Word: minh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Minh is a poet: Suddenly I hear the autumn flute sounding coldly like a signal on the screened hillside...
Autumn Flutes & Saliva. "Have you met Ho Chi Minh?" an anti-Communist Vietnamese was asked. "Oh yes," the Vietnamese replied, quickening involuntarily. "He is the living example of a revolutionary. He has a blameless private life. He dresses simply. He is intelligent. He speaks French, Russian, English, Chinese and Vietnamese. He is very clever: when he speaks to the people he is direct so that an eight-year-old child can understand. He has infinite patience. He has sacrificed his own life completely for the revolution." Jawaharlal Nehru adds: "Extraordinarily likable and friendly ... a man of integrity desiring peace...
...considers himself a man of the world: "Moscow is heroic," he will remark, jocosely, "but Paris is the joy of living." Ho Chi Minh is a kindly man, it seems, who calls his associates "Little Brother," while they call him "Uncle Ho." Yet Uncle Ho, it also seems, keeps his favorite Swallow's Nest-a rare and expensive delicacy made from the saliva of sea swallows-in his room so that he will not have to share it; he keeps Philip Morrises in one pocket for himself and passes poor local cigarettes from another...
Stewpans & Silverware. Ho Chi Minh, dedicated Communist, is a matchless interplay of ruthlessness and guile. Before he was nine, in the central Viet Nam province of Nghean, Ho was carrying messages for his father's anti-French underground.* In 1911 he shipped out of Indo-China as a cabin boy on a French vessel, so that he could learn the foreign techniques of revolution and "come back to help my countrymen." He was not yet a Marxist, but already showed signs of an ascetic, fanatic single-mindedness...
...three years at sea, Ho Chi Minh read avidly-Tolstoy, Zola, Shakespeare, Marx-and from all accounts had pretty rough sailing. He was seasick. He was almost swept overboard. He was too frail to lift the heavy copper stewpans, and got only ten francs for his first 8,000-mile voyage to France. At Marseille he was offended when prostitutes came on board. "Why don't the French civilize their own people," he asked, "before they pretend to civilize...