Week Three in Hue - Visiting Nationalist Shrines

In the middle of one of the rainiest days I have ever experienced in Vietnam--it must have rained more than 5 inches in 24 hrs--we went ahead with our regularly scheduled city tour of two historic sites for Vietnamese nationalism. The first is a simple house in the city where Phan Boi Chau, a man from the generation before Ho Chi Minh and a founding member of the Vietnam Nationalist Party, lived under house arrest from 1925-1940. Will the true nerd please raise his or her hand? That's me, David, along with Hong-Anh and our baby in the hippy sling. The students quickly rushed through the rather plain room of mildewed photographs highighting important figures and moments in this man's life. I took a little more time and took pictures of mounted photographs I have not seen reproduced elsewhere. This much lesser known Vietnamese nationalist is I think a very interesting figure for his alternative vision of a modern Vietnam, one that local histories typically dismiss as just a stepping stone to the more revolutionary brand of nationalism envisioned by Ho Chi Minh. These days, with Vietnam's rapid opening up to commercial ventures and the rush to build industrial zones etc., I think Mr. Chau deserves some reassesment as a visionary of a very viable Vietnamese future.

After an hour there, we loaded back into the van and traveled across town through torrential downpours to a little village just beyond Hue with one of many little homes in Vietnam where Ho Chi Minh stayed as a youth while he followed his dad around with his brother. Mr. Cung, that was Ho's given first name, lived in a little thatch house with his dad and brother from 1906-08 while he attended the elite National Academy (same highschool as Ngo Dinh Diem). Young Mr. Cung was expelled after helping organize a protest of the crazy taxes imposed by the French on poor people at the time, so he moved south to Saigon and then as a ship's cook to Paris, London, New York, Moscow, Hong Kong, and thirty years later back to Hanoi where he became Vietnam's first President in 1954.

Hong-Anh poses for the last of these rain shots peaking out of the kitchen door from Ho Chi Minh's home for a few years. While I first thought such a place would be really special and important home because of its significant guest, I soon learned that Ho Chi Minh stayed in many homes, so there is a little bit of an effort to preserve all of them perhaps in the manner of the "George Washington slept here" homes and campsites one finds throughout the former 13 American colonies.

While both houses were certainly very simple, we all agreed that this house where HCM the boy stayed was one of the most comfortable and elegant in its simplicity, carefully maintained interior and traditional construction with the family altar of the house's current owner arranged in the middle of the room. Every piece of bamboo and thatch was carefully assembled by hand in age-old construction techniques rarely seen now even in the countryside.