Personal life of Ho Chi Minh
Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
date May 26, 2007 3:02 PM
subject Re: [Vsg] personal life of Ho Chi Minh
I agree that HCM's personal life played little role in policy decisions. But, as someone interested in biography, I do not think that its details are trivial. As you well know, much policital discourse is allegorical and oblique. What is said, and what is not said or allowed to be said is significant. Much has been made of northern revolutionary virtues and southern corruption. What did these consist of? I do not believe that they ecompassed only nepotism.
I'd agree that in some societies, extensive womanizing is seen as a sign of prowess, both sexual and political. But in revolutionary Vietnam, polygamy and adultery were both condemned, and the law enforced far more rigorously than in the South. I believe that Vietnamese such as Calvin Thai think it is important to expose what they see as Communist hypocrisy.
By the way, I mentioned the Chinese wife to my aunt who'd been in the NLF and who oversaw the publication of her older sister's memoirs. Her response was "So what?" But when the book was published in 1996, all mentions of HCM's Chinese wife (and thus my aunt's visit to Lam Duc Thu's wife) had been deleted. My aunt claimed that nha xuat ban Phu Nu had had to abridge the text because of paper shortage. But long passages dealing with my aunt's childhood had been left intact.
Best
Hue-Tam
Balazs Szalontai <aoverl@yahoo.co.uk>
date May 27, 2007 5:30 AM
subject Re: [Vsg] personal life of Ho Chi Minh
Dear Hue-Tam,
I agree with you in that a biography of HCM should not intentionally omit or otherwise overlook these aspects of his personal life. Still, I think that if we decide to deal with such issues, it is better to attack philandering husbands as a class (as Uncle Joe would have put it) than to single out a few individuals. That is, it is worth to write some overview about the behavior of ICP/ VWP leaders in general if we want to know what was peculiar in Ho's private life and what was not. If the stories of Nguyen Minh Can are credible, deviations from the officially prescribed morality code were not rare among North Vietnamese leaders (see, for instance, Tran Quoc Hoan's alleged rape and murder of Nong Thi Xuan, of which you informed me many years ago). Unmasking the hypocrisy of a ruling elite in general may be more educative than focusing one's attention to a single individual.
My "class-based" approach may be a bit old-fashioned, but I saw so many sensationalist stories about Stalin's pre- and post-1917 affairs with women that I am inclined to treat this subject with a great degree of caution. Namely, any excessive emphasis laid on the (real or alleged) sexual adventures of a ruler is usually not less propagandistic in nature than the official image of a selfless and celibate leader. Attempts to demolish a state-sponsored myth should not degenerate into creating an anti-myth, since this approach would actually reproduce the Communist way ofdepicting the past.
All the best,
Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
date May 27, 2007 6:23 AM
subject Re: [Vsg] personal life of Ho Chi Minh
Dear Balasz:
>>I agree with you in that a biography of HCM should not intentionally omit or otherwise overlook these aspects of his personallife. Still, I think that if we decide to deal with such issues, it is better to attack philandering husbands as a class (as Uncle Joe would have put it) than to single out a few individuals.>>
Biography does not deal with individuals "as a class," not should it be preoccupied with attacking "philandering husbands."
>>Unmasking the hypocrisy of a ruling elite in general may be more educative than focusing one's attention to a single individual. >>
It may be, but that is not the purpose of biography.
However, it is interesting to compare the persona that has been created and the actual life of individuals, especially when this biography seems to have such significance in political discourse. Sometimes, I show pictures of Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem side by side to my students. They invariably think of Ho Chi Minh as an ascetic and Ngo Dinh Diem as a bon vivant. And given the easy connection that is made in American culture between sex and power, unless I tell them about Diem's probably lifelong celibacy, they also attribute to him some of the decadence associated with pre-1975 South Vietnamese society.
>>Namely, any excessive emphasis laid on the (real or alleged) sexual adventures of a ruler is usually not less propagandistic in nature than the official image of a selfless and celibate leader. Attempts to demolish a state-sponsored myth should not degenerate into creating an anti-myth, since this approach would actually reproduce the Communist way of depicting the past. >>
I agree. I should note, as a point of interest, that some of the more excessive claims regarding HCM's personal life have been made by people I've met in Hanoi rather than among Viet Kieu, and they were not made in a spirit of hostility toward him.
As for class-based approach? I'd rather not tar whole groups of people with the sins of the few, and conversely, I would not like to attribute to individuals the supposed crimes of a whole class.
Best,
Hue-Tam
Balazs Szalontai <aoverl@yahoo.co.uk>
date May 27, 2007 7:56 AM
subject Re: [Vsg] personal life of Ho Chi Minh
Dear Hue-Tam,
I should have added a few :))-s to my comments. I don't really think that philandering husbands may be regarded and described as a separate social stratum (though some long-suffering ladies may disagree), nor do I think that the VWP CC in itself constituted an entire social class. My ironic remarks were motivated mainly by the following logic: If one writes a biography about HCM, s/he usually makes comparisons between his political ideas and actions and that of other Communist and non-Communist leaders in order to make the description as specific as possible. For instance, Ho's well-known tactical flexibility becomes particularly clear if compared to the attitude of certain other ICP/VWP leaders. Why not apply this approach to his private life as well? For instance, a more or less systematic study on the private life of itinerant Comintern (or ICP) cadres would help us in putting Ho's behavior in a proper perspective. Were there individuals who really practised celibacy on political grounds? How possible it was for itinerant cadres to bring their wives from one country to another? How did their Comintern superiors react to such amorous adventures? Were there politically arranged marriages and divorces in ICP/VWP circles? In my view, it is somewhat difficult to evaluate Ho's personality without answering these questions.
All the best,
Balazs Szalontai
Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
date May 27, 2007 8:29 AM
subject Re: [Vsg] personal life of Ho Chi Minh
Actually, Balasz, I would not want to discuss HCM in the context of practices of ICP/VWP Party leaders only but of Vietnamese culture more generally, and of the itinerant lives of many Vietnamese, whether political activists (both Communist and non-Communist) or not.
Not that I am interested in writing a biography of Ho myself. But, soon, I will be sending out calls for contributions to a workshop on the telling of lives in Vietnam, ranging from long ago figures such as Tran Thai-tong or Do Anh Vu (about whom Keith Taylor wrote) to more contemporary figures such as Dang Thuy Tram--or HCM. More details will be forthcoming in a couple of weeks, I hope.
Offhand, however, I am struck by what Vietnamese put it on leave out when writing biographies or autobiographies. For example, I had to do some calculations in order to find out that my aunt was born in 1909. She did not provide this information in her memoir, although she wrote in minute detail about the crunch and smell of anchovies. Similarly, Hoang van Hoan, in his memoir, does not say when he was born, when his parents were married, etc... but writes about the topic of the (traditional) exam he took. Tran Thai-tong in his preface to Khoa Hu Luc, talks about his feeling of loss when his father died but does not mention being compelled by his uncle to divorce his wife and marry the already pregnant wife of his brother. And on and on. Allof this is very different from the approach taken by Western biographers, especially modern ones who are indelibly influenced by Freud..
If you want to include :), there's an icon, at least on my email program. :-)
Best,