanted to change the world. He supported himself by touching up photographs and writing newspaper articles, adopting the name “Nguyen Ai Quoc” (Nguyen the Patriot) or “Nguyen O Phap” (Nguyen Who Hates the French). In the Vietnamese community, Ho became a leading nationalist, and the French secret police kept track of him.

  But then overnight, Ho Chi Minh became a genuine hero. At the Paris Peace Conference negotiating the end of World War I, Ho electrified Vietnamese nationalists when he submitted an eight-point set of demands that included Vietnamese representation in the French parliament; freedom of speech, press, and association; relea
se of all political prisoners; and full equality under the law for the Vietnamese in Indochina. If France would not meet those demands, the empire was morally bankrupt and would surely be destroyed. Looking back on that moment in 1919, the Vietnamese student Bui Lam would remember: “It was like a flash of lightning.... Here was a Vietnamese insisting that his people be accorded their rights.... No two Vietnamese residing in France could meet, after this, without mentioning the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc.”