Before leading Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh washed dishes and cooked on three continents
The future Ho Chi Minh left Saigon in 1911 as a kitchen hand on a French steamer. Over the next decade he turned up in Marseille, Rio de Janeiro, possibly Boston and New York, and London hotel kitchens, before politics in Paris set his course. He used somewhere between 50 and 200 aliases.
Nguyễn Sinh Cung came into the world in 1890 at Hoàng Trù, a village of Nghệ An province in northern central Vietnam, then a French protectorate, though he gave other birth years at various times. His father, Sắc, was a Confucian scholar who became an imperial magistrate in 1909 and was later demoted after a local notable died days after a caning he ordered. Details of the son's early life are thin: at least four official biographies disagree on names, dates and places.
In Saigon he signed on as a kitchen helper aboard the Amiral de Latouche-Tréville under the alias Văn Ba. The ship left on 5 June 1911 and reached Marseille a month later. In 1912, taken ill on board, he was left in Rio de Janeiro, where he recovered in the Santa Teresa neighbourhood and worked in a restaurant in Lapa. Later that year he sailed to Boston; he claimed to have baked at the Parker House Hotel and may have lived in Harlem, though only a single document places him in the United States. Between 1913 and 1919 he said he lived in West Ealing and Crouch End in London, working as a chef or dishwasher at the Drayton Court Hotel. Stories that he trained under the famous chef Escoffier are unconfirmed.
Paris turned him political. Influenced by the socialist Marcel Cachin, he joined the Group of Vietnamese Patriots, whose members wrote for independence under the shared pen name Nguyễn Ái Quốc, Nguyen the Patriot. They sent a petition to allied leaders including Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson before the Versailles conference. It was ignored, yet it helped make him a symbol of the anticolonial cause.
Back in Vietnam in 1941, he founded the Việt Minh to resist Japanese occupation, and in 1945 proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam. His government's land reform of 1953 to 1956 included executions of landowners. After the 1954 Geneva Conference split the country, he led the North until his death on 2 September 1969.
Source: Ho Chi Minh
