(4 of 10)
In his three years at sea, Ho Chi Minh read avidly—Tolstoy, Zola, Shakespeare, Marx—and from all accounts had pretty rough sailing. He was seasick. He was almost swept overboard. He was too frail to lift the heavy copper stewpans, and got only ten francs for his first 8,000-mile voyage to France. At Marseille he was offended when prostitutes came on board. "Why don't the French civilize their own people," he asked, "before they pretend to civilize us?"
In 1914 Ho Chi Minh turned up in London, joined a secret society called "The Overseas Workers." Despite his poor health, he shoveled snow, stoked coal, and got a menial job cleaning silverware at London's Carlton Hotel restaurant. The great Escoffier was then master chef of the Carlton, and to hear the Communist legend-makers tell it, Escoffier took a fancy to the young Asian and called him over for a chat. "Put aside your revolutionary ideas," offered Escoffier to Ho, "and I will teach you the art of cooking." Loftily, Ho Chi Minh declined.
"Better & Better." Later, in Paris, young Ho Chi Minh worked as a photographer's assistant in a dead-end street behind Montmartre, and peddled enlargements ("Living Souvenirs of Your Friends and Relatives"). Each morning he would cook rice in his bare hotel room and at noon would chew half a sausage, or a fish; each evening, a picturesque and mannerly Asian intellectual, he had access to the clubs. With scholars, artists and future Cabinet ministers, Ho would contemplate and debate astronomy and hypnotism; he argued against Couéism ("Every day in every way I'm getting better and better") with Coué; but somehow, most nights the debate would zigzag back to Ho's one gnawing pang: Indo-China. "I am a revolutionary," Ho would explain.
He agitated among the 100,000 Vietnamese in Paris, and tried to drum up support for Indo-China reforms at the Versailles Peace Conference (Woodrow Wilson, apparently unwilling to offend the French, did not take up the matter).
Steadily and inexorably Ho was moving left. He preferred Communists to Socialists because "they seriously considered the colonial problem." He was intrigued when Communists sought his advice. In the summer of 1922 Ho gladly attended a Congress of the French Communist Party, which expounded its thesis for "solid front" revolution across the world. Modestly, Ho advocated an alternative plan, a subtler plan, that might go down well in Indo-China. Ho believed in 1) a revolution against French colonialism in the name of nationalism and a "democratic regime," to be followed by 2) a second revolution against nationalism, to achieve the total Socialist state.
Soon thereafter, it was noticed in Paris that Ho Chi Minh had disappeared.