Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Before leaving, I rested one hand on each headstone. The image of the Chuongs’ kindly faces from the newspaper floated before me. I was so sorry for them; what a terrible way to go. The words of Le Chi, their oldest daughter, echoed in my head: “The more you tell about the glories of the past, the more horrible the end becomes.”7

  CHAPTER 3

  A Distinguished Family

  THE MORE I LEARNED ABOUT MADAME NHU’S early years, the less glorious her family’s past seemed. It became hard to reconcile the smiling faces of the elderly couple pictured in a 1986 Washington newspaper with the darker portrait of the Chuongs that emerged. Madame Nhu’s “miserable” memories of childhood fell into place when I understood that no one, certainly not her mother or her father, had any inclination to think that the little girl, born in a Hanoi hospital on August 22, 1924, might amount to anything significant.

  A traditional birth would have taken place at home with a midwife, who would have said that this particular spirit was reluctant to be born because the baby was in a stubborn position, refusing to come down the birth canal. She would have disapproved of the forceps, shiny instruments and modern science, as interference with heaven’s will. A midwife would have left this child, born blue, silent, and immobile, to return to whatever crossroads exist for unborn souls hovering somewhere between heaven and earth.

  But no midwife was there that day. The child was going to be a boy. The mother was so sure of it that she had arranged to give birth in the hospital. She suffered through the terrible agony of the long labor, knowing it would be worth it—for a boy.

  The French doctor may have feared that he would be blamed if anything happened. It was his first time delivering a Vietnamese baby since his arrival in Indochina, but this was a special case.

  The young woman lying soaked in sweat and blood on his table was Madame Chuong, born Princess Nam Tran, a member of the imperial family. The fourteen-year-old’s exquisite beauty was so rare that it later earned her a legion of French admirers, who nicknamed her “the Pearl of Asia.”1 Although schooled in the domestic arts of homemaking, as well as singing and sewing, she would never need to lift a porcelain finger, except to ring for a servant. Her most important duty as wife would be to bear her husband a male heir.

  Her husband hailed from a family of powerful landowners. As the eldest son of an esteemed provincial governor in French Tonkin, Chuong had been given the very best of everything, from a Western education to a bride with royal lineage.2 The Tran family was also related to the imperial throne, making Chuong a distant cousin to his bride.

  The French doctor must have felt great pressure to save the pale form that finally came out in a great gush of blood and fluid. This was the doctor’s chance to prove himself—and the superiority of Western medicine. He took a firm grip on the infant’s ankles and laid a series of well-placed spankings on the tiny backside until the first cries rang out.

  With that, the newborn came howling into the world.3 It was a girl.

  What did the fourteen-year-old Madame Chuong make of her newborn daughter, a scarlet-faced bundle, now screaming in her arms? When she came into the world, there was little reason to suppose her fate would differ much from that of centuries of Vietnamese women before her. In the East Asian Confucian tradition, boys were expected to provide care for their parents when they aged, and only males honored the ancestor cult of Vietnam. Traditional Vietnamese sayings capture the disappointment of a daughter’s birth: “One boy, that’s something; ten girls, that’s nothing”; or “A hundred girls aren’t worth a single testicle.”4 On their marriage, men brought into their families the most prized possession of all: a daughter-in-law, who would be released from her role as virtual servant to her husband’s family, his mother in particular, only when she had produced a son of her own. It was a vicious cycle.

  Madame Chuong had already given birth to a girl. Her first child, Le Chi, was born less than two years before, and Madame Chuong had convinced herself that this second child would be a boy. She was so certain that she had already bought baby-boy toys and baby-boy clothing.

  A second daughter only postponed Madame Chuong’s freedom. Until she gave birth to a boy, she was the lowest person in the hierarchy of her husband’s family. What’s more, her husband’s mother had been making some ominous threats. She wanted her son, Chuong, to take a second wife if the second child wasn’t a boy. Chuong, after all, was the firstborn son of the illustrious Tran family—he should be given every chance to sow the family’s greatness with his seed. Polygamy had been part of the cultural tradition in Vietnam for centuries. Royal daughter-in-law or not, a woman who gave birth only to daughters wasn’t worth very much. Failures should be written off quickly.

  It was a dismal prospect for the fourteen-year-old Madame Chuong. If her husband took a second wife, and if that one succeeded where she had failed, in giving the family a boy, Madame Chuong and her girls would be fearfully trapped in submission to others for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t long before she set her mind to the fact that she would just have to do it all over again—and again—until she had the son she expected. And the one expected of her.

  The new baby girl was named Le Xuan, or Beautiful Spring. Except it wasn’t spring. August in Hanoi typically marks the beginning of autumn, and that year was no exception. It seemed that the early days of autumn had turned the city a little cooler, providing a refreshing break from the long, hot summer. Willow branches hung down, kissing the surface of the lake, inviting the breeze to dance in their leaves and the city’s residents out into the open air to enjoy the fleeting mild season before the cold winds from China swooped in.

  Little Le Xuan and her mother were not to enjoy a moment of it. Vietnamese tradition required that the newborn and its mother remain practically bedridden in a dark room for at least three months after the baby’s birth. The room was supposed to be a cocoon for mother and child. Even bathing routines were restricted. The custom evolved from practical concerns having to do with infant-mortality risks in the tropical delta, but in practice the postpartum gloom must have been stifling. Except for the necessary traditional-medicine practitioners and fortune-tellers, Madame Chuong’s visitors were limited to her closest family members.

  The family astrologer was one of the first people to see the new baby. His job was to determine the fate of this child by cross-referencing the birth date, zodiac season, and birth hour with the positions of the sun and moon and to take into account any passing comets. It seems very possible that the fortune-teller intended to boost the spirits of the miserable young mother he found trapped in a dark room for three more months with the baby girl she didn’t want. He exclaimed over the baby’s fate: “It defies imagination!” The child, he told the stricken Madame Chuong, would rise to great heights. “Her star is unsurpassable!” The little girl would grow up believing in her fortune and also that the shining prediction had made her mother profoundly jealous. The result was a lifetime of strained mother-daughter relations and endless suspicion.

  Madame Chuong was by all accounts a young and ravishing beauty from Hue, the imperial capital in the center of Vietnam. Emperor Dong Khanh, who ruled briefly from 1885 to 1889, had been her grandfather. A succession of her cousins had sat on the throne ever since. As a member of the extended royal family, she was considered a princess, and she exemplified traditional loveliness with one exception: when she smiled, her teeth were pearly and white. She had resisted the customary practice of lacquering her teeth with calcium oxide to turn them black. To her elders, her white smile looked rotten, like a mouthful of bones. Long white teeth belonged to savages and wild animals; blackening them warded off fears that an evil spirit lurked inside the person. A mouthful of glossy black teeth was a traditional sign of elegance and beauty.

  But to Chuong, the white smile of his young bride made her the perfect image of a modern wife. Chuong had become accustomed to European pleasures when he was a student abroad; he had a taste for French poetry, wine, Western mo
vies, and motorcycles. Stepping away from tradition himself, Chuong had cut the long hair worn in a bun and abandoned the practice of wrapping a turban around his head typical of other men of his class and education. Long hair was a Confucian ideal, the value of filial piety applied to the body, hair, and skin, all extensions of the life bestowed on children by their parents. But Western ways were taking hold. Chuong embodied progress with his short hair, suit, and position as a lawyer with the colonial administration. As such, he would never accept a girl with blackened teeth as his wife.

  The couple married in 1912.5 The date of birth on Madame Chuong’s headstone, and the date given to the Metropolitan Police Department for the 1986 death report, was 1910. This would have made her only two years old at the time of her marriage.

  It was not uncommon for girls in the countryside to be married off at a very young age, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, but rarely was a toddler given away as a bride. The fact that both families were members of the elite made even less sense; they could have afforded to wait. A plausible explanation is that Madame Chuong’s birth date had been conveniently confused, allowing her to age gracefully in the United States, far from anyone who would contradict her version of the truth.

  But age confers status to the Vietnamese. There would have been no reason to try to appear young. Maybe Madame Chuong really was a two-year-old bride. An uncharacteristically long time passed after the marriage before the royal cousins started a family. Their first child, daughter Le Chi, was born almost a decade after their wedding date. Maybe the baby bride needed to reach childbearing age.

  Chuong was still a boy himself on their wedding day. He was born in 1898, making him only fourteen years old when he wed. Chuong was the eldest son of Tran Van Thong, a thong doc, or esteemed provincial governor, in French Tonkin. According to his dossier in the French colonial archives, Chuong left both Vietnam and his bride shortly after the wedding. He went to France and North Africa to continue his studies.

  The teenaged Chuong’s timing was impeccable. He left Indochina just before World War I broke out. Leaving even a year later would have been impossible in wartime. World events forced young Chuong to stay far away from his homeland for over ten years. He was able to take advantage of educational opportunities that were available in Europe but unheard of for a Vietnamese, even one of his social standing. Chuong attended schools in Algiers, Montpellier, and Paris, receiving his law doctorate in 1922.6 He was the first Vietnamese to do so.

  During the years that Chuong was studying abroad, colonial tension in Vietnam had escalated. French authorities had begun to recruit “volunteer” native Vietnamese for the European war front, forcing thousands of peasants and impoverished workers to report for duty. The French swiftly tamped down any hint of riot or rebellion and turned the countryside “upside down” in search of traitors.7

  There was also a growing chorus of disapproval about the educational opportunities available to the Vietnamese. The first, and for a long time the only, French lycée, Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon, catered to the sons of European administrators. But with war raging in Europe, a shortage of personnel loomed increasingly large. The colony realized it needed to recruit more French-trained natives into the civil service if it hoped to survive. The hope was that spreading French ideas among the Vietnamese would bind the natives more closely to the mother country. The result, however, was ironic: by schooling the Vietnamese in Western principles, including those of freedom and the history of the republic, the educational reforms helped to spark a quest for political empowerment that would prove impossible to extinguish.

  When Chuong finally returned to Vietnam at age twenty-four, his years of Western scholarship were handsomely rewarded. He landed an exalted apprenticeship in the French colonial judiciary and was awarded French citizenship on September 16, 1924, less than a month after the birth of his second daughter.8

  Not long after Madame Chuong and her baby girl emerged from their postpartum isolation, Madame Chuong became pregnant for the third and final time before her sixteenth birthday. In 1925, she bore the boy she had so hoped for, Tran Van Khiem. The birth of a son put a decisive end to her childbearing responsibilities. It also confirmed Le Xuan’s lowly position in the family.

  Chuong was promoted to a new job near the town of Ca Mau, near the southern tip of the country, hundreds of kilometers away from the urban luxury of Hanoi. It was a high-profile post within the French colonial administration. Although the promotion would mean moving away from the cosmopolitan pleasures of the capital in Hanoi, rising to such a high-level position was a professional coup for a native Vietnamese.

  There was only one small casualty: the Chuongs’ middle daughter, Le Xuan, would be left behind. Like a chit at a coat check, Le Xuan was a token of exchange between her father and her paternal grandmother. It was a kind of proof of his filial devotion and a sign of his intent to return, but really it was nothing more than a symbolic gesture to make his mother happy. If keeping the child honored her, it was a small price to pay.9

  The cluster of well-appointed homes with red-tile roofs surrounding a courtyard that made up the Trans’ family estate shouldn’t have been a bad place for a girl to grow up. The patriarch, Le Xuan’s grandfather, was a large landowner, and anyone in his household was like a local celebrity in the lush green countryside of northern Vietnam. Le Xuan’s grandmother was highly educated, which was exceptional for a Vietnamese woman of her day and age. Even as she had aged, and even as her eyesight had failed, she continued to read passages from the Vietnamese classics, or had them read to her.

  Vietnamese stories are filled with strong, intelligent, and decisive women, but theirs is not always a happy ending. Was it here that Le Xuan heard pieces of the beloved and often-recited Vietnamese epic poem The Tale of Kieu—the story of a talented young woman, wellborn and extraordinarily beautiful to boot? Jealous of the girl, fate forces her to abandon her true love and sell herself into prostitution to save her father from prison. Kieu struggles in an unjust world, but she remains a model of integrity and righteousness. More than just a tragic heroine, she symbolized the Vietnamese people, caught in the moral degradation of political change. Though the story was hundreds of years old, in 1924, the year Le Xuan was born, Kieu was formally honored as a national cultural hero. The woman-as-victim officially became the most beloved heroine.10

  Le Xuan’s grandmother certainly did not see herself as a victim of anything. She presided over a sprawling household that included herself and two other wives and all of their children. In addition to her first son, Chuong, she had given her husband three more sons and two daughters, after which she had considered her wifely duties fulfilled. To avoid any confusion about that fact, she simply installed a pillow bolster down the middle of their marital bed. She also introduced her husband to his second wife, who bore him seven more children. In order to prevent the second wife from gaining too much power, she introduced her husband to his third wife. Each one of the wives and their children held a distinct rank in the family hierarchy. The skill of the grandmother, the matriarch, showed in the fact that none of them ever obviously sabotaged each other.11

  Le Xuan’s paternal grandparents’ home was the perfect place to observe the disjointed and conflicting roles that Vietnamese women, especially members of the elite, assumed. Certainly, there was a clear emphasis on the behavioral code of Confucianism. Wives and daughters-in-law were expected to be outwardly dutiful and compliant. But behind the villa’s closed doors, another reality prevailed. Men were not expected to pay attention to domestic affairs. Practical matters, like the family budget, were left to the women. It was understood, if not discussed, that women held the real power inside the family. If the family were a country, the husband would be the nominal head of state, in charge of foreign relations. The wife would be the minister of the interior and in control of the treasury.12

  At first, Le Xuan’s daily upbringing was entrusted to the care of nurses. Even the domestic help understood the base pos
ition of their child charge, so they mostly ignored her. She was a nobody in the traditional order of things. The nurses handed Le Xuan off to the gardeners who played with her like a toy. It just so happened that the gardeners employed at her grandparents’ home were local petty thieves and village thugs, men ordered by her grandfather’s court to serve time for their wrongdoing by doing good for the community—or the community’s chief, her grandfather. She followed the men around as they took care of the animals. Sometimes she was even bathed alongside the animals.

  Within a year of her parents’ departure, the little girl became deathly ill. Madame Nhu would always claim that her parents never cared for her, but she concedes that the Chuongs returned from their new post in the far south as soon as they heard. It couldn’t have been an easy trip to make. There were no rail lines linking the country, and the provinces were too distant for road travel. The most obvious means of traveling from south to north would have been by steamer ship along the coast. For ten days and nights, Le Xuan hovered between life and death.

  Once Le Xuan’s mother returned, she did not let her little girl out of her arms. But this, at least as the little girl would come to understand it, wasn’t out of love, or even concern, for her middle daughter. It was a reproach directed at the child’s grandmother. In the wild arena of family politics, her sick child had just earned the young Madame Chuong an edge over her mother-in-law.

  Le Xuan recovered her health. She would remain scrawny for the rest of her childhood, but what she lacked in strength, she made up for with sheer will. Le Xuan would need to be scrappy. The severity of the illness had made her mother more suspicious than ever of her middle daughter. When she had last seen her, Le Xuan had been a black-haired infant with round cheeks. The skinny, hollow-cheeked girl she came home to could easily have been the child of a household servant or local peasant woman. Suspicion that her child had been switched nagged at Madame Chuong for the rest of her life. Her two other children knew this and exploited it, teasing their middle sister about being the nurse’s child. And Madame Chuong used it as an excuse to forgive herself for not loving her middle daughter like she loved the other children. As the little girl grew up, she would feel like “a bothersome reminder for her [mother], an object of morbid doubt [and] family infighting.”13