Ho Chi Minh Read online

  The surrender of the imperial court did not end the Vietnamese desire for independence. Centuries of resistance to China had instilled in the Vietnamese elite class a tradition of service to king and country as the most fundamental of Confucian duties. Many civilian and military officials refused to accept the court’s decision to capitulate to superior military force and attempted to organize local armed forces to restore Ham Nghi to power. In Ha Tinh province, along the central coast of Annam, the scholar-official Phan Dinh Phung launched a Can Vuong (Save the King) movement to rally support for the deposed ruler and drive the French from his native land. When his friend Hoang Cao Khai, a childhood acquaintance who had decided to accommodate himself to the new situation, remonstrated with Phung to abandon his futile effort and prevent useless bloodshed, the latter replied in the lofty tones of the principled Confucian patriot:

  I have concluded that if our country has survived these past thousand years when its territory was not large, its wealth not great, it was because the relations between king and subjects, fathers and children, have always been regulated by the five moral obligations. In the past, the Han, the Song, the Yuan, the Ming [four of the most powerful of past Chinese dynasties] time and again dreamt of annexing our country and of dividing it up into prefectures and districts within the Chinese administrative system. But never were they able to realize their dream. Ah! If even China, which shares a common border with out territory and is a thousand times more powerful than Vietnam, could not rely upon her strength to swallow us, it was surely because the destiny of our country had been willed by Heaven itself.1

  But the existence of two claimants to the throne created a serious dilemma for all those Vietnamese who were animated by loyalty to the monarchy. Should they obey the new emperor Dong Khanh, duly anointed with French approval at Hué? Or should they heed the appeal of the dethroned ruler Ham Nghi, who from his mountain hideout had issued a call for the support of all patriotic elements in a desperate struggle against the barbarians? The dilemma of choosing between resistance and accommodation was a cruel one and created a division in the traditional ruling class that would not heal for over half a century.

  At the heart of the anti-French resistance movement was the central Vietnamese province of Nghe An. A land of placid beaches and purple mountains, of apple green rice fields and dark green forests, Nghe An lies in the Vietnamese panhandle between the South China Sea and the mountains of the Annamite cordillera along the Laotian border to the west. It is a land of hot dry winds and of torrential autumn rains that flatten the rice stalks and flood the paddy fields of the peasants. It is paradoxical that this land, so beautiful to the eye, has often been cruel to its inhabitants. Crowded into a narrow waist between the coast and the mountains, the Vietnamese who lived in this land, over 90 percent of whom were peasants scratching out their living from the soil, found life, at best, a struggle. The soil is thin in depth and weak in nutrients, and frequently the land is flooded by seawater. The threat of disaster is never far away, and when it occurs, it sometimes drives the farmer to desperate measures.

  Perhaps that explains why the inhabitants of Nghe An have historically been known as the most obdurate and rebellious of Vietnamese, richly earning their traditional sobriquet among their compatriots as “the buffalos of Nghe An.” Throughout history, the province has often taken the lead in resisting invaders, and in raising the cry of rebellion against unpopular rulers. In the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Nghe An became one of the centers of the anti-French resistance movement. Many of the province’s elites fought and died under the banner of Phan Dinh Phung and his Can Vuong movement.

  The village of Kim Lien is located in Nam Dan district, in the heart of Nghe An province, about ten miles west of the provincial capital of Vinh. The district lies along the northern bank of the Ca, the main river in Nghe An province. Much of the land is flat, with rice fields washed by a subtropical sun stretching to the sea a few miles to the east, but a few hillocks crowned by leafy dark-green vegetation rise above the surrounding plain. Clumps of palm trees dot the landscape and provide shade for the tiny thatch huts of the peasants huddled in their tiny hamlets. Within each individual hamlet, banana trees, citrus, and stands of bamboo provide sustenance in times of need and materials for local construction. Still, the farmers of the district were mostly poor in the nineteenth century, for it was a densely populated region, and there was inadequate land to feed the population.

  It was here, in 1863, that Ha Thy Hy, the second wife of the well-to-do farmer Nguyen Sinh Vuong (sometimes called Nguyen Sinh Nham), gave birth to a son, who was given the name Nguyen Sinh Sac. Vuong’s first wife had died a few years earlier, after bearing her husband’s first son, Nguyen Sinh Tro. To raise his child, Vuong married Ha Thy Hy, the daughter of a peasant family in a neighboring village. By the time Sac was four, his mother and father had both died, and he was brought up by his half brother Tro, who had already taken up farming on his father’s land. The farmer’s life was difficult for Tro and his neighbors. When a typhoon struck, the land was flooded, destroying the entire harvest; times of drought produced stunted rice plants. As a result, many farmers in the village worked at other tasks as a sideline, such as carpentry, bricklaying, weaving, or metalworking. Yet there was a long tradition of respect for learning in the area. A number of local scholars had taken the Confucian civil service examinations, and several offered classes in the classics as a means of supplementing their meager income.

  At first, the young Nguyen Sinh Sac had little opportunity to embark on his own career as a scholar. Although the family history, carefully carved in Chinese characters on wooden tablets placed, in accordance with tradition, beside the family altar, recorded that many members had successfully taken the civil service examinations in earlier times, apparently none had done so in recent generations. Sac’s half brother Tro had little interest in learning. Yet it soon became clear that Sac was eager for education. After leading his brother’s water buffalo back from the fields in the late morning, he often stopped off at the school of the local Confucian scholar Vuong Thuc Mau, where he tied up the animal and lingered outside the classroom, listening to the teacher conduct his lessons. In his spare time, young Sac attempted to learn Chinese characters by writing them on the bare earth or on the leaf of a persimmon tree.2

  By the time he was an adolescent, Nguyen Sinh Sac’s love of learning had become common knowledge throughout the village and came to the attention of Hoang Duong (also known as Hoang Xuan Duong), a Confucian scholar from the nearby hamlet of Hoang Tru who often walked over the mud-packed footpaths to Kim Lien to visit his friend Vuong Thuc Mau. Noticing the young lad on the back of a water buffalo absorbed in reading a book while his friends played in the fields, Hoang Duong spoke with Nguyen Sinh Tro and volunteered to raise the boy, offering him an education through the classes that he taught in his own home. Tro agreed, and in 1878, at age fifteen, Nguyen Sinh Sac moved to Hoang Tru village, where he began formal study in the Confucian classics with his new foster father and sponsor. The event was hardly an unusual one, since it was customary for the talented sons of poor farmers to be taken under the wing of more affluent relatives or neighbors and provided with a Confucian education in a local school. Should the child succeed in his studies and rise to the level of a scholar or government official, relatives and neighbors alike could all bask in the glow of the recipient’s prestige and influence.

  Like many other scholars in the area, Master Duong (as he was known locally) was part teacher, part farmer. The roots of the Hoang family were in Hai Hung province, just to the southeast of Hanoi in the Red River delta, where many members were renowned for their learning. After moving to Nghe An in the fifteenth century, Hoang Duong’s forebears continued the tradition of scholarship. His father had taken the civil service examination three times, eventually receiving the grade of tu tat (“cultivated talent,” the lowest level of achievement in the examination and the Confucian equivalent of a bachelor’s deg
ree in the United States today).

  While Hoang Duong taught his students in two outer rooms of his small house, his wife, Nguyen Thi Kep, and their two daughters, Hoang Thi Loan and Hoang Thi An, tilled the fields and weaved to supplement the family income. Like their counterparts in villages throughout the country, none of the women in Master Duong’s family had any formal education, since the arts of scholarship and governing—reflecting time-worn Confucian principles introduced from China—were restricted exclusively to males. In Vietnam, as in China, it was a woman’s traditional duty to play the role of mother and housekeeper, and to serve the needs of her husband. This had not always been the case, since Vietnamese women had historically possessed more legal rights than their Chinese counterparts, but as Confucianism became increasingly dominant after the fifteenth century, their position in Vietnamese society became increasingly restricted. Within the family, they were clearly subordinate to their husbands, who possessed exclusive property rights and were permitted to take an additional wife if the first failed to produce a son.

  Within these constraints, Nguyen Thi Kep and her daughters were probably better off than most of their neighbors, since they had absorbed a little literary knowledge. Kep’s own family also had a tradition of scholarship. Her father had passed the first level of civil service examination just like her father-in-law had. As the wife of a local scholar, Kep was a respected and envied member of the local community. In most respects, however, her life, and that of her daughters, differed little from their less fortunate neighbors, who spent their days knee-deep in the muddy fields beyond the village hedgerow, painstakingly nursing the rice seedlings through the annual harvest cycle.

  In this bucolic atmosphere, young Sac grew to adulthood. He quickly showed himself adept at Confucian learning, and when he displayed a romantic interest in Master Duong’s attractive daughter Hoang Thi Loan, the family eventually consented to arrange a marriage, although Kep was apparently initially reluctant because of Sac’s status as an orphan. The wedding ceremony took place in 1883. As a wedding gift, Master Duong provided his new son-in-law with a small three-room thatch hut on a small plot of land next to his own house. A one-room structure nearby served as the family altar, where the males in the family were expected to pay fealty to the family ancestors. The house built for the newlyweds was cozy and clean, with the living space in the front room, the kitchen in the rear, and an outside room for Sac’s study. The family was somewhat more affluent than most in the village but did not hire laborers for their rice fields or the small vegetable garden. During the next seven years, while her husband continued his studies, Hoang Thi Loan bore three children—a daughter, Nguyen Thi Thanh, born in 1884; a son, Nguyen Sinh Khiem, in 1888; and then, on May 19, 1890, a second son, Nguyen Sinh Cung, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh. (In Vietnam, children are given a “milk name” at birth. When they reach adolescence, a new name is assigned to reflect the parents’ aspiration for their child).3

  While Nguyen Sinh Sac studied in preparation for taking the civil service examinations, his wife, Loan, as was the custom, tended the rice fields and raised the children. According to the recollections of her contemporaries, she was diligent and family oriented, both traditional Confucian virtues, but she was also gifted and intellectually curious. She had some acquaintance with Vietnamese literature and often lulled her children to sleep with traditional folk songs or by reciting passages from Nguyen Du’s famous verse classic Truyen Kieu (The Tale of Kieu), a poignant story of two lovers caught in the web of traditional morality.

  In 1891, Nguyen Sinh Sac traveled to the provincial capital of Vinh to sit in candidacy for the tu tai, but he failed to pass. His performance was sufficiently encouraging, however, for him to continue his studies after his return home, and to teach classes to local children in his home to help support the family. When his father-in-law, Master Duong, died in 1893, adding to the family’s financial burdens, Sac was forced to delay his preparations for retaking the examination. While his older sister helped with the household chores, little Nguyen Sinh Cung enjoyed himself, playing in the fields or roaming around his father’s school. At night, before being placed in his hammock, his grandmother read him local tales of heroism, Cung was intelligent and curious, quick to absorb knowledge.

  In May 1894, Sac took the examinations in Vinh a second time and received the grade of cu nhan, or “recommended man,” a level higher than the tu tai and the equivalent of a master of arts degree. The achievement was unusual for a local scholar, and on his return to Hoang Tru village he was offered a small plot of land as a traditional reward given by the community to successful candidates in the civil service examinations. Since he had only three acres of rice land as part of his wife’s dowry, Sac accepted, but he refused offers to arrange an expensive banquet in his honor, preferring instead to distribute water buffalo meat to poor villagers.

  It was commonplace for recipients of the prestigious cu nhan degree to seek an official position in the imperial bureaucracy, thus “honoring the self and enriching the family” (vinh thanh phi gia), but Nguyen Sinh Sac preferred to continue his studies while earning a modest income as a local instructor of the classics. In the hallowed Confucian tradition of wifely sacrifice—in the expressive Vietnamese phrase, vong anh di truoc, vong nang theo sau, or “the carriage of the husband goes before, that of his wife after”—Hoang Thi Loan continued to work in the family’s rice fields while raising the family.

  In the spring of 1895, Nguyen Sinh Sac traveled to Hué to take the imperial examinations (thi hoi), the highest level of academic achievement in the Confucian educational system. He did not pass but decided to remain in the city in order to enter the Imperial Academy (Quoc tu Giam) in preparation for a second effort. The academy, whose origins dated back to the early years of national independence in Hanoi, served as a training place sponsored by the court for aspiring candidates for the imperial bureaucracy. Sac had no funds to pay his tuition or room and board, but fortunately the school offered a few modest scholarships to help defray living costs and with the assistance of a friend he was able to obtain one. Sac returned briefly to Nghe An to bring Loan and their two sons back to Hué, so that his wife could seek work to help the family meet expenses.

  In those days, the trip from the Nghe An provincial capital of Vinh to Hué was both arduous and dangerous. The journey lasted about a month, and the road wound through dense forest and over mountains infested by bandits. It was quicker and more comfortable to travel by sea, but to poor villagers like Nguyen Sinh Sac, the cost of passage by ship was prohibitive. The family thus decided to make the trip on foot, covering at most about thirty kilometers a day and walking in groups with several other travelers for protection against bandits and wild animals. With his short legs, the five-year-old Cung found it difficult to keep up the pace, so his father sometimes carried him, entertaining him with stories of mythical creatures and the heroic figures of the Vietnamese past.

  Hué, originally known as Phu Xuan, had once been the headquarters of the Nguyen lords who had ruled the southern half of the country during the two centuries of civil war. After the founding of the Nguyen dynasty in 1802, Emperor Gia Long had decided to transfer the capital there from its traditional location in the Red River valley as a means of demonstrating his determination to reunify the entire country under Nguyen rule. A small market town nestled on the banks of the Perfume River about midway between the two major river deltas, it had become an administrative center after becoming the seat of the imperial court, but was still much smaller in size than the traditional capital of Hanoi (then known as Thang Long), and probably contained a population of fewer than ten thousand inhabitants.

  After arriving, undoubtedly exhausted, in Hué, Nguyen Sinh Sac was able to arrange temporary lodgings at the house of a friend. Eventually, however, the family moved into a small apartment located on Mai Thuc Loan Street, not far from the eastern wall of the imperial city, on the northern bank of the Perfume River. The Imperial Academy
was located on the southern bank, about seven kilometers west of the city. But Sac seldom attended school, spending most of his time studying at home. In his spare time he taught the classics to his own boys and the children of local officials. Reflecting the intense respect for education that characterized Confucian societies, he put extra pressure on his sons, admonishing them to study hard and pay strict attention to their calligraphy. According to the accounts of neighbors, little Cung had already begun to display a lively interest in the world around him, joining his brother to watch the imperial troops perform their drills and trying to sneak into the imperial city for a closer look inside. Observing a royal procession as it left the palace on one ceremonial occasion, he returned home to ask his mother whether the emperor had injured his leg. When asked why he had posed the question, Cung replied that he had just seen the ruler being carried by bearers in a sedan chair.

  In 1898, Sac failed in his second attempt to pass the metropolitan examination and decided to accept temporary employment as a teacher at a neighborhood school in the hamlet of Duong No, just east of the city. His wife, Loan, remained in the apartment in Hué to supplement the family’s meager income by weaving and taking in washing. The school at Duong No had been founded by a well-to-do local farmer, who gave permission for Sac’s own two sons to attend the classes. It was apparently at that time that the boys were first exposed to the Confucian classics in the Chinese language.