Zeng Xueming

Zeng was born into a Catholic family in Guangzhou in October 1905. In these difficult circumstances, she was befriended by the wife of Vietnamese communist Lam Duc Thu. He posed as a Chinese citizen named Li Shui (Ly Thuy) and worked as a translator for Comintern agent and Soviet arms dealer Mikhail Borodin. Hồ later gave Zeng a ruby engagement ring. The couple were married on 18 October 1926. Zeng was 21 and Hồ was 36. Chinese police raided his residence in Guangzhou on the same day. In May 1930, Hồ sent a letter asking Zeng to meet him in Shanghai, but her boss hid the letter and she did not receive it in time. Unknown to him, Zeng attended his court hearing on 10 July 1931, the last time she would see him. In May 1950, Zeng saw a picture of Hồ in a newspaper and learned that he had become president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). By this time, a cult of personality had arisen around Hồ and the North Vietnamese government had an investment in the myth of his celibacy, said to symbolize his total devotion to the revolution. For his part, Hồ asked the North Vietnamese consul in Guangzhou to look up Zeng in 1967, but without success. Hồ died in September 1969. Zeng retired as a midwife in 1977 and in 1979, the Guangdong Provincial Communist Party Committee provided her with a living allowance and assistance for her. She died 14 November 1991 at the age of 86, and was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea. ==Research and reaction==

The claim that Hồ had a Chinese wife first appeared in a book by Chinese author Huang Zheng published in 1987. This claim went unnoticed until the book was translated into Vietnamese in 1990. Also in 1990, French author Daniel Hémery found Ho's letters to Zeng in the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, the French colonial archive. In May 1991, the editor-in-chief of Tuoi Tre Vũ Kim Hạnh was summarily dismissed from her post after the newspaper published a story about Ho's marriage. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000) presents additional CAOM documentation for the relationship. The government requested substantial cuts in the official Vietnamese translation of Duiker's book, which was refused, preventing the translation from being published. In 2002, the Vietnamese government suppressed a review of Duiker's book in the Far Eastern Economic Review. Chu Đức Tính, Director of the Hồ Chí Minh Museum, in an interview with the newspaper Tuổi Trẻ said that he and his colleagues at the museum have debated many times with Huang Zheng, the first person who published about Zeng Xueming's marriage to Ho. He characterized it as a rumor heard on the Internet and concluded that "this is a hypothesis that is more fiction than not" and said "the facts have proven that it is not true." ==References==