Summarize Ho Chi Minh’s life from his birth through the Second World War.
Ho Chi Minh was born, 1890 in a village of nghe a province in central Vietnam. His birth name was Nguyen Sinh Cung which is the first of many names he would have. His father Nguyen sinh Sac, a concubine’s son relegated to menial farm work had risen to the rank of mandarin through assiduous study. His father eventually abandoned the family and roamed the country for the rest of his life as an itinerant teacher and medicine man.
Ho Chi Minh started his real education at nineteen, when he went south, where he taught for a few months at a village school. He went through one of his first name change during this period of his life, which was Van Baba being the Vietnamese term for “third child. He then signed on to a French vessel as a stoker and galley boy aboard the French freighter. This was the beginning of the soul searching that his father went on that would last for thirty years before returning back to Vietnam.
The trip to Europe was an eye opening experience for young Ho. On the trip while crossing the Indian Ocean Ho soaked up the sights at the ports along the way. I surprised to read upon disembarking in Marseilles he applied to ministry of colonies for admittance to a government school that trained bureaucrats for France’s overseas possessions. After a couple of years in 1913, he was employed aboard another French vessel that crossed the Atlantic, visiting Boston and San Francisco before settling in Brooklyn as an itinerant laborer. This was a time when he was dazzled by marvels of the Western industrial progress. When he proclaimed Vietnam’s independence from France in 1945, his speech would feature an excerpt from the American Declaration of Independence.
After a year in the United States, Ho sailed back to Europe where he found a job in a kitchen of the elegant Carlton Hotel, of London. Now known as Nguyen Tat Thanh, he began to flirt with politics where he...