Chapter 33: Ho Chi Minh was a contemporary of the hotel king Ritz and the great chef Escoffier (Vietnam, a journey of discovering many faces one by one—aimless wandering, a travelogue of Vietnam)
Let me repeat.
The young Ho Chi Minh,
before he went by that name,
harbored doubts about the unreasonable reality in which Vietnam was placed,
and in order to liberate his homeland,
he first headed to France.
What he sought to learn
was not how to use a gun, but philosophy.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Voltaire.
Charles de Montesquieu.
Resistance to colonial rule
does not mean rejecting all of the ruler's culture.
Rather, it meant receiving the ideas of freedom and equality from within that culture,
and attempting to criticize colonialism itself.
In his youth, Ho Chi Minh
was hired as an apprentice cook
on the merchant ship 'Amiral Latouche-Tréville'
of the French shipping company Chargeurs Réunis.
This large passenger ship
was the great artery of the colonial empire,
connecting French Indochina with mainland France.
Young Ho Chi Minh
worked there every day,
washing hundreds of pots,
peeling hundreds of potatoes,
working as a kitchen hand.
The kitchen was in the era of coal stoves. The fire never went out all day long. The cast-iron range glowed red with heat, and white steam rose from the pots boiling bones. Sweat poured down no matter how many times he wiped it away. Young Ho Chi Minh learned the smell of fire, steam, and labor before he learned revolutionary ideology.
What was carried to the dining tables
were potage and consommé,
beef braised in red wine,
lamb stew,
roast chicken,
roast beef—.
These are all dishes now called 'classic French cuisine'.
Of course, it is not as if he could taste those dishes.
The luxurious food was for the passengers, and what was provided to the Vietnamese crew was rice, salted fish, and a simple soup.
However, the aroma alone must have been drifting throughout the kitchen every day.
I imagine
the figure of young Ho Chi Minh,
while washing pots,
secretly scooping up the sauce left on the side of the pot with his fingertip and tasting it without anyone noticing.
Of course, I do not know if such a thing really happened.
However, don't people first come to know an unknown world through its scent,
and then by tasting it with their tongue?
Here, I am
surprised by the coincidences of the era.
Just around that time,
the hotel king César Ritz and
the legendary chef Auguste Escoffier were joining forces,
attempting to perfect modern French cuisine.
Escoffier
systematized the cuisine that had been scattered across France,
compiled the thick 'Le Guide Culinaire',
and at the same time, organized the division of labor in the kitchen.
It was a revolution in culinary history.
No,
to put it more broadly,
it might have been the beginning of global expansion through culture.
An empire cannot survive on warships alone.
People
also yearn for delicious food.
France
was attempting to topple Russian cuisine, which had until then been considered the best in the world, and make the world believe that French cuisine was the best.
It was not just literature and painting.
They were transforming even cooking into the nation's cultural capital.
They were transforming even cooking into the nation's cultural capital.
Meanwhile, in a corner of the kitchen of that massive cultural empire, a young Vietnamese man was silently washing pots.
That young man would eventually come to be known as Ho Chi Minh.
History sometimes produces revolutionaries not from the podium, but from the kitchen.
The young Ho Chi Minh was crossing the seas
while breathing in not only revolutionary ideas, but also the scent of French cuisine to his heart's content.
He was crossing the seas.
That scent was fragrant and sensual,
but at the same time, it was the very contradiction of the world.
To be continued
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