As we fell upon the gift shops and restaurants that often accompany any historical site, it was time for a snack. Diem brought me a cup filled with sweetened black rice topped with tangy yogurt. I gobbled up my offering as I walked around the gardens of the government complex. A beautiful pagoda with a Buddhist shrine sat high above a perfectly squared pond. I climbed its steep stairway and bowed to the golden deity that adorned this beautiful shrine. I was far from home and felt the need to respect even the most pagan of sites.
I wandered the courtyards and gardens of the palace grounds, taking in the views. Beautiful pagoda-style sculptures with expertly manicured flora. Overlooking it all, the grand visage of Ho Chi Minh’s museum.
As we walked around the museum seeking its entrance, the scale of its footprint became clear. Once again, it was a building resemblant of Cold War concrete architecture, only studded with beautiful marble reliefs. Vietnamese nationals were afforded free entry. Foreigners had to pay. Diem purchased my ticket, and we stepped inside.
I ran into some Canadians from Nova Scotia, and we had a brief but welcomed conversation. It was comforting to converse with someone from North America. It had become clear how difficult and special it was to find someone who didn’t have to think about their words in this distant land. It wasn’t that English was completely absent in this oriental jungle. It’s just that it was as difficult to speak for them as Vietnamese was for me.
The interior of the museum was breathtaking. It was interesting to me how the collective operates. Government buildings housing millions of dollars of polished marble, people struggling to survive in the streets. It was an interesting paradox often talked about, it seems, of communist nations.
I walked up the beautiful multicolored marble staircase through the expertly gilded doorway and into the rotunda. At the far end stood a larger-than-life bronze statue of Ho Chi Minh. hand raised to shoulder height as an Uncle waving gently to his nieces and nephews. Both sides of the rotunda opened to different parts of the museum. I walked its exhibits and took in its moderate collection. Silk shirts bearing his name, edicts bearing his signature. The propaganda was apparent, the message clear. I began to understand a little more about the nature of this communist nation.
It was declared in Ho Chi Minh’s declaration for a free Vietnam that he wished three things for his countrymen. They have clothes on their back, food in their bellies, and the ability to read and write. After hundreds of years of oppression and occupation by the Chinese, Japanese, and French, Vietnam only wanted one thing. It’s Independence. It didn’t care, it seemed, if it was a communist system or any other. Communism was just in the right place at the right time. They merely desired to be masters of their fate. The people appeared willing and eager to give up common liberties and freedoms of the West if their people held the strings. After the overly oppressive nature of French Indochina, the famine-ridden nation was at a point of desperation. Everyone having something, no matter how meager it seemed, was better than most having nothing. And so it was. A moment in history, a time, a place, and a man who were all on a collision course with the emerging superpower of the West. In some of the propaganda, it was believed that Uncle Ho single-handedly defeated the giant Eagle from the land of the setting sun. Hero, Legend, god, these words barely scratched the surface of the national collectives’ feelings about their most beloved leader, and hero.
I continued to the art and times that were the influential years of Ho Chi Minh. The exhibits were adorned with images of Charlie Chaplin, Einstein, the Rockettes, Lenin, and Marx. A replica of the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso had its own room where images of the painting were represented in 3D relief. Picasso painted this masterpiece in 1937 in response to the Nazi bombing of the town that bears the painting’s name. It is said that it was Ho Chi Minh’s favorite painting as it represents the horrors, the pain, the suffering of war. We continued through the museum and exited through the always ubiquitous museum gift shop.
