The Cult of Uncle Ho

So I don't want my negative take on HaLong Bay to be my only record of Vietnam. We experienced a lot of cool things on our visit. One of the more interesting was the reverence still given Ho Chi Minh. Every museum shop has its own collection of Uncle Ho bric-a-brac, even those with no connection whatsoever to the 20th century. For example, I got several items (pictured) at The Temple of Literature, a Confucian temple and the first university in Vietnam.

Of course in Hanoi it is also possible to view Ho Chi Minh himself. His corpse is laid out á la Lenin in a mausoleum on public display. It cannot be photographed. There is a whole procession visitors must go through, putting one's camera in a little numbered bag at one station, then surrendering it at the next station, and finally picking it up again at a third station at the exit. The Vietnamese get dressed up to visit the mausoleum--three piece suits for men, traditional dresses for women, uniforms with medals for veterans. (It was kind of Twilight Zone to see decorated Vietnam vets from the other side). If you don't dress conservatively, you are turned away.

The exterior of the mausoleum is very Soviet--heavy, imposing, without embellishment. Filing along there was a lot of red carpet and velvet rope, with young soldiers standing at attention in crisp white dress uniforms. Inside it is cool and dark (presumably to prevent damage to the corpse). The vitrine housing his mummy sits on a pedestal rising out of a recess in the floor about three feet deep. There is a soldier posted on each corner (bayonets gleaming in the dim light), but because they stand in this hollow, Ho lies resting above their heads. His face was waxy, fuzzy and unreal, yet sublime and contented. I couldn't help but pause and strain to look a second longer, which prompted a guard to clench my upper arm in his white glove and firmly move me along out the door.

The rest of the museum campus (sort of like the mall in Washington DC) was generally less interesting. There was a museum where the first floor contained deathly dull letters and black and white photos of Vietnamese revolutionaries and a second floor that was baffling beyond description. It was notable for a scam artist posing as a university student giving a survey about tourism and then suddenly asking for Red Cross donations.

There was also the house where Ho Chi Minh lived during the critical such and such period, which, if I had grown up in Vietnam and studied the minutia of his life during history class, might have been more interesting. Or possibly not, as the school children there were singularly fascinated with feeding the ducks. The western tourists in turn were all singularly fascinated with über-cute Vietnamese kindergardeners in precious little school uniforms feeding ducks. So if you're curious why Vietnam has fallen short of the Marxist-Leninist paradise envisioned by Ho Chi Minh, it's possibly the counterrevolutionary activity of the ducks.