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1

p The Vietnamese garc.ons’ day on the ship began early - at four in the morning. Thanh washed the table tops, and the walls and floor of the ship’s kitchen. He stoked the ovens, brought a supply of coal, and lugged heavy baskets of vegetables, fish, beef and ice from the holds. One day, in a storm, lugging a heavy basket along the deck, a wave seized him and nearly washed him overboard. At the last instant he managed to take hold of a rope.

p The kitchen catered to 800 persons the passengers and the crew. So the young man hadn’t an idle moment until late at night, climbing up and down sleep and slippery ladders, barely calching his breath, sweating terribly. During the day, a coat of coal dust gathered on his body, and fatigue lay heavily upon him. Still, when the welcome time of rest arrived and his mates went to bed or played cards, Thanh sought a quiet corner and read books until late at night.

p One day, he made his first important discovery. Among the 26 passengers were two French soldiers, of aboul his own age. returning home. Sometimes they helped him with his work. After nightfall they taught him the liner points of French, and gave him books to read. Thanh, for his part, taught them Vietnamese, and supplied them with cups ofcoflee on the quiet. All the Frenchmen he had met so far had been arrogant officials or policemen. They behaved as though they owned the land and treated the Vietnamese as subhuman, lint now, a little surprised, Thanh was happy to see there could be good Frenchmen too.

p His second discovery was made in Marseilles, the first French city Inset foot in. The wretched dwellings of the poor in the narrow alleyways on the edge of the city were an eye-opener. He also saw many poorly clothed Frenchmen, and was stunned to see young girls selling themselves outside the waterfront taverns. Late at night, when the ship lifted anchor and set its course to Havre, Thanh said to his neighbour, a ship’s garcon like himself: "There are poor people in France, too, as in our country. Why don’t the French worry about them rather than ’teach’ us?"

p On one of the crossings, Thanh learned that Charlie. Chaplin was on board. He had seen a few Chaplin films, and had quickly become a Chaplin fan. He sent a note, Geraldine Chaplin recalled years later, asking for permission to take a photograph with her father. Father wasted no time. He went down to the ship’s kitchen and found the Vietnamese youth who called himself Ba. They ate a meal together, and then had a photograph taken... Later, after Ho Chi Minh became a renowned political leader, they met several times. Chaplin often spoke of their meetings, and always remembered Ho Chi Minh with affection and sincere joy.

p Within a few months, Thanh made two nearly round-the-world voyages. He crossed the Atlantic and Indian oceans, the Arabian and Red seas, the Mediterranean, and saw two more continents first Africa, then America. In New York, he left the ship. For a lew months he had a job in Brooklyn. Among the many impressions he gained, the strongest was made by the Declaration of Independence. He savoured the words that all men were created equal, that they were endowed with inalienable rights, among which were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He remembered those words many many years later when, in a secret hideout in Hanoi he laboured sleepless nights on the draft of Vietnam’s own declaration of independence.

p Soon, the picture that he saw around him in America dispelled all illusions. Behind the fine words about equality and liberty he saw the rampant injustices and the poverty of millions of people. Thanh was stunned by what he saw in Harlem, the black ghetto that he often 27 visited. The racial oppression and discrimination, signs of which were plentiful all round, revolted him.

p Six months passed, and Thanh was travelling again. His destination was England. He arrived there when World War I was at its height. The reception was not a kind one. He found a job clearing London streets of sleet and snow, then he was a stoker in rich houses and for a pittance, though he managed to pay tuition at English language courses.

p A few months later he had a stroke of luck: he found a job at the Carlton Hotel on Hayrnarket Street. The chej there, the famous Escoffier, known in those days as king of the French cuisine, look him on as a kitchen boy.

p The work was hard. A weaker man would have gone down. But Thanh was firm of character. Those who knew him then say he never used foul language, never drank, never gambled. All his free time, no matter how tired he was, was spent reading and learning.

p But Thanh’s active mind could not suffer the monotonous life in London for long, far away from anything that might have linked him with his country. Across the English Channel, in France, he knew from the newspapers, were many of his countrymen, among whom he would be less lonesome. Besides, in France he would know more about the political affairs in Indochina, where portentous events were in the making.

p An abortive anti-French armed rising had occurred in May 1916 in Hue. The colonial authorities suppressed it, and banished the rebellious Emperor Duy ’Fan to Reunion Island. And in August of the following year, in the town of Thai Nguen, the French suppressed an armed rising of Red Belts.

p Thanh wrote a letter to Phan Chu Trinh, whose Paris address he had come upon by accident. Trinh, arrested in 1908 for anti-French activities, had been sentenced to death by a colonial tribunal. But he was known in French democratic circles, and the Human Rights League and Jean Jaures, leader of the French Socialists, intervened in his behalf. The death sentence was commuted to exile on prison island Poulo Condore. Three years later, he was allowed to settle in France, where he lived under police surveillance.

p Trinh did his best for Thanh, promising help in finding a job and lodgings for him in Paris. At the end of 1917, finally, Thanh crossed the English Channel to embattled France.

p A lawyer by name of Phan Van Truong let him a little room in quiet Rue Cobelin. Phan Chu Trinh had his photo studio in the same house, and employed Thanh as retoucher. In his childhood, Thanh had learned penmanship as part of his classical education, and handled the brush with great skill. So retouching came easy. His new friend, the lawyer, was glad to show Thanh around the city. For Thanh, he was an 28 entirely new type of Vietnamese intellectual. Truong knew many French progressives writers, artists, and politicians. He was interested in politics, especially in socialist theory, and Thanh saw Marxist authors among his hooks. Besides, the house on Rue Gobelin was a place where Vietnamese emigres congregated.

p Thanh loved wandering about Paris, that open-air museum of history. Kvcn in the harsh conditions of wartime, the city had lost none of its beauty, glamour and charm. Every street, every house, almost every paving stone carried traces of a revolutionary past. For nearly a hundred years—from the end of the 18th century right up to the 1870s - Paris had been leader in revolutionary matters, the revolutionary beacon for all other European capitals.

p Knights of revolution came to Paris from all over the world to hear the living voices of history, to glimpse through the prism of the past the outlines of the impending battles in their own countries. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had lived in Paris. So had Lenin for three of his most fruitful years. Embedded in the memory of Paris were hundreds of names of revolutionaries from different countries. Years would pass and one more name would be added to the list, that of the as yet unknown Vietnamese patriot who walked the pavements of Paris with humility, gazing with wide-open eyes at majestic pictures of a glorious past.

p Longing to see more of his countrymen, Thanh became a frequent visitor to the Latin Quarter. Most Vietnamese who had settled in Paris, lived there. He went into the little restaurants kept by his countrymen, where the heady aromas of the thick, pitch-black Vietnamese coffee and the nyok mam fish sauce hung in the air. Those who live abroad for a long time, says a Vietnamese saying, see and smell nyok mam in their dreams.

p In those days, the Vietnamese in France had no organisation of their own. Many of them, though missing their country, were rather pleased with their life, which was easier than in colonial Vietnam. Most young people were students getting a government stipend, or sons of prosperous Vietnam mandarins. Patriotic feelings, and pain for their oppressed country, were foreign to many of them. Thanh tried to arouse them, telling them about the suffering and heroic past of their country.

p His prestige rose quickly. He was the moving spirit of the as yet rare gatherings of Vietnamese. Soon, he became an initiator, and most active participant, of the first Vietnamese organisation in France the Association of Vietnamese Patriots.

p In the evenings and on days off he spent hours in the SainteGenevicve Library on Rue Pantheon. That was where he first read Shakespeare, Dickens, Lu Hsun, Victor Hugo, and Emil /ola.

p The genius of Leo Tolstoy staggered his imagination. He read French translations of War and Pence, Anna Karenina and Resurrection over and 29 over. The philosophical depth of those outstanding novels delighted him. He was caught up by Tolstoy’s hatred of war, of feudal authoritarianism, and injustice, for all these things doomed people to misery and rightlessness. Thanh was captivated by Tolstoy’s plain and clear language. After reading the description of a hunt in War and Peace, he wrote in his diary: "One must write only of what one saw and felt."

p One day, Thanh picked up a paper running installments of a novel, Under Fire (Le feu), by Henri Barbusse, then a young novelist. These dramatic lines excited Thanh: "For countless workmen of the battles, you who have made with your hands all of the Great War, you whose omnipotence is not yet being used for doing good, you are the human host whose every face is a world of sorrow..."

p In his mind’s eye, Thanh again saw the war-ravaged towns and villages in the north of France, hospital trains bringing wounded to Paris from the frontlines, the thousands of his emaciated and wretched countrymen who had been sent against their will to die for the alien interests of “mother” France and were hypocritically called champions of justice and freedom.

p Thanh could not have known what Maxim Gorky said of Barbusse: "He looked into the essence of war more deeply than any other writer before him, and showed people the abyss of their delusion.” But this was exactly how he felt after reading Barbusse’s book. Again and again, he repeated the concluding lines of the novel: "These men of the people, who had dimly seen the outlines of an unknown Revolution, a revolution that sprang from themselves and was already rising, repeated ’equality!’ "

p During the first weeks of his stay in France, Thanh had learned of the astounding events in Petrograd at the end of October 1917: a new revolution had broken out in Russia. The Paris papers called it a Bolshevik coup, and it was difficult for Thanh and for many of his French friends to at once grasp its history-making significance. But his intuition helped him arrive at the main conclusion. So did his reading of socialist newspapers: for the first time in world history, working people had come to power.

p From the bottom of his heart, the heart of an ardent patriot, he welcomed the working people’s victory. Some forty years later, as Chairman of the Communist Party of Vietnam and President of free Vietnam, he would say that for him, for all Vietnamese revolutionaries, the influence ol the Great October Socialist Revolution had been "like the water and rice that a thirsty and hungry traveller receives after a long journey."

p The experiences of his long life abroad, coupled with the benign influence of the Great October Revolution all this was an important turning point in Thanh’s ideological and political outlook. No, he had not 30 yet found his "magic sword”. But his vision of the world had changed. Such abstract things as “imperialism”, “capitalism”, and “colonialism” had acquired tangible features. Not in Vietnam alone. All over tinworld, the toiling masses, whole nations, were being subjected to oppression and exploitation. Meeting people of different colour and social background, Thanh saw that in Europe, too, there were povertystricken people who had nothing in common with the colonialists oppressing his country. He saw that Africans were just as handicapped and humiliated as Asians. He concluded bitterly that for colonialists the life of an oppressed, whether black or yellow, was not worth more than a sou.

p Thanh realised that the Vietnamese proverb, "a crow is black wherever it is”, was entirely true. The United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan were, like 1’Vance, imperialist powers with colonial possessions. Oppressed peoples could not expect help from any of them.

p But his hatred of colonialists contained no racial overtones. This helped him gradually acquire a consistent internationalist outlook. He saw that all working people oppressed by the ruling classes, whether in capitalist or colonial countries, had the same interests. His life in Paris convinced him that the enemy of the Vietnamese people was also the enemy ofthe French working people. This discovery prompted him to join the most revolutionary wing of the French working class.

p Thanh was a regular reader of I’Humanile, the socialist newspaper. He tried not to miss any of the Socialist Party’s meetings, conferences and discussions, for it was the only political party in France that sided with the colonial peoples. He listened eagerly to speakers who denounced colonialism. At one of the meetings he was introduced to Paul Vaillant Couturier, a left winger in the Socialist Party and one ofthe youngest deputies in the French National Assembly. And Couturier introduced Thanh to Marcel Cachin and Henri Barbusse. Gradually, he got to know a large number of people in the Socialist Party and the tradeunion movement.

p At the end of 1918, Thanh himself became a member ofthe Socialist Party of France. No Vietnamese before him had ever been in any French political party. At that time, the Socialists numbered no more than 12,000, though when World War I erupted its membership had approached 100,000. No few Socialists had been among the two million F’renchmen who laid down their lives in battle. And the responsibility for their death lay with the Socialist leaders who had voted for the war. Thanh had joined the Socialists along with those who were later called the iiery generation, those who were moved by strong anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiment and had none of the illusions of their elder comrades.

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p For Thanh joining the party was the beginning of a professional revolutionary career. He adopted a new name or rather a party name Nguyen Ai Quoc, meaning Nguyen the Patriot. Possibly he had used the name on arriving in France. That would be in keeping with Vietnamese tradition. But its first documentary evidence dates to the beginning of 1919.

Among themselves, Vietnamese use just the name, that is, the last element of their usually three-word appellation. The first element, an archaic reminder of once belonging to a particular clan, is used only to show special respect for the person in question. And that was what he was to his party friends, both Vietnamese and foreign comrade Nguyen. Twenty-three years of his revolutionary activity passed under that name.

2

p In mid-January 1919, Paris gave a festive reception to a number of highly-placed foreign guests. Representatives of belligerent countries came to the peace conference in the French capital. Rulers ofthe victor powers were eager to cash in on the results ofthe war, to enrich themselves at the expense of the losers. The Paris newspapers called for national unity : they wanted a peace treaty that would ensure the revival of a great France. People living in the rich quarters and those who had made their fortunes on military supplies, as well as various shareholders all of them, gripped by chauvinism, called on the government to make defeated Germany "pay for everything".

p News ofthe peace conference attracted no few representatives of oppressed peoples to Paris. They nursed hopes that the high-ranking conferees would, when making post-war arrangements, hearken to their voices. Many of them were misled by U. S. President Woodrow Wilson’s demagogic Fourteen Points, which, among other things, referred to the rights ofthe colonies and of dependent countries. A delegation arrived from China. That country had fought on the side ofthe victor countries and legitimately expected, at long last, to shake oil its semi-colonial status. A Korean delegation came to demand autonomy, and opened an information bureau in Paris. Representatives of India, Ireland, and various Arab countries appeared in the endless corridors ofthe magnificent Versailles Palace.

p One morning, the doorbell rang at the home of Jules Cambon, former French ambassador to Germany, who was a member of the French delegation. The door was opened by a young woman named Gencvieve Tabouis. The future famous woman journalist was her ambassador uncle’s 32 secretary. A lean Asian youth with a pleasantly open face confronted her. He spoke with a strong accent:

p “I want to hand the ambassador a document."

p Genevieve let in the early visitor, seated him at a long richly adorned table that still stands in the drawing room of the Tabouis home and began questioning him.

p “Mademoiselle, my name is Nguyen Ai Quoc. 1 should like to see Monsieur Gambon."

p The young man opened a file, and handed it to Genevieve.

p “This is an appeal from the peoples of Indochina. 1 want to give it to the Ambassador."

p The writing, Genevieve saw at once, was clear and orderly. There was also a letter to "Esteemed Mr. Ambassador Gambon, plenipotentiary representative of France at the Paris (Conference".

p “I write on behalf of the peoples of Indochina.” This was inscribed on the top page of the document. "We are an underdeveloped nation. We have learned by experience what the civilisation of your country is.” The document was entitled, "List of Glaims of the Annamese People”. It read:

p “While waiting for the sacred right of nations to self-determination to be recognised, the people of the former kingdom of Annam, now a French possession in Indochina, presents the following demands to the governments of the Allied powers in general, and the French government in particular:

p “Complete amnesty of Vietnamese political prisoners.

p “A reform of legislation in Indochina, providing Vietnamese with the same juridical guarantees as the Europeans and abolition of the special tribunals, an instrument of terror against the best Vietnamese.

p “Freedom of the press and freedom of opinion.

p “Freedom of association and freedom of assembly.

p “Freedom of emigration and residence abroad.

p “Right to education, opening of technical and occupational educational establishments for the population in all provinces.

p “Substitution of a system of laws for the system of decrees.

p “In the French Parliament there must be a permanent Vietnamese representative elected in his own country, m order to express the will and aspirations of his countrymen."

p A few days later, other delegations and many French National Assembly deputies received the same messages. An attached note read: "Esteemed Sir, on the occasion of the victory of the Allies, we should, with your permission, like to address to you a list of the wishes of the people of Vietnam. Convinced in your magnanimity, we hope that you will 33 support these demands during their discussion by the plenipotentiary representatives.

p “On behalf of a group of Vietnamese patriots, Nguyen Ai Quoc."

p The resolute Vietnamese youth with a file of papers under his arm was seen in the noisy corridors of Paris newspaper oflices and crowded halls rented for meetings and conferences by trade unions and the Socialist Party.

p Louis Arnoux, chief of the Indochina section of the French political police who would one day become chief of the security service in Indochina, shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment when the actions of a certain Ngyen Ai Quoc and the contents of an “anti-French” document he was disseminating, were brought to his notice. He had thought he knew all the politically unreliable Annamese in Paris, and was informed of every step they made. One of them, Phan Chu Trinh, owner of a photo studio, had practically given up political activity, and, besides, could not have written the document in question for he respected France.

p The lawyer Phan Van Truong, also a resident of Paris thought to be a Marxist, was chiefly engaged in translating political books into Vietnamese and was not known to engage in any subversive activity. The only one out of Arnoux’s old acquaintances who could have ventured on such a course of action was the embattled Phan Boi Chau but Arnoux knew that Chau was in South China and, besides, had only recently published an article which, quite unexpectedly, favoured FrancoAnnamese cooperation.

p Neither the “all-seeing” Arnoux nor the young patriot’s closest friends knew, nor could have known, that the author of the "List of Claims”, one Nguyen Ai Quoc., was the ship’s kitchen boy Van Ba, or the inquisitive youngster named Thanh, son of the only scholar in the Golden Lotus Village.

p On June 29, 1919, Nguyen Ai Quoc was among the first readers of the morning papers. The headlines in the bourgeois press were triumphant. The Paris conference had culminated in the signing of a peace treaty that signified a complete victory for France. The country had received practically everything it wanted: Alsace and Lorraine, large reparations, and some of the German colonies in Africa. 1 he newspapers reflected on the postwar arrangements in capitalist Europe, where France would play a dominant role. But nothing was said of the fate of the colonial peoples. The participants in the Paris conference had secured a redivision of the world in favour of the victors, and were deaf to the demands of colonial and dependent countries. A conspiracy of silence surrounded the "List of Claims of the Annamese People".

p To be sure, Ai Quoc had enough experience by that time to know that 34 a petition could not have a decisive effect. He considered his initiative little more than convenient occasion to expose colonialism and attract the attention of French democrats to the situation in Vietnam, and, last but not least, to rouse the Vietnamese themselves from their lethargic sleep.

p Still, he was assailed by bitterness. Freedom, equality, and fraternity had turned out to be words and nothing more, a smokescreen of the bourgeoisie to conceal its crimes. The eight points in his "List of Claims" did not go beyond demanding autonomy within the French Union, and the fundamental freedoms of bourgeois democracy. But this had the effect of a red rag. The imperialists’ honeyed wartime promises were nothing short of deceit. The way out? Struggle unto death. To win independence, the colonial peoples had to throw out their oppressors, like the working people in Russia. Revolution was the only way to break down the colonial stronghold. The "List of Claims" was a political manifesto heralding a new stage in the national liberation movement of the Vietnamese.

p Bui Lam, a veteran of the Communist Party of Vietnam, recalled the tremendous impression that Nguyen Ai Quoc’s action made on Indochinese emigres and those serving in the French army or navy. "The French called it a bomb,” he recalled. "We called it thunder a spring thunder that dispersed the fog and the clouds. It gave life to the sprouts of freedom that slumbered deep within us. Going abroad in search of a livelihood, we all remained true to our country and dreamed of seeing it free. So, we could not but revere the man who claimed rights for his people. The Vietnamese in France began speaking of independence, self-determination, and Nguyen Ai Quoc. That name itself held a magicattraction for us."

p The new name in the anti-colonial movement and the dissemination of "seditious literature" created a commotion among the French authorities in Indochina. On July 25, 1919, the- Ministry for Colonial Affairs received a secret dispatch from the Governor of Cochin China.

p “Newspapers in the colony have received an inflammatory leaflet from Paris, entitled ’List of Claims of the Annamese People’,” it said. "It is signed by a Nguyen Ai Quoc on behalf of a group of Annamites. I should be grateful for any information you have about the author. In his letters he says the leaflet was also sent to people in high places in Paris. According to the secret police in Cochin China, the man is known to the Ministry for Colonial Affairs."

p A cable to the same effect also arrived from the Governor-General of Indochina. Saying that the "List of Claims" had been found on the person of an arrested Tonkinese, the Governor-General requested all Unavailable information about its author, Nguyen Ai Quoc, who was said 35 to have distributed the leaflet among departing natives in the port of Marseilles.

p The Vietnamese colonial press reacted in its own way. The newspaper Tonkin’.’, I’ulure wrote: "Again Nguyen Ai Quoc! Recently we quoted the text of a petition he had filed in Paris. Now the latest ship has brought us the ’List of Claims of the Annamese People’. The text has also reached a number of journalists, and officers ol various institutions..."

p The reaction of the Ministry for Colonial Affairs was anything but unexpected: although the war was over, it prolonged the postal censorship in Vietnam and for Vietnamese living in France. In France and Indochina police files were started on Nguyen Ai Quoc. Two secret agents were assigned to shadow him. At the end of 1919, photographs of him were filed by the Paris police. In a report of the Interior Ministry, investigators noted that the heart and soul of the Annamese movement in Paris was a certain Nguyen Ai Quoc, Secretary-General of the Association of Annamite Patriots.

p That was when Louis Arnoux, who saw Nguyen’s photograph for the first time, noted his burning eyes and the resolution written on his face, and said to officials of the Colonial Ministry that the young man, seemingly frail and fragile, was a man of vigour and action, and would one day put an end to French dominance in Indochina.
 

p Nguyen had long wanted to tell common Frenchmen of the bitter plight of his countrymen. And his acquaintanceship with Gaston Monmousscau, a progressive journalist, editor of La Vie Ouvriere, and Jean Longuet, grandson of Karl Marx, editor of the socialist Populaire, helped him do so. It was difficult writing in a foreign tongue, but gradually he learned, helped by his new friends, who touched up his contributions.

p He lamented that the French had so quickly forgotten the tens of thousands of Vietnamese who had fought under the tricolour in the war, laying down their lives in the fields of France and Germany, and in the Balkans. He wrote of the appalling living conditions of the Vietnamese “volunteers” building roads and digging foundation ditches in the northern suburbs of Paris. He wrote, too, that the end of the war had brought no relief to the Vietnamese despite France winning. On the contrary, the number of Vietnamese sentenced to a slow death on Poulo Condore was rising, as was the number ol prisoners in the remote Tonkin province of Songla, and in French Guinea and New Caledonia.

p Through his contacts in the papers, Nguyen picked up what meagre and conflicting news came from Soviet Russia. He questioned his Socialist friends about the Russian Revolution, and about Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He wanted to understand them. That was not easy in those days. The bourgeois press had mounted a slander compaign, distorting 36 the course of events in Russia. Posters put up all over Paris depicted a Bolshevik with a blood-stained knife between his teeth, grasping a woman by her hair, with peasant huts burning in the background. On other posters a hungry Russia grovelled in agony. In the bourgeois newspapers, Nguyen read monstrous inventions about the country that the Bolsheviks had loosened a bloodbath, that the Soviets had nationalised women, and that citi/ens had to file a request before being allowed to marry.

p At the end of 1918, the French government went over from hostilepropaganda to armed intervention against the young Soviet Republic. An Anglo-French squadron dropped anchor in Sevastopol and Odessa. Landing parties sci/cd Kherson and Nikolayev, and thrust farther north.

p Workers in France responded with mass actions in defence of the Soviet Republic. Nguyen attended meetings held for several consecutive days by the 2,000 workers of a mechanical works in the vicinity of his house. He joined the Socialists distributing leaflets that called on peopleto come out against the intervention in Russia.

p Marcel Cachin made emotional exposures of those "who slandered the Russian revolution without even trying to understand its nature”. Speaking in the National Assembly, he warned: "Regardless of your attitude towards the Russian Revolution, get your troops out of there at once. If you don’t, French soldiers will soon absorb the ideas of Bolshevism and Revolution. They will then come home and do what the German soldiers did who had been in Russia."

p That, Cachin pointed out, was the unavoidable result of any resort to force. The peoples would soon realise that they must secure the solidarity of those who suffer want and oppression.

p Cachin’s words were prophetic. In April 1919, French units quartered in Odessa, and seamen stationed in Sevastopol, showed their revolutionary mood by singing the Internationale and fraternising with Russian workers. "Down with the War in Russia!" Under this slogan seamen formed revolutionary committees.

p Nguyen stumbled upon a sensational item in the papers. A colonial regiment of Algerians, Moroccans and Vietnamese quatered in Odessa had refused to fight for the interests of the French bourgeoisie. It went over to the side of the Red Army.

p Nguyen did not know then that the man who raised the red flag on the cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau, then at anchor in the Odessa harbour, was a Vietnamese named Ton Due Thang a Saigon schoolmate of his who would subsequently become a close comrade in the fight for a new Vietnam.

p “I am sure,” Ton Due Thang would say later, "that any Vietnamese 37 patriot, especially a worker, who found himself in Russia at that historical moment, would have done exactly what I did, for to love one’s country and to hate the imperialists means loving the October Revolution and hating those who are against it."

p The French authorities dealt most severely with the rebellious seamen. Andre Marty, a mechanic aboard a destroyer, and do/ens of his mates were sentenced to hard labour. But this did not halt the actions in defence of Soviet Russia. Young Socialists in Paris went about singing a march written by Paul Vaillant Couturier. Meetings of Nguyen’s partysection frequently ended with the singing of these lines from Couturier’s march:

p Tyranls stained with blood
Who started the Jour-year war
Have not overcome the proud, jree Soviet
Land land of the workers’ hope.

p Gradually, Nguyen settled down. His party comrades got him a permit de sejours and a work permit. With official papers in his pocket, he had no trouble finding a job at a reputable photographer’s. Finding lodgings was more difficult. Few landladies wanted a Vietnamese lodger. Yet through Vaillant Couturier’s good offices, he finally moved into an unprepossessing little room in the 17th arrondisement. To glimpse a slice of blue sky he had to stick his head far out of the little window facing the blank wall of an adjoining house. There was no heating, and Nguyen suffered from the cold. His ingenuity found a part solution: before leaving for work in the morning he would put a brick in the landlady’s fire, and at night take it up to his room wrapped in a newspaper and exuding warmth.

p The quarter he lived in was a poor, working-class neighbourhood. Nguyen saw the wretched life of its deni/ens. Once more, with his own eyes, he saw the irreconcilable pattern of class antagonisms that racked capitalist society. He put down his observations in a contribution to L’Humanite, entitled “Paris” and presented in the form of a letter to his cousin in Vietnam.

p “There’s a district in Paris that can by itself illustrate all sides of life, the psychology of Paris, of all France, of the universe. Anyone who wants to study the state of contemporary society will do well to visit three places 1’Etoile, Batignole and Epinette. You have always had a fertile imagination and I am sure that upon reading these three names you will have guessed the rung each occupies on the social ladder. I can even hear you whisper, ’FLpinctte, Epinette!’ Life there is indeed very thorny.  [37•1  And 1’Etoile is for the lucky, the privileged, a real Garden of Eden.

38

p “L’Kloile is a place ol’ cosmopolitan luxury, abundance, and relincd indolence. It is a paradise lor the idle ol all colours and lands. Splendourrules the day even the animals here are magnificent. The money spent on various birds and pedigree horses would be enough to Iced the population of one ol our provinces. The meanest cur in this part of Paris is better otT than a working man.

p “The Epinette is at the bottom of the ladder : here live paupers, unwanted people, the rejects of the other two places. It is as though they belong to some other breed of humans timid, modest, shy, crushed by the burden of their poverty. Watch Uncle press the sugar juice out of sugar cane, and you will get the picture. The sweet juice runs down one side, and the squee/.ed out remains are on the other. That is what you have here: wealth and indolence on one side, want and hard work on the other."

p Contributing to left papers, Nguyen learned how little, if anything, the French knew of his country.

p On January 4, 1920, Jean, a secret agent who tailed Nguyen, reported to the Minister for Colonial Affairs: "Monsieur Nguyen Ai Quoc complained that other countries know nothing about Indochina. He had spoken to foreigners, and none of them knew a place like that existed. They had never heard ol it, and assumed that it was a border /one between India and China. Nguyen Ai Quoc said he wanted to speak and write as much as possible about Indochina. He wanted members of the Socialist Party to mount a campaign, so that everybody should know what is really going on in Indochina."

p Nguyen’s wish to let ordinary Frenchmen know the truth about the colonialists’ abuses in Indochina led to the thought of writing and publishing a book. In his very next report, secret agent Jean cites a dialogue between Nguyen and Lam, a friend of his:

p “When do you expect to finish your book?" Lam asked.

p “Hard to say. I need a lot of fresh material. I wouldn’t want to invent anything. I’ll quote extracts from various books on French colonialism. The book will consist of four chapters the first about Indochina prior to its seizure by the French, the second about what the colonialists brought to Indochina, the third about the present situation in Indochina, and the fourth about Indochina’s future.

p Nguyen entitled his book, which was ready in March 1920, The Oppressed.

p “Monsieur Nguyen Ai Quoc,” wrote agent Jean, "intends to publish the book on his own money. He told Lam he had saved up 300 francs... It is most unlikely that some secret organisation should have supplied him with any money, because he is a finicky sort of person. He wants the book to be published on his own savings."

39

p But the manuscript never reached the printer’s. On coming home one night, Nguyen lound it missing. Jean, a man who knew ol Nguyen’s every step, had evidently stolen it. But what Nguyen had accomplished was not wasted. He used a lew of the chapters he had intended for "The Oppressed’^ in a book that appeared in 1925, French Colonisation on Trial.

p His moving to new lodgings, even though they amounted to an unheated, small half-dark room, meant that now Nguyen was financially independent of Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Van Truong. Their relationship had indeed gradually grown cooler.

p Phan Chu Trinh, evidently allected by his arrest and prison term, had in effect abandoned all political activities, and preferred spending his free time in billiard halls. As for Phan Van Truong, he was by nature more attracted to desk work. He had neither skill nor the liking to work among people. And Nguyen was angry at both for their indifference. They, on the other hand, thought his conduct and ties with the Association of Vietnamese Patriots a worthless and childish venture. Fierce arguments would break out between them. The secret agents who kept an eye on their house reported the noisy quarrels that occurred each night, noting that by all evidence the views of Phan Chu Tnnh and Nguyen Ai Quoc diverged.

p A Ministry for Colonial Affairs file contained the following note: "Nguyen Ai Quoc is gradually becoming an authoritative leader of the Annamites resident in France, while the part played by Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Van Truong is diminishing."

p Nguyen was perturbed by the ideological break with his friends. He was fond of both of them, and grateful for all the good things they had done for him. So their final encounter left a most bitter aftertaste. One evening, as usual, the) gathered in Truong’s study. Stroking his moustache nervously, Trinh glanced vexatiously at Nguyen.

p “I was told you’re distributing leaflets,” he said.

p “Yes, claims of the Annamiles. Truong helped me with my French, and the Association helped disseminate them in France and Indochina. What’s wrong. Uncle Phan?"

p Truong explained hastily, "\ did help, but I told him he was playing a dangerous game."

p “An adventurer, that’s what you are,” Tnnh exclaimed. "I’ve told you before, and I’ll say it again: France is a civilised country. It is bringing us enlightenment and knowledge. What we need are a few reforms. Our troubles come from our weak-minded emperor, greed}’ mandarins, feudal lords, and the gentry. What we need is a republic and the paternal hand of France."

p Trinh was reared on strict Confucian traditions, and in political 40 debates preferred the lapidary style of the old Chinese writings, where characters usually stood for just the subject, object, and predicate, while many grammatical aspects, such as tense, mood, and so on, were merely implied.

p “What civilisation are you talking about, Uncle Phan?" Nguyen asked acidly. "Haven’t you heard of the colonialists’ cruelty? More prisons than schools, and all of them crowded. Vietnamese have been stripped of elementary rights. We are oppressed, but what is worse is that the colonialists ply us with opium and drink in order to make idiots out of us. You call that civilisation?"

p He cited a newspaper report of a French mechanic in Haiphong shooting a man who was pursuing a young woman. The killed man turned out to be European. The killer said to justify the murder that he had thought his victim was a native.

p “And what about the rising in Thai Nguyen?" Nguyen added heatedly. "Blood was shed, and innocent people were executed. It was provoked by M. Darles, the French resident. To squeeze money out of people, he put them in jail, where they were beaten. He buried people up to their necks in the ground and did not release them until they were half dead. Do you think M. Darles was punished for it? Not on your life!"

p Truong smiled sadly.

p “Did you think your petition would help?" he asked.

p “No, I didn’t,” Nguyen replied. "But we mustn’t sit on our hands. Unite, organise, gather strength. Colonialists do not change their spots. To plead with them is like playing the lute to a buffalo. Force and nothing but force will win us freedom. Remember Le Loi, Tran Hung Dao, and Quang Trung. In Russia, the people have taken power into their own hands. Our neighbour, China, has risen, too."

p “No, no, and no. No force. Force would be the end,” Trinh objected. He added, as though arguing against his old ideological adversary, Phan Boi Chau, "Mustn’t count on foreign countries either. That’s stupid."

p Truong filled the pause by saying:

p “Our task is to enlighten our people. We must bring them knowledge. Political knowledge. Cautiously, and slowly. The way you behave, your scandalous speeches at the club, your leaflets it’s childish. There’s no other word for it. But it’s also dangerous. The poliee’ll be after you."

p The argument between the three lasted deep into the night. At that lime, Nguyen did not know Marx’s pertinent thought that action is more important than talk. The sixth sense of a real revolutionary filled Nguyen with a yearning for action to help those who were lighting and rouse those who had resigned themselves to being colonial slaves.

41

p Nguyen did not lose contact with his elder friends after he had moved to the new place. He could not accept their views, but had deep respect for both of them for what they had done. Phan Chu Trinh had been the idol of the patriotic Vietnamese youth for years. And when he died suddenly in 1925, after having just returned to his homeland, all dedicated Vietnamese took his death as a great national loss. As many as 140,000 people walked behind his coffin through the streets of Saigon. There were also public demonstrations in Hanoi, Haiphong, and Namdinh.

p Phan Van Truong, the timid intellectual, had done a lot by then to disseminate Marxist knowledge in Vietnam. He had been the first to translate the Communist Manifesto into Vietnamese, and had himself written do/ens of articles on Marxist theory. On returning home, he started a newspaper, Antiam, which ranked as one of the most progressive publications in Cochin China in the 1920s.

But a break with his old friends, though painful, was becoming inevitable. Ideologically, Nguyen was already far ahead of them. He was foreign to any and all conservatism, and rejected the social Utopias and political delusions of the Vietnamese national leaders of the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. A man of action, he had a revolutionary psychology, and happily escaped the effects of any dangerous reformist viruses. Unlike his old friends, he was about to merge national patriotic ideals with the Marxist doctrine.