In later years, Ho Chi Minh would claim that he had also lived in Boston, where he worked briefly as a pastry chef in the Parker House Hotel, and that he had made a short visit to the Southern states, where he observed the lynching of blacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Living in Moscow in the 1920s, he wrote an article that described these events in vivid detail. Unfortunately, none of the details of his trip to the United States can be corroborated. Virtually the only incontestable evidence that confirms his presence there is in the form of two communications that he sent. The first letter, signed Paul Tat Thanh and addressed to the French résident supérieur in Annam, was dated December 15, 1912 and postmarked New York City. The second was a postcard from Boston, which was mailed to Phan Chu Trinh in France; it mentioned that he was working as a cook’s helper in the Parker House Hotel.9
Thanh probably left the United States in 1913. By his own admission, his stay apparently had little influence on his worldview, since he later told the U.S. journalist Anna Louise Strong that during his visit to the United States he knew nothing about politics. After another stopover in Le Havre, he arrived in Great Britain to study English. In a brief note to Phan Chu Trinh in France, he indicated that for the last four and a half months he had been in London studying the English language and consorting with foreigners. In four or five months, he wrote, “I hope to see you again.” The letter was not dated, but it must have been written before the outbreak of war in August 1914, since he asked Trinh where he expected to spend his summer vacation.
In a second letter, Thanh commented on the start of what would turn out to be World War I. He noted that any country that tried to meddle in the issue was bound to get drawn into the war and concluded: “I think that in the next three or four months, the situation in Asia will change, and change drastically. So much the worse for those who fight and agitate. We have only to stand aside.” He may have anticipated that the conflict would lead to the collapse of the French colonial system.10
In his first letter to Phan Chu Trinh, Thanh also remarked that he had to work hard in order to avoid going hungry. His first job was as a snow sweeper at a school. “What a hard job,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “I sweated all over and yet my hands and my feet were freezing. And it was not easy to break up the icy snow, for it was slippery. After eight hours’ work I was completely exhausted and hungry.” He quickly abandoned that job for another as a boiler operator. But that was even worse:
From five o’clock, another friend and myself had to go to the basement to light the fire. All day long we had to feed coal into the boiler. It was terrifying. I never knew what the people were doing upstairs because I’d never been up there. My workmate was a quiet man, probably he was dumb [mute]. Throughout the working day he never spoke. He smoked while working. When he needed me he made a sign but never said a word. It was terribly hot in the basement and terribly cold outside. I did not have enough warm clothes and therefore caught cold.
Finally, he was able to find work in the kitchen at the Drayton Court Hotel in central London. Later he switched to the Carlton Hotel and worked under the famous chef Auguste Escoffier. If the following story in Ho Chi Minh’s autobiography is accurate, he must have had promise as a chef:
Each of us had to take turns in the clearing up. The waiters, after attending the customers, had to clear all the plates and send them by means of an electric lift to the kitchen. Then our job was to separate china and silver for cleaning. When it came to Ba’s turn he was very careful. Instead of throwing out all the bits left over, which were often a quarter of a chicken or a huge piece of steak, etc., Ba kept them clean and sent them back to the kitchen. Noticing this, the chef Escoffier asked Ba: “Why didn’t you throw these remains into the rubbish as the others do?”
“These things shouldn’t be thrown away. You could give them to the poor.”
“My dear young friend, listen to me!” Chef Escoffier seemed to be pleased and said, smiling: “Leave your revolutionary ideas aside for a moment, and I will teach you the art of cooking, which will bring you a lot of money. Do you agree?”
And Chef Escoffier did not leave Ba at the job of washing dishes but took him to the cake section, where he got higher wages.
It was indeed a great event in the kitchen for it was the first first time the “kitchen king” had done that sort of thing.11
In his spare time, Thanh used his sparse savings to take English lessons with an Italian teacher, often sitting, as he remarked, “in Hyde Park with a book and a pencil in his hands.” He was also becoming active in political organizations. Various reports indicate that he was involved in labor union activities and became a member of the Overseas Workers’ Association, a secret organization of mostly overseas Chinese laborers committed to improving working conditions in British factories. He also claims to have taken part in street demonstrations in favor of Irish independence and a variety of leftist causes. It is probable that he first learned of the writings of the German revolutionary Karl Marx during this period.12
Above all other causes, Thanh continued to be concerned with the plight of his country. In a short poem that he sent to Trinh on a postcard he wrote:
In confronting the skies and the waters
under the impulse of will that makes a hero
One must fight for one’s compatriots.13
Unbeknownst to Thanh, his letters to Phan Chu Trinh had fallen into the hands of the authorities in France. In the late summer of 1914, Trinh and his close colleague, the lawyer Phan Van Truong, had been arrested by the French government on suspicion of meeting with German agents. Athough they were later released for lack of evidence, French police searched their apartment in Paris and discovered the communications from a Vietnamese named N. Tat Thanh residing at 8 Stephen Street, Tottenham Court Road, in London. In the course of their investigation, police also discovered that in one letter to Trinh (no longer extant), Tat Thanh had complained about conditions in Indochina and promised that in the future he would seek to carry on Trinh’s work. At the request of the French Embassy in London, British police carried out surveillance, but could not locate anyone by that name at the address given. They did locate two brothers, named Tat Thanh and Thanh, at a different address. They proved to be engineering students who had just left to pursue their studies in Bedford, and were apparently not involved in political activities.14
The wartime years in Great Britain are among the least documented of Thanh’s life. Accounts of his activities rely almost exclusively on his autobiographical writings of many years later. Some historians do not believe that he ever actually lived in Great Britain, but suspect he invented the experience as a means of strengthening his credentials as a revolutionary from a working-class background. This seems unlikely, since he rarely sought to disguise his family background as the son of a Confucian scholar. Although it has proven impossible to verify any of the anecdotes contained in his account of the period, enough evidence exists to confirm that he did live in London, although the precise nature of his activities there remains somewhat of a mystery.15
The date of Thanh’s return to France has long been a matter of dispute. French authorities were not aware of his presence until the summer of 1919, when he became involved in an incident that made him the most notorious Vietnamese in the land. In his autobiography, Ho Chi Minh wrote that he returned to France while the war was still under way. Several of his acquaintances in Paris maintained that he arrived in 1917 or 1918, and an agent assigned by the police to follow him in 1919 reported that he had “long been in France.” Most sources place the date sometime in December 1917.16
His motives for returning to France are not entirely clear, although in terms of his nationalist goals the change was certainly a logical one. During the war thousands of Vietnamese had been conscripted to work in factories in France as replacements for French workers serving in the armed forces. From fewer than one hundred in 1911, the number of Vietnamese living in France had grown rapidly during the war. For a patriot dete
rmined to play a role in the liberation of his country, France was a logical site for operations and for the recruitment of avid followers. In Phan Chu Trinh and his colleague Phan Van Truong, Thanh already had useful contacts who could serve as his entrée into the Byzantine world of Vietnamese émigré politics in Paris. Because of the notoriety brought by his open letter to Paul Beau in 1906, Trinh was the acknowledged leader of the émigré community in France. Following his arrest on suspicion of treason at the beginning of the war, Trinh had behaved with circumspection, although rumors persisted that he was still active in the Vietnamese independence movement.
After his arrival in France, Thanh soon became involved in agitation among Vietnamese workers. Social unrest was on the rise as a result of the length and brutality of the Great War; in 1917 there was a serious mutiny in the French army, and radical elements began to distribute antiwar propaganda and organize labor unions throughout the country. Factory and shipyard workers from the colonial countries, because of their low pay and the dismal conditions in which they lived, were particularly susceptible to such agitation. A militant young Vietnamese inflamed with anticolonial zeal would have been especially useful in such activities.17
How Thanh became involved is not clear. It is possible that he returned as a delegate of the Overseas Workers’ Association to establish liaison with workers’ groups in France. In that case, it is not unlikely that he may have traveled back and forth between the two countries on several occasions. Or he may have simply established contact independently with some of the leading figures in leftist circles in Paris, who made use of his obvious enthusiasm to assist them in their own activities.
Boris Souvarine, later to become a prominent historian but then a radical activist in Paris, recalled that he first met Thanh shortly after Thanh’s arrival from London and places the year as 1917. Thanh had found lodgings in a dingy hotel on a cul-de-sac in Montmartre, and had begun to attend meetings of one of the local chapters of the French Socialist Party; it was there that he met Souvarine, who introduced him to Léo Poldès, founder of a speaking group called the Club du Faubourg. Thanh began to show up regularly at the club’s weekly talks, which addressed a wide variety of subjects, from radical politics to psychology and the occult. These took place at various meeting halls in Paris. He was so painfully shy (Souvarine recalled that he was “a timid, almost humble young man, very gentle, avid for learning”) that other participants dubbed him the “mute of Montmartre.”
Eventually, however, Poldès encouraged him to speak publicly as a means of conquering his timidity. On his first occasion, when he was called upon to describe the suffering of his compatriots under colonialism, Thanh was so nervous that he stuttered. But although few in the audience understood what he was saying, they were sympathetic to his theme. At the close of his talk there was wide applause. He was soon invited to speak again.18
Souvarine’s account tallies with that of Léo Poldès himself, who told the U.S. writer Stanley Karnow that he had first seen Thanh at a meeting of the Club du Faubourg. There was, he recalled, “a Chaplinesque aura about him—at once sad and comic, vous savez [you know].” Poldès was struck by his bright eyes and his avid interest in all things. Thanh overcame his stage fright and took an active part in discussions at the weekly meetings of the club. On one occasion he criticized the views of an advocate of hypnotism, arguing that the French colonial authorities habitually used opium and alcohol to hypnotize the peoples of Indochina. He became acquainted with many of the leading figures in the radical and intellectual movement in Paris, such as the socialist writer Paul Louis, the militant activist Jacques Doriot, and the radical novelist Henri Barbusse, who in his writings had movingly described the abysmal conditions for soldiers at the front.19
By now, Nguyen Tat Thanh was almost thirty years old. His worldly experience was limited to teaching, cooking, and a few menial jobs. It was probably difficult for Thanh to find employment in France, since he had no work permit. Various sources say that he sold Vietnamese food, manufactured signs, taught Chinese, and made candles. Eventually he was given a job as a photo retoucher (adding colors to black-and-white photographs, a popular innovation at the time) in a shop managed by Phan Chu Trinh. In his free time he frequented the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale or the library of the Sorbonne. Thanh was a voracious reader, and he especially enjoyed the works of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, and Lu Xun, in addition to those of Barbusse. He was living almost literally out of a suitcase, and apparently moved frequently from one shabby hotel or flat to another in working-class sections of the city.20
Paris at war’s end was a fascinating place for a young Asian interested in politics. The French capital still had some pretensions of being the political as well as the cultural hub of the Western world. Many of the most famous radical figures of the nineteenth century had lived and operated in Paris, and the brutalities of the recent war had energized their ideological heirs into escalating their verbal attacks on the capitalist system. Along the Left Bank, intellectuals and students from France and the world over gathered in cafés and restaurants to discuss politics and plan revolutions. Some had been secretly recruited as French agents to spy on their colleagues and report any subversive activities to the police.
Among the various exile communities that had been established in Paris at the end of the war, the Vietnamese were one of the most numerous. By the end of the war there were approximately fifty thousand Vietnamese in France. While most worked in factories, a few hundred, often the children of wealthy families, had come to study; because of the highly politicized atmosphere within the intellectual community in France, such students were ripe for political agitation. Still, although national feelings were high among Vietnamese living in France, little had been done to channel this to the cause of independence. During the war France had asserted that it was the duty of every able-bodied subject of the far-flung colonial empire to come to the defense of the mother country; as a result, some of the more militant elements thought they should demand a quid pro quo—support for the French in Europe in return for increased autonomy or even independence for Vietnam following the war. Others had gone much further, flirting with German intelligence agents in the hopes that a French defeat would undermine the overseas administrative apparatus and lead to an overthrow of colonial authority.
The French appeared to have some evidence that Phan Chu Trinh and his compatriot Phan Van Truong may have tried to test both possibilities. Truong, born in 1878 near Hanoi in Ha Dong province, had been trained as a lawyer, settled in France in 1910, and became a French citizen. Just before the outbreak of war, he and Trinh formed an association of Vietnamese exiles. Trinh, predominantly a man of ideas, never displayed much capacity for organizational politics. The group, called the Fraternal Association of Compatriots (Hoi dong Than ai), did not achieve much recognition among Vietnamese living in and around Paris, recruiting only about twenty members and scheduling few activities. But there were rumors—apparently taken seriously by the French intelligence services—that the two had given some thought to organizing a movement to promote a general insurrection in Vietnam. It was for that reason that shortly after the start of the war they were briefly detained in prison on suspicion of taking part in treasonable activities. This was the arrest that resulted in Thanh’s correspondence falling into the hands of the authorities. After their release, Trinh and Truong refrained from launching a major challenge to the colonial authority in Indochina—and it would be a decade before anyone else would do so. Whether because of decisive French preventive action or incompetence, the Vietnamese community in France did little during the war to further the cause of national independence. For all practical purposes, the community was politically stagnant,
Thanh was quick to change that. Up until 1919, although he had made the acquaintance of a few of the great figures of the Vietnamese anticolonial movement, his only political achievment was to serve briefly as an interpreter durin
g the peasant demonstrations in Hué. Un-imposing in appearance, shabbily dressed, Thanh was hardly an arresting figure to a casual passerby. Yet friends remember that he did possess one remarkable physical characteristic, which implied that this was no ordinary man—a pair of dark eyes that flashed with intensity when he spoke and seemed to penetrate the soul of the observer. One acquaintance even mentioned that Thanh’s intensity frightened his wife.
That summer, with the benign approval of his two older colleagues, Thanh formed a new organization for Vietnamese living in France: the Association of Annamite Patriots (Association des Patriotes Annamites). Because Thanh was still relatively unknown, Trinh and Phan Van Truong were listed as the directors of the organization, but Thanh, as secretary, was almost certainly the guiding force. The first members were probably intellectuals, but Thanh was reportedly able to employ his own contacts to recruit some working-class Vietnamese, including a number of naval hands from the seaports of Toulon, Marseilles, and Le Havre.21
On the surface, the association did not espouse radical objectives. Indeed, the founders hoped to avoid such an orientation in order to win broad support within the Vietnamese community and avoid suspicion by the authorities. The adoption of the word “Annam” instead of the traditional “Vietnam” into the title was probably a signal to the government that it did not represent a serious danger to the colonial enterprise. Yet from the start Thanh was determined to use the association to turn the Vietnamese community into an effective force directed against the colonial regime in Indochina. He had already contacted members of other national groups living in Paris, such as Koreans and Tunisians, who had founded similar organizations of their own to seek independence from colonial rule.
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