Ho Chi Minh Page 5

  In August 1900, Sac was appointed by the imperial court to serve as a clerk for the provincial examinations in Thanh Hoa, a provincial capital almost five hundred kilometers north of the imperial capital. The assignment was considered an honor, since cu nhan were not usually allowed to serve as proctors. Sac’s elder son, Khiem, went with him; Cung remained with his mother in Hué. On his return from Thanh Hoa to Hué, Sac stopped briefly in his home village of Kim Lien to build a tomb for his parents.

  The decision was costly. Back in Hué, his wife had given birth to her fourth child, a boy named Nguyen Sinh Xin (from xin, meaning literally “to beg”). But the ordeal weakened her already fragile constitution, and despite the help of a local doctor she became ill and died on February 10, 1901. Neighbors later recalled that during the Têt (the local version of the lunar new year) holidays, the young Cung ran crying from house to house asking for milk to feed the baby, and that for weeks his normally sunny disposition turned somber.4

  On hearing the news of his wife’s death, Sac returned immediately to Hué to pick up his children and take them back to Hoang Tru village, where he resumed his teaching. For a while, young Cung continued to study with his father, but eventually Sac sent him to a distant relative on his mother’s side, a scholar named Vuong Thuc Do. By then, little Cung had begun to make significant progress in his studies. He was able to recognize quite a few Chinese characters—the essential medium for a Confucian education and still used to write the colloquial Vietnamese language—and enjoyed practicing them. It was clear that the boy was quick-witted and curious, but his father was concerned that he sometimes neglected his studies and sought out other amusements. Cung’s new instructor may have been some help in that regard. Vuong Thuc Do genuinely loved his students and reportedly never beat them—apparently quite unusual in his day—and he regaled his protégés with stories of the righteous heroes of the past, one of whom was his own older brother, who had fought with Phan Dinh Phung’s Can Vuong movement against the French.

  After a few months in Hoang Tru, Sac returned to Hué; his mother-in-law, Nguyen Thi Kep, kept the children. Sac’s daughter, Nguyen Thi Thanh, who had stayed in the village with her grandmother when the rest of the family moved to Hué, was now fully grown but had not married, so she remained at home to reduce the burden on the family. Cung helped out in the house and garden, but still had time to play. In summertime he joined his friends in fishing in the local ponds, flying kites (many years later, local residents would recall that when on windless days many of his friends quickly grew discouraged, Cung would still try to keep his kite in the air), and climbing the many hills in the vicinity. The most memorable was Mount Chung, on the summit of which sat the temple of Nguyen Duc Du, a general of the thirteenth century who had fought against an invading Mongol army. It was here, too, where the patriotic scholar Vuong Thuc Mau, at whose doorstep Sac had first discovered his love of learning years before, had formed a band of rebels in 1885 to fight under the banner of the Can Vuong movement. From the heights of Mount Chung, climbers had a breathtaking view of rice fields, stands of bamboo and palm trees, and the long blue-gray line of the mountains to the west. There was only one sad interlude in this, the happiest period of young Cung’s childhood. His younger brother Xin continued to be sickly, and died at the age of only one year.

  Back in Hué, Nguyen Sinh Sac applied to retake the imperial examinations and this time he earned the degree of doctorate, second class (known in Vietnamese as pho bang). The news caused a sensation in Hoang Tru, as well as in Sac’s native village of Kim Lien. Since the mid-seventeenth century, the villages in their area had reportedly produced almost two hundred bachelor’s and master’s degree holders, but he was the first to earn the pho bang degree. On his return, the residents of Hoang Tru planned a ceremonial entry into the village, but Sac, whose dislike of pomp and circumstance was now becoming pronounced, again declined the honor. Despite his protests, the village arranged a banquet to celebrate the occasion. At his request, however, some of the food was distributed to the poor.

  According to tradition, the honor of claiming a successful examination candidate went to the home village of the candidate’s father. In Sac’s case, of course, this meant that the village that could now label itself “a civilized spot, a literary location” (dat van vat, chon thi tu) was his father’s birthplace of Kim Lien, rather than Hoang Tru, where he now resided. To reward their native son, the local authorities of Kim Lien had used public funds to erect a small wood and thatch house on public land to entice him to live there. Sac complied, using it as a new home for himself and his three surviving children. It was slightly larger than his house in Hoang Tru, consisting of three living rooms, with one room reserved for the family water buffalo and a small room containing an altar for Hoang Thi Loan. A couple of acres of rice land were included with the house, as well as a small garden, where Sac planted sweet potatoes.

  The award of a pho bang degree was a signal honor in traditional Vietnamese society and often brought the recipient both fame and fortune, usually in the form of an official career. Nguyen Sinh Sac, however, had no desire to pursue a career in the bureaucracy, especially in a time of national humiliation. Refusing the offer of an official appointment at court on the grounds that he was still in mourning for the death of his wife, Sac decided to stay in Kim Lien, where he opened a small school to teach the classics. The monetary rewards for such work were minimal, and Sac contributed to his financial difficulties by giving generously to the poor residents in the village. Sac did adopt one concession to his new status, however, taking on the new name Nguyen Sinh Huy, or “born to honor.”5

  For young Cung, Sac’s decision came at a momentous time in his life; at the age of eleven, he was about to enter into adolescence. As was traditional in Vietnamese society, to mark the occasion his father assigned to him the new name Nguyen Tat Thanh, or “he who will succeed,” on the village register. At first the boy continued to study the classics with his father, but eventually he was sent to attend a local school taught by his father’s friend Vuong Thuc Qui, the son of the scholar Vuong Thuc Mau, who had committed suicide by throwing himself into a pond to avoid being arrested by the French. Although a degree holder like Sac, Qui had also refused appointment as an official and taught in his home village, where he secretly took part in subversive activities against the puppet government in Hué. In teaching his students, he rejected the traditional pedantic method of forcing his students to memorize texts, but took great care to instruct them in the humanitarian inner core of Confucian classical writings while simultaneously instilling in their minds a fierce patriotic spirit for the survival of an independent Vietnam. To burn his message into their souls, prior to beginning each day’s lecture he lit a lamp at the altar of his father along the wall of his classroom.

  Nguyen Tat Thanh thrived under his new tutor, penning patriotic essays at Qui’s direction and helping to serve the guests who frequently came to lecture on various subjects. Unfortunately, the experience was a short one, for Qui soon closed the school and left the village to take part in rebel activities. Thanh briefly studied with another teacher in a neighboring village, but his new tutor’s teaching methods were too traditional for the boy’s taste, and he soon returned to study with his father, whose attitude toward learning was much more tolerant. Like his friend Vuong Thuc Qui, Sac was critical of the technique of rote memorization and once remarked that studying a text “branch and leaf” was a worthless activity far removed from the reality of life. Don’t just follow the road to an official career, he advised his students, but try to understand the inner content of the Confucian classics in order to learn how to help your fellow human beings. To a friend Sac once remarked, “Why should I force my students to memorize the classics just to take the exams? I won’t teach my kids that way.”6

  Young Thanh was undoubtedly delighted with his father’s attitude, for he much preferred to read such popular Chinese favorites as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a romantic tale
of heroism during the period of turmoil following the fall of the Han dynasty, and Journey to the West (sometimes translated into English under the title Monkey), an account of the Buddhist monk Xuan Zang’s trip through Central Asia to India in search of classical Buddhist texts. (While Thanh was attending school at Duong No village, an older student who had been instructed to keep an eye on him found it necessary to tie a string to his charge so that he could be located when he sneaked out to play. On most occasions, it turned out that Thanh had already learned his lesson by heart.7)

  Nguyen Tat Thanh’s education was not limited to the classroom. His father’s house was located near the workshop of a local blacksmith named Dien, who taught the boy how to use the forge and frequently took him bird hunting. Dien’s penchant for telling stories turned his forge into one of the most popular gathering spots in the vicinity, and in the evening Thanh often joined with other village youngsters to sit at Dien’s feet while Dien recounted the heroic but ultimately futile efforts of local Can Vuong bands to drive the barbarians from their homeland. With others in the audience, Thanh heard about the glorious achievements of warriors long dead like Le Loi and Mai Thuc Loan, who had fought to protect their homeland against invaders. He listened with sorrow to the story of Vuong Thuc Mau’s suicide, and how the Can Vuong leader Phan Dinh Phung, his dwindling forces driven deep into the mountains along the Laotian border, had finally died of dysentery in 1896, thus bringing a tragic end to the movement. But he thrilled to hear that several members of his father’s family had served and died fighting for the cause.

  By now, Thanh had begun to absorb an intense feeling of patriotism. While living with his parents in Hué, he had attended memorial services at a nearby temple for martyrs who had been killed during the war of resistance against the French, and he joined the others in weeping bitterly over their sacrifice. After returning to his home village in 1901, he was irritated to discover that most of the classical texts available locally dealt with Chinese rather than Vietnamese history, and he walked to the provincial capital of Vinh to buy books about the history of his own country. When he discovered that they were too expensive to purchase, he tried to memorize key passages so that he could quote them to friends back in Kim Lien.

  Until now, the boy’s acquaintance with the French had been limited to observing them as a child on the streets of Hué; contemporaries later recalled his curiosity at that time as to why even the most prestigious of Vietnamese officials had to bow and scrape before all Europeans. Sometimes, he and his brother watched raptly as French construction workers erected a steel bridge over the Perfume River just east of the imperial city. On occasion, the workers would joke with the boys and offer them candy, inspiring Thanh to ask his mother why some foreigners were so much more friendly than others. On his return to his home village, however, Thanh’s dislike of foreigners intensified when he heard tales of the mistreatment of laborers recruited by the French to work on a new highway under construction that wound westward through the mountains into Laos. Although Thanh and his brother, as the sons of a member of the scholarly class, were exempted from conscription for public labor projects, many other villagers were not so fortunate. The lucky ones returned home broken in body and spirit. Many others, their health ravaged by malaria, malnutrition, or overwork, did not return at all. Although corvée labor had traditionally been required of peasants in precolonial times, such projects had usually been more modest in scope and in the length of service required. The road into Laos—the “road of death,” as it became known to the Vietnamese—became a major source of popular antagonism to the new colonial regime.

  One of Nguyen Sinh Sac’s close acquaintances was the renowned scholar and patriot Phan Boi Chau, a native of a village only a few kilometers from Kim Lien. Chau’s father had been a tu tai, and Chau had received training in the classics as a youth. But to young Chau, the plight of his country was much more important than the promise of an official career. While still an adolescent, he had organized the youth of his village into a tiny militia to follow the example of their elders in attacking the invading French. He later acknowledged his humiliation when French troops entered the village to suppress the movement and forced him to flee to the surrounding woods in the company of a crowd of refugees.

  Eventually, Chau continued with his classical studies and in 1900 he passed the regional examinations “with honors” (giai nguyen). But, like Nguyen Sinh Sac, Phan Boi Chau had no aspirations for an official career and soon began to travel throughout the central provinces of the country to organize fellow scholars into a coherent movement to oppose the feudal court and its protector, the French colonial regime. By now he had begun to read the reformist writings of Chinese progressives such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, and became convinced that Vietnam must learn from the West in order to survive.

  During his travels, Phan Boi Chau frequently stopped in neighboring Kim Lien to visit Nguyen Sinh Sac and Vuong Thuc Qui and discuss the matters of the day. Articulate and affable, he was a persuasive advocate of the patriotic cause, and he undoubtedly made an impression on young Thanh, who often served his father and his guest as they sat on rattan mats in the living room of Sac’s house with a jug of rice wine or a pot of tea. The impressionable young man was already acquainted with some of Chau’s patriotic writings and was inspired by his rebellious spirit and his contempt for feudal traditions and the decrepit monarchy in Hué.8

  As his writings at the time vividly demonstrate, Phan Boi Chau had already concluded that the Vietnamese must eventually abandon the traditional system that had evolved over a thousand years and adopt modern institutions and technology from abroad. But he also believed that only the country’s scholarly elite could lead the people to adopt such changes and that, to obtain the people’s assistance, his own movement must borrow some of the hallowed trappings of past centuries. As a result, when in early 1904 he established a new organization called the Modernization Society (Duy Tan Hoi) to provide a focus for his efforts to attract support from patriotic scholars around the country, he selected a dissident member of the Nguyen royal house, Prince Cuong De, to serve as the titular head of the organization, the stated goal of which was to drive out the French and establish a constitutional monarchy.

  Like many of his progressive contemporaries in China, Phan Boi Chau found a model for his program in Japan, where reformist elements from among the aristocratic class had rallied around Emperor Meiji to promote the modernization of traditional Japanese society. Like many Vietnamese, he had been impressed with the success of Japanese armed forces in the recent war against tsarist Russia, viewing it as proof that Asian peoples possessed the capacity to defeat Western invaders. Chau was firmly convinced that Vietnam would require assistance from abroad to bring his plans to fruition. At the end of 1904, he left for Japan and took steps to establish a school in Yokohama to train young Vietnamese patriots for the coming struggle for national independence. The following summer he returned to Hué and began to scour the country for prospective recruits.9

  Sometime shortly after his return to Vietnam, Phan Boi Chau visited Kim Lien and asked Nguyen Tat Thanh and his brother to join his movement, now popularly known as Journey to the East (Dong Du). Thanh, however, rejected the offer. According to some accounts, his decision was based on the grounds that relying on the Japanese to evict the French was equivalent to “driving the tiger out of the front door while welcoming the wolf in through the back door.” Other sources suggest that it was his father who made the decision. In his own autobiographical account, written under a pen name, Ho Chi Minh later explained that he preferred to go to France to see the secret of Western success at its source.10

  Thanh’s decision to reject Phan Boi Chau’s offer may have been motivated by one of Chau’s own remarks. When Thanh had asked how Japan had realized its own technological achievements, Chau replied that the Japanese had learned from the West. Shortly afterward, Thanh told his father that he wanted to study the French language. Sac was reluctant, sin
ce at the time only Vietnamese collaborators had bothered to learn the foreigner’s tongue. But Sac himself had already begun to obtain a superficial acquaintance with Western culture when he joined a book club to read the writings of Chinese reformist intellectuals seeking to persuade the Qing court to change its ways, so he was eventually convinced by his son’s arguments.

  At first, opportunities for Thanh to pursue his new objective were limited. During the summer of 1905, he began to study French language and culture with the help of one of his father’s scholarly friends in Kim Lien village. Then, in September, Sac enrolled both his sons in a Franco-Vietnamese preparatory school at Vinh. On the instructions of Governor-General Paul Doumer, the French administration had just decided to establish elementary-level preparatory schools to teach the French language and culture in all the provinces of central Vietnam. Doumer’s objective was to attract students from the Confucian schools in the area and provide a core of potential recruits for the new colonial administration; funds were made available to provide scholarships for needy students. Although Nguyen Sinh Sac had devoted his career to traditional education, he had by now become convinced that the younger generation must adapt to the new reality and learn from the country’s new masters. He frequently quoted from the fifteenth-century Confucian scholar Nguyen Trai, who had once pointed out that it was necessary to understand the enemy in order to defeat him. During the next academic year, Thanh and his brother made their first serious acquaintance with French language and culture. They also began to study quoc ngu, the transliteration of spoken Vietnamese into the Roman alphabet, which had first been introduced by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century and was now being popularized by progressive scholars as an alternative to the cumbersome Chinese characters that had been in use for centuries.

  Since receiving his pho bang degree in 1901, Nguyen Sinh Sac had steadily refused an official appointment by the court on the grounds of illness or family responsibility but, summoned once again in May 1906, he decided that he could no longer refuse, and accepted the offer. Leaving his daughter in charge of the house in Kim Lien, Sac returned with his two sons to the capital, arriving in June. Once again, they traveled on foot, but it must have been much easier than the previous occasion, since the boys were now teenagers. En route, Sac recounted stories about Nguyen Trai and other famous historical figures, while Thanh quizzed his older brother on the names of all the Vietnamese dynasties.11