Ho Chi Minh's Love Child

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 28, 2001 | by Hans S. Nichols

Rumor carried Nong Duc Manh to the top of the Communist Party of Vietnam. Some say his political skill is not the only thing bears an uncanny resemblance to Uncle Ho.

The British were rounding up communist agents in the Asian ports of their empire in 1931 when they stormed into Ho Chi Minh's apartment in Hong Kong and arrested him in bed with a Chinese woman. This came as no surprise to his Soviet backers, who had rejected his marriage request a few months earlier.

But to the communist hagiographers who now guard the myth of Ho Chi Minh, it amounts to blasphemy. To the mythmakers at party central, Uncle Ho was a Marxist saint, free of all earthly desires and married only to the revolution. From French police files and Soviet archives come this and other evidence that Uncle Ho had other interests. During one of his tours through the former Soviet Union, the files indicate, he struck up a relationship with a married Russian woman. Before his Russian fling, the alleged Vietnamese nationalist was seduced by French charm. From that liaison came rumors of a French child.

And while struggling to keep his thoughts and energies on the international revolution, Ho asked a fellow communist insurgent to find him a wife for his time in coastal China in the late 1920s. Unbeknownst to Ho, his comrade was a double agent working for the French secret police. While the agent took the time to find Ho a companion he also reported it all back to Paris.

And now comes perhaps the most conclusive proof of Ho's prodigious ways: a son, Nong Duc Manh, who mysteriously has risen to become the new general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV).

Long before he was known as Uncle Ho, he may have been Father Minh. Intelligence files indicate that at the time Ho Chi Minh (He Who Enlightens) is thought to have fathered Nong Duc Manh he wasn't even Ho Chi Minh. In those days, he still was using the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot) and was in fact a little-known communist agent who liked to describe himself as a "patriot who long has served his country."

Frederick Brown of Johns Hopkins University tells Insight that "Vietnam is a land of rumors and myth." The truth about the new leader of Vietnam still is somewhere behind the morning mist that rises above the shallow backwaters of the Mekong Delta. While the saying goes, "We are all Uncle Ho's children," Manh is believed by Vietnamese sources and American scholars to be the real thing: one of several illegitimate children of Ho Chi Minh.

Most news accounts about Manh's rise to the top of the CPV note that he is an ethnic Tay, even though there are no records of his parents, who Manh has said died when he was very young. At a Houston conference of Vietnam experts in late April, just after the Ninth Party Congress officially made Manh party secretary, questions about his parentage were on everyone's tongue. Back in Hanoi, conversations also buzzed with the implication that one of Uncle Ho's love children had become the new leader of Vietnam.

William Duiker, author of the definitive biography, Ho Chi Minh, may have been the first to do the math. If Manh was born in September 1940, this would have put Minh in southern China at the time of conception. Duiker rechecked his notes: He could not escape the possibility that the new leader of Vietnam may be half Chinese.

If Ho is the father, either Manh is half Chinese or his birth date is doctored. Given the uncertainty about Manh's background and the murky biographies made available by the CPV, either or both are plausible.

Myths seldom are born in a void. As Soviet files are declassified, evidence mounts that Uncle Ho's carefully constructed image as a monastic revolutionary, wedded only to the cause of an independent Vietnam, always was more myth than reality. Hilaire du Berrier, an American who was an operative against the Japanese in the region for both the French and the United States, scoffs: "That was always a pretense." But as Zachary Abuza, a professor at Simmons College in Boston and a noted specialist on Vietnam, observes: "The Communist Party goes to vast lengths to promote this myth." Assuredly so.

If only Uncle Ho's dalliances were a mere parlor game; if only Vietnam exmld survive on myth alone.

There's more at stake here than the reputations of a revolutionary and those of the Chinese, French and Russian women with whom he consorted: "To this day the party uses Ho to legitimize the regime because they certainly aren't gaining any legitimacy on their economic performance," Abuza offers.

"Whether the rumors are true or not," says Carl Thayer of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, "there's no doubt that they've been to Manh's benefit." However, the new party secretary must be careful not to exploit ms mysterious origins too far because, if he is the communist leader's son, then Uncle Ho is not the aesthete the party long has maintained him to be. And if he personally was corrupt with women, then in what other ways did he betray the faith entrusted to him?