Who is Ho Chi Minh?

Who was Ho Chi Minh?

Yesterday I headed off to Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, which is an impressive building with a parade ground in front of it.  This mausoleum is a national treasure and is treated like sacred ground.  Visitors are firmly advised to walk through quickly and quietly.  When I arrived at 7:45 a.m., I stood in a line outside the building which was at least two city blocks long.  I am told that this is the one place that Vietnamese citizens visiting Hanoi MUST see.  Ho Chi Minh or “Uncle Ho” as he is lovingly called, is considered to be the Father of Vietnam.  His name- which he chose for himself after many other names- means “Bringer of Light”. 

It was interesting to me that he never wanted to have this mausoleum built- just as he never wanted to live in the beautiful presidential palace located just next to the mausoleum grounds.  Instead, he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in all across the country.  He did not, as I understand, live in the presidential palace, but instead in the house on stilts next to his own fishing pond.

This leader, born in the center of the country in 1890, first traveled to Paris in 1911. Later, he travelled to the US on a French steamer.  The Ho Chi Minh museum states that he lived in Harlem, New York, in 1912-1913.  Here he sympathized with the plight of the African Americans.  In 1919, He reached out at the Versailles Peace Conference to President Woodrow Wilson in attempt to gain support for Vietnamese independence.  Throughout his life his focus remained on a unified and independent Vietnam.  In his words, “Nothing is as dear to the heart of the Vietnamese as independence and liberation.”  It is certainly hard to find blame for that sentiment.

However, we also need to remember point of view.  Throughout the museum, I was struck by the wording that the north was fighting for the “liberation” of the south. Hmmm…I am not sure that this would have been the wording of the South Vietnamese at the time. Also interesting was a book in the museum’s gift gallery called Children at War.  In this book, all children are smiling- digging trenches and smiling, studying on the ground rather than in a desk or a chair and smiling, working the fields and smiling.  Life is better when you can control the media. 

Unfortunately, Ho Chi Minh died at the age of 79 in 1969.  He did not ever see the fall of Saigon and the end of the war in 1975, nor did he hear of the renaming of Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City.  Judging by his desire for simplicity, I am not sure he would have approved.  What he would have enjoyed the most, however, is a unified, peaceful, and welcoming Vietnam.

As I always tell my students-if you don’t believe or think I am wrong (very likely), look it up.  I have two sources that I found to be very interesting.

Karnow, Stanley. “Ho Chi Minh.” Time. Monday, Apr. 13, 1998.

     http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988162-2,00.html

Kirkpatrick, Charles E. “Ho Chi Minh.” Vietnam Magazine . 1990.

http://www.historynet.com/ho-chi-minh-north-vietnam-leader.htm

This site has an informative four minute video about Ho Chi Minh:

http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/ho-chi-minh

A friend here in Vietnam introduced us to a great bookstore called The Bookworm.  There on Saturday I found a copy of Ho Chi Minh’s diary when he was held by Chiang Kai-Shek in a Chinese prison.  He was imprisoned for 18 months in 1941.  Here is a poem from that time.

Listening to the Sound of Rice Pounding

By Ho Chi Minh

Under the pestle how terribly the rice suffers!

But it comes out of the pounding as white as cotton.

The same thing to man in this world occurs:

Hard trials turn him into a polished diamond.