(4 of 10)
The first generation of Asian nationalists, of which Ho was a charter member, seized on these borrowed ideas. Ho's emphasis on nationalism made him stand out in the memories of his fellow Communists. Ruth Fischer, a leading German party member who knew Ho in the 1920s, wrote: "It was Ho's nationalism which impressed us European Communists, born and bred in a rather gray kind of abstract internationalism." To classic nationalistic sentiments, Asians added an indigenous ingredient —barely contained outrage at the fact that the European colonizers almost inevitably humiliated the peoples they sought to rule. "Natives" were not allowed in European parks or clubs; they were either treated like children or abused like slaves. Before Ho was ten, a Hanoi biography says, his countrymen were press-ganged into road-building crews while Francophile mandarins "sipped champagne in the evening and milk in the morning." Ho once noted that until he arrived in France in his 20s, he had never been addressed as "Mr."
Imbued with the nationalist ideals of his father, Ho finished his schooling, taught briefly in the South and finally, about 1914, shipped out to Europe. For several years, he held a series of odd jobs, including a spell as a pastry cook under the famed French Chef Escoffier at London's Carlton Hotel. In Paris, Ho worked as a gardener and photo retoucher. In 1917, so one account goes, he worked his way across the Atlantic as a merchant seaman, visiting New York, Boston and perhaps San Francisco. One source says that Ho worked briefly as a waiter in a Harlem restaurant. Back in Paris, he resumed contacts with other nationalist-minded Asians, and found himself increasingly attracted by the rosy ideals of international Socialism. In 1919, Ho rented a striped suit and derby and sought out Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference. Ho hoped to interest the peacemakers in his dreams of autonomy for Viet Nam, but his efforts were ignored. In 1922, after discovering that French Socialists were similarly indifferent to the problems of the colonies, he joined the newly founded French Communist Party. His path was set.
Over the next decade, Ho the Asian nationalist became Ho the Westernized Asian Communist. He absorbed the teachings of Marx and Lenin during two years of study at Moscow's Toilers of the East University, wrote a host of articles on colonial problems for Communist-front magazines. In 1925, he was assigned by the Comintern to go to Canton as an adviser to Soviet Agent Mikhail Borodin, then an adviser to the Chinese Nationalists.
The Foundation of Nationalism
In Canton, he began preparing for his eventual return to Viet Nam. Nationalism, Ho saw, was the foundation on which an independent Viet Nam could be built. To this end, he began organizing young Vietnamese nationalists exiled in China, slowly building the organization that was to become his apparatus of power. In the process, he proved that he could be utterly cruel.