Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Once Le Xuan was well enough to travel, the Chuong family made their way back down the coast, all together now. They settled into life in the remote province of Bac Lieu. Madame Chuong, not even twenty-years old, presided over a large home with servants and an out-sized tract of land.

  With the cosmopolitan diversions of Hanoi now far away, the Chuongs reverted to a more traditional Vietnamese family life, one with distinctly Confucian leanings.14 Free of her mother-in-law and her oppressive judgments, Madame Chuong managed the homestead, as she had been raised to do. Still, after a taste of city life in Hanoi, with all its Westernized pleasures, the quiet of the countryside and the traditional duties she assumed must have seemed tediously old-fashioned. Madame Chuong had left behind the chance to participate in the new opportunities emerging for women in cosmopolitan society. The wife of a modern man in the city, aside from running her household and supervising her children’s education, could stand beside her husband in a social setting. This must have seemed impossibly exotic to the young girl living the life of a traditional Vietnamese wife and mother, as women had for centuries before her.

  Did she dare to hope for something different for her own daughters? Judging from the educational opportunities she pushed for her girls, the answer seems to be yes. And yet, on those occasions when their educations conflicted with family hierarchies, centuries of tradition won out. The ground rules of a proper, traditional lifestyle demanded loyalty to family and fidelity to an ancient culture. Women were expected to obey three submissions, first to their father, then to their husband, and finally to their sons. Women were also encouraged to display the four virtues: management of the household income, decorum, harmonious speech, and virtuous behavior.

  The ideals of domestic femininity were spelled out clearly in classic Vietnamese texts, manuals in “family education in verse.” Written to be read aloud in singsong for easy memorizing, they made expectations for household management and morality clear.

  Do not talk to a man who is not a relative;

  Do not say hello to him, so as not to arouse suspicion.

  Do not frequent women who are not virtuous;

  Do not alter your clothing without reason;

  When sewing, do not let your needle be idle;

  When alone, do not sing or declaim poetry;

  Do not look out the window with a pensive air.

  . . . Do not shrug, do not sigh;

  Do not laugh before you have even said a word;

  When laughing, do not show all your teeth;

  Do not gossip or talk crudely.15

  Le Xuan learned early that she must defer to the established role of middle daughter. Her parents and elders were to be honored and obeyed, and so were her siblings. Le Xuan occupied the most menial position in the family. Her aggravation at being told what to do started at a young age. “It is something like a game my [brother] used to tease me with when I was a child. I would be sitting down, and he would say, ‘Sit down.’ So to show that I was not sitting because he ordered me to do it, I would stand up. But then he would say, ‘Stand up.’ It made me very angry.”16

  Another child might have reacted differently, becoming docile as she acclimated to the reality of her circumstances. But Madame Nhu remembered her childhood as an infuriating time. She craved attention and approval. To get it, she had to work a little harder, cry a little louder. Even as a little girl, she believed she was entitled to more.

  Le Xuan’s formal education started when an old, turbaned tutor with two fused fingers came to the family home to instruct her and her two siblings. At the exceptionally young age of five, she was sent off to boarding school in Saigon with her sister.

  Young Le Xuan was studious and serious. Her younger brother envied her good grades and intelligence. When she was away, he missed his sister as a playmate, but when she returned, he often felt frustrated by their differences in ability. He didn’t like being treated as the baby. One day he got so frustrated that he ripped her writing plume out of her hands and threw it at her head. The sharp tip stuck straight into her forehead. Le Xuan ran upstairs with the feather sticking out of her head and ink running down her face to show her mother. Her younger brother was not perfect, she wanted to scream.

  Le Xuan’s mother was angry—but not with her son. A girl with proper manners would never have shown such determination to humiliate the family heir. The girl was punished.17

  CHAPTER 4

  Portrait of a Young Lady

  THE CHUONG FAMILY MOVED BACK TO Hanoi before Le Xuan’s eighth birthday. Her father had been appointed to serve on the Hanoi Bar, the highest-profile job a Vietnamese lawyer could aim for in the colonial system. While an honor, it was also a reminder of the limited options available to even the best-educated Vietnamese.1

  After seven years in the southern countryside, Hanoi was a foreign city to Le Xuan. The people spoke with an accent filled with industrious buzzing. They hit the low tones with hard clicking stops that southerners usually just rolled through. The food was less sweet. There were no more floating chunks of pineapple or mango in her canh, the soup served over rice at most meals. Every time Le Xuan took a bite of something, even something she thought she knew, she had to be careful. Cha gio, the crispy spring rolls of the south, were called nem in Hanoi, and their sauce had a different heat in the north, a black pepper that tickled her nose rather than the spreading warmth of the chili used down south.

  Le Xuan felt oddly out of place in Hanoi for another reason: it was much harder in a dense city to avoid the complications of race. To some extent, the Chuong family’s wealth and elite status cushioned the otherwise stark segregation of the colonial city. Their home, Number 71 on the boulevard Gambetta, was a grand manor, tall and narrow with a mansard roof, gabled rooms, and dormer windows. It looked like the others in their neighborhood, but most of those belonged to French families. In fact, the whole neighborhood was known as the French Quarter. At the end of the nineteenth century, colonial urban planners had filled in swampland and carved broad avenues shaded by tamarind trees. A British visitor to Hanoi described how it must have looked to Le Xuan in 1932: “The villas are pure French, making no concessions to climate, and were it not for palms, bougainvillea . . . they might be standing in some pleasant outskirt of Paris.”2

  Le Xuan would have seen how most urban Vietnamese lived only when she was driven through town—either from behind the windows of a chauffeured Mercedes or from the perch of a cyclo-pousse, a narrow, open-topped carriage pushed by a servant pedaling a bicycle. The jumble of thirty-six streets to the northwest of the Chuong home known as the Old Quarter was far easier to navigate by pousse. Traditional houses had clay walls and thatched roofs. Impossibly narrow alleyways linked the homes, creating a veritable labyrinth. Behind darkened doorways, artisans meticulously plied their crafts from dawn to dusk, weaving silk, pounding silver, or making parasols, many in exactly the same manner as their ancestors. Steam from curbside noodle shops and incense smoke from the pagodas perfumed the air.

  Although less than a kilometer from where Le Xuan lived, the Old Quarter was separated by a chasm. The better-off could afford wooden frames and tiled roofs, but others with less-substantial shelter suffered through summer’s torrential rains and winter’s chill. The Great Depression had put an added strain on living conditions for Vietnamese in Hanoi. Peasants had fled the countryside looking for opportunity in the city, but found little, if any. Open sewers and shantytowns expanded the urban periphery. Violence simmered among the discontent.

  Eight-year-old Le Xuan had a different experience with colonial injustice. She went to a French school with French children and spoke French at home with her parents. The Chuongs and the few Vietnamese like them who could afford it took part in Western pastimes, like tennis and even the yo-yo. Women imitated the Paris fashions; boatneck blouses permitted a peek at the soft skin below the collarbone, and propriety no longer required women to bind their breasts so tightly. Rouge, lipstick, and perfume became the rage. T
he good life was a big party featuring French champagne and swing music. The quest for pleasure became the new preoccupation among the young and liberated generation of elite.

  Le Xuan wanted to fit into her new surroundings, but how? There simply were not many Vietnamese families like hers. Le Xuan’s best friend from childhood was an outsider too, a Japanese girl. Their shared misery forged a permanent bond, and they remained in touch for the rest of their lives. Most of the other Vietnamese that Le Xuan saw regularly worked on her family’s staff of twenty servants, including cooks, drivers, maids, and gardeners. The little girl knew her French history well enough to know that her street, a main thoroughfare that ran east-west across the city, was named for Leon Gambetta, a nineteenth-century French statesman who believed that France’s prestige in the world hinged on aggressive colonialism—on conquering people and places. The French had only been in Vietnam since the 1860s, and the seven decades of European presence were nothing compared to Vietnam’s history of 1,000 years of Chinese occupation; all the same, colonial injustice was a fact of life for young Le Xuan.

  Indeed, the French forbade the use of the word “Vietnam,” which referred to the unification of the country. To keep their colonial power intact, the French had to keep the Vietnamese from getting too strong—so they conquered by dividing. The administration of the country was split into three parts: the north (Tonkin) and center (Annam) were nominally sovereign Vietnamese territories, or protectorates, of France. The resource-rich southern third of the country, Cochinchina, was governed by direct colonial rule. The colony was carved into large estates for the production of rice, rubber, and other valuable commodities. To fund the colonial administration, the French state depended on revenue from the monopolies it controlled: salt, alcohol, and particularly opium. The French knew just how dangerous opium was, but they also knew how profitable addiction could be. They opened opium-buying centers in every village. Villages that didn’t meet their sales quota were punished.3

  Colonial prosperity in Indochina had a dark underbelly. There were stories of village families forced to sell sons and daughters to pay onerous taxes. Working conditions at the French-run factories, in the mines, or on the rubber plantations were hell on earth for the Vietnamese laborers. Malaria and cholera were rampant, and there was barely enough rice to fuel the twelve-hour workdays. One worker at the Michelin plantation watched as his French manager called in soldiers to deal with seven men who had tried to escape; the manager “forced the escapees down on the ground and let the soldiers tramp on their ribs with their nail studded boots. Standing outside I could hear the sound of bones snapping.”4 Factory owners were said to provide dark cages for workers’ children, who emerged to rejoin their parents at the end of the day covered in filth.

  More than just the profit motive encouraged the French to believe that Indochina’s natural resources were theirs for the taking. They believed that Vietnamese were biologically inferior.5 The French term for the Vietnamese, regardless of which region they were from, was Annamite. The word had its origins in Chinese, but to the French it sounded very much like une mite, meaning insect or parasite. Another term they used to address any Vietnamese, regardless of class, was nha que, or peasant. An educated city dweller would have bristled at the characterization, but the careful ones and those like Le Xuan’s father, who had the most to lose, didn’t dare show their displeasure.

  The Chuongs didn’t participate in any overt anti-French activity—at least not at this point. Their lives were too comfortable to take the risk. But even they could see that the colonial system was fraying. The timing of the Chuong family’s move back to Hanoi coincided with the aftermath of the Yen Bay uprising, the most serious rebellion the territory had seen in the French era. In February 1930, a group of Vietnamese nationalists (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, or VNQDD) attacked a French garrison post in North Vietnam, killing the French officers stationed there and seizing an arms depot. To preserve their authority, the French responded with a show of strength intended to terrify the Vietnamese back into submission. The colonial government clamped down on suspected rebels, guillotined those they caught, and threw bombs into assembled crowds and suspect villages.6

  The children’s school in Hanoi was located next to the French governor-general’s residence. The saffron-plastered building still stands today but houses the offices and reception rooms for the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party. In Le Xuan’s day, the school was named after Albert Sarraut, the governor-general in Indochina from 1911 to 1913. Although Sarraut was celebrated for pushing education reform, his motivation was, at its base, another troubling example of the predominance of racism. He believed that the Vietnamese could not be civilized until their thinking, customs, and institutions mirrored those of the French. For Albert Sarraut, the self-proclaimed champion of native education reform, the Vietnamese would “deserve independence from French rule only when they no longer desired to be Vietnamese, but Frenchman in yellow skin.”7

  Le Xuan was taught to speak, read, write, and think like a good little French schoolgirl. She learned the order of the kings of France and the dates of all the French battles against the British. She could sing about forests and snow-capped mountains without ever having laid eyes on them. She was tested in French poetry and dictation but never about her own heritage. Le Xuan was supposed to forget that she was Vietnamese and encouraged to believe that she was destined to participate in another, superior culture.

  Now that the family was back in Hanoi and the children were busy with school, the lady of the house, Madame Chuong, could enjoy a bit more liberty. Freed from the traditional countryside, the pressure to bear another child, and the meddling of her mother-in-law, Madame Chuong could explore what it meant to be a Vietnamese woman in an era of experimentation and even permissiveness. Unthinkable just one generation before, Vietnamese women now joined men in public social settings like restaurants and dance halls.

  Because Madame Chuong didn’t have to flatten her breasts with cloth under a tunic anymore, she could show off her figure. She could have dresses made to order, copying the latest fashions, such as dropped hems and flouncy skirts. Godard’s Department Store on the corner of rue Paul Bert sold silk stockings, hats, and hairpins. The Chuongs’ favor with the French gave them the economic means to pursue all of Hanoi’s European pleasures. A chauffeured Mercedes squired them around the town; they ate in the city’s most elegant Chinese restaurants and enjoyed the cinema showing American and French films. The Palace was the most modern and most expensive of the seven movie theaters in Hanoi, but even the poorest urban Vietnamese could see movies. There was the Trung Quoc across town, where people squatted together on wooden slats, craning their heads for a better view of the screen. An even cheaper ticket could be had for those willing to stand on the wrong side of the screen and watch the flickering images back to front.8

  On Tuesday afternoons, Madame Chuong hosted a social gathering in her home. Her guests were Vietnamese and French—and after 1939, Japanese. Men and women mingled comfortably over canapés and cocktails in the parlor. Anyone who was anyone, or might be someday, attended. Laughter and conversation floated up past the crystal chandeliers and wound up the stairs to the landing where the children crouched, listening to the adults below.

  Madame Chuong was adapting the tradition, dating back to the French Revolution, of elite women presiding over salons in their homes, where guests could engage in intellectual debate over art, literature, and even politics. Powerful men were always in attendance at Madame Chuong’s gatherings, but feminism and women’s rights became vehicles for arguing about another topic, one much too dangerous to address outright: Vietnamese freedom from French colonialism. There were spirited debates about the proper role of women, the value of education for women, and the balance between family hearth and public life, but at the root of all these questions was a much larger one: how could Vietnam become modern and free?

  I had expected to find reams of information on Mada
me Chuong’s Tuesday salons in the archives of the notorious French Sûreté, the secret police, but instead of intelligence on the dangerous people and ideas she hosted, I found a salacious account of the Chuongs’ life as a couple.

  Nothing in the French files supported the idea of the “glory” described in the Chuongs’ obituary so many years later. In fact, the reality was quite the opposite. French army general Georges Aymé described Le Xuan’s father, Chuong, as “a little runt,” a limp character who couldn’t keep his own wife satisfied. The most generous description I could find of Chuong in the archives characterized him as “intelligent, if subtle.” It seemed a far cry from the portrait of the dignified diplomat presented at his death.

  But the description of Madame Chuong shocked me most. “Chuong’s WIFE is beautiful and very intriguing. In Annamite circles, it is known that she is the one in charge, she directs her husband.” That wasn’t so surprising. Even with greying temples, Madame Chuong always looked regal and in control in the pictures I had seen. But I had never seen a picture of her wild side—which was, according to the French secret police, “famous throughout Indochina.” She was known as much for “her dogged ambition as for her coucheries utilitaires—sleeping around with people of influence from any and all nationalities.”