Word: ho
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Wandering Wraith. Ho was born in French Indo-China, not far from the Gulf of Tonkin, 78 years ago. His father was a celebrated scholar and minor official-following the mandarin tradition-in the imperial puppet government. He was fired because the French suspected him of "patriotic" sympathies. Embittered, he used to declare that "being a mandarin is the ultimate form of slavery." He went on to eke out an existence as a nomadic marketplace storyteller, scribe and sometime bonesetter, but he somehow had contrived to send his son to schools in Hue and Saigon...
...London. There he washed dishes, cooked under Escoffier, and met Fabian socialists; he moved on to Paris in 1917. "The French left," says Lacouture, turned "an angry patriot into a modern revolutionary." Setting himself up as a retoucher of photographs and a painter of "Chinese antiquities" manufactured in France, Ho changed his name from Nguyen Tat Thanh to Nguyen Ai Quoc-"Nguyen the patriot." A wraithlike figure "always armed with a book" (Zola, Shakespeare, Dickens, as well as Marx), he was nicknamed, unaccountably, "little M. Ferdinand...
Withdrawal & Retreat. Ho began to build his legend by demanding an audience with Woodrow Wilson himself at the Versailles peace conference. He was, says Lacouture, "unceremoniously shown the door." Not long after, he joined the French Communist Party and began to fire journalistic broadsides at French colonials. "The disreputable old fogy," he is said to have written of one officer, "is leaving Morocco so that he can nurse his 'syph' in France...
Apprenticeship served, Ho commenced his indefatigable career as "traveling salesman of revolution." In 1925 he was in Canton, setting up the Association of Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth. Three years later, wearing the robes of a Buddhist monk, he turned up in Bangkok, organizing cells in the pagodas. Everywhere he went, he left behind a network of indoctrination schools and newspapers...
Every prophet-leader has his period of withdrawal and retreat. Ho's came when he got out of a Hong Kong prison with an aggravated case of TB. He spent the next four years (1934-38) in Russia, savoring recuperation as a "scholar recluse." In 1941, he slipped back into his homeland. For him, the return marked a kind of reincarnation, and after setting up the League for Vietnamese Independence (nicknamed the Viet Minh), he renamed himself Ho Chi Minh ("Ho who enlightens...