Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  French reports tallied her lovers, including the most prominent—and most threatening—one. Sometime after his arrival in 1939, the Japanese diplomat Yokoyama Masayuki betrayed his French wife for Madame Chuong; in return, she was described as more than his mistress.9 Madame Chuong became the Japanese consul’s “right arm” in Hanoi. To the French, it was an ominous sign that a woman as smart and ambitious as Madame Chuong would choose the Japanese over the French. She was doing what she could to help secure her family’s good position in quickly shifting political sands.

  The allegations were transmitted to Paris on faded onionskin sheets and archived, preserving the tittle-tattle of diplomats for posterity. According to one rumor that gained traction many years later as café gossip, among Madame Chuong’s many lovers in Hanoi was a man by the name of Ngo Dinh Nhu.10

  Nhu was approaching thirty when introduced to the fifteen-year-old Le Xuan in 1940. An eligible bachelor from a good family in Hue, he had the kind of handsomeness that would only improve with age and experience. They met in the garden of the Chuong house in Hanoi. Nhu was just back in Vietnam after having spent much of the last decade studying in France. First he had gotten a degree in literature. Then, while studying librarianship, he had earned a degree in paleography, the study of ancient handwriting, from the prestigious Parisian École Nationale des Chartes. Nhu was beginning a position at the archives in Hanoi when he met Le Xuan.11 All of this might have seemed bookish and small to someone with more experience, but to Le Xuan, who was still in high school and had never left the country, Nhu’s experiences abroad gave him an exotic appeal. A marriage would deliver her from the daily humiliations visited by her family. It seemed to Le Xuan that a man who preferred books to politics would be a relief from the duplicity and shifting loyalties she witnessed in her own parents’ marriage. The fact that Nhu smiled more than he spoke seemed another good sign. Getting married was the next step for a girl of her breeding, and Le Xuan didn’t think she would do better than Nhu.

  The catch was that Nhu’s family was strongly Catholic. Catholic families were a minority among the Vietnamese elite and somewhat of an oddity. Still, it was as good as a middle daughter should expect.

  Nhu was the fourth boy in his family. His father, Ngo Dinh Kha, had once held an important position in the royal court in Hue, but by the time Nhu was born in 1910, the French had deposed the emperor whom Kha served. In solidarity with his sovereign, Kha quit his position and moved his family to the countryside to raise buffalo and cultivate rice, a notable—if noble—step down. Kha’s rejection of the French intrusion into Vietnamese affairs reinforced the family’s sense of honor and nationalist duty—traits duly passed along to all six sons.

  Every morning, Kha’s nine children attended a mass at 6:00 a.m. After that, school. Their father also expected them to work in the fields alongside the local peasants, getting their hands dirty. Although Kha himself wore the traditional silk robes of a scholar and grew his fingernails two inches long as a sign of his elite mandarin status, he continually admonished his boys that “a man must understand the life of a farmer.”

  Kha personally oversaw the education of his boys, in and out of the home. At school, he demanded that they follow the European curriculum. At home, he taught them the mandarin classics. In addition to its scholarly emphasis, Kha’s home was a place to learn about anti-French nationalist politics.

  By the time of Nhu and Le Xuan’s first meeting, the older brothers in the Ngo family were already established in prominent careers. The eldest son was serving as a provincial governor. The second eldest was on his way to becoming one of the first Vietnamese bishops in the Catholic Church. The third brother, the family member who would have the most direct hand in shaping the country’s future, was the future president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem.

  In later interviews with Western reporters, Madame Nhu would candidly admit that her marriage to Nhu was a practical matter, not a romantic one. “I never had a sweeping love.” She confessed to Charlie Mohr of Time magazine. “I read about such things in books, but I do not believe that they really exist. Or perhaps only for a very few people.”12

  But young Le Xuan was a good actress, and she knew a good role when she saw one. In 1940, just before she met Nhu, the young ladies of Madame Parmentier’s ballet school had put on Snow White. The other French and Vietnamese students had refused to play the terrible witch, but Le Xuan saw the potential in the role. She would never be cast as Snow White; that part would go to one of the fair-skinned French girls. So she might as well steal the show with a magnificent, if cruel, performance.

  Le Xuan saw Nhu as an opportunity. Whether out of love, ambition, or mutual convenience, Le Xuan and Nhu were engaged shortly after their garden encounter. They were betrothed for three years, a Vietnamese tradition, although one not followed by Le Xuan’s parents. But during that time, from 1940 to 1943, the universe as Le Xuan had always known it changed entirely.

  World War II raged in Europe. The military defeat of France left Indochina all but cut off from the motherland. The Vichy government in France granted the Japanese the right to transport troops across northern Vietnam to southern China, build airfields, requisition food supplies, and station 6,000 men in Tonkin.

  Japanese diplomats, interpreters, intelligence specialists, and businessmen took the places of honor at the Chuongs’ Tuesday salons, and the French colonials in Indochina took it badly. They simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe that their surrender in Europe compromised their colonial rights to rule Indochina. So for a time, the French tried to live as normally as possible, retaining their servants, dressing formally for dinner, and gathering at cafés to talk about their weekend trips to the beach or the winner at the horse races. The French might have handed the deed to their colonial property in Indochina over to the Japanese, but for five more years, they would do their best to keep up appearances. The French flag continued to fly. Boulangeries, deprived of their customary 20,000 tons per year of imported wheat flour, also tried to make the illusion last, baking bread from corn and rice. Indochina was the only Southeast Asian area under Japanese control that had allowed white colonials to remain.

  In 1942 ration tickets were issued to Europeans for rice, salt, sugar, cooking oil, soap, matches, “quality” cigarettes, and fuel. The French still enjoyed favored status when it came to meat and condensed milk: they were supplied first. All this was justified in the colonial mind-set by the notion that the Annamites were accustomed to simple diets, whereas Europeans would become ill without variety.

  Although the Chuong family did not exactly suffer, they were deprived of the luxury goods they were used to. But the Chuongs were masters of political maneuvering and managed just fine—at least for a while. The Japanese infiltration of the nominal French regime made for a rather confusing state of political affairs. Who was in power, the Westerners or the Asians? Who would be more sympathetic to the nationalist aspirations of the Vietnamese? The Chuongs tried to cultivate important friendships on both sides, but eventually they chose to cast their lot with the Japanese under a banner of “Yellow Brotherhood.” The Japanese encouraged the Vietnamese to think of themselves as part of a greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere—one led by Japan, of course. At least the Japanese wouldn’t claim superiority based on the color of their skin.

  Le Xuan’s mother signed on for Japanese-language lessons, and her romance with Yokoyama, the Empire of the Rising Sun’s envoy in Hanoi, was soon rewarded. In 1945, her lover Yokoyama was appointed resident of Annam, and Tran Van Chuong, her husband, was promoted to a cabinet position in the Japanese puppet government.

  Le Xuan and Ngo Dinh Nhu were married in the first week of May 1943 at the Saint Joseph Cathedral of Hanoi, or as Hanoi residents called it, Nha Tho Lon, the big church. It was only Le Xuan’s second time in the towering, neo-gothic style church. The first had been the day before, for the confirmation of her conversion to the Catholic faith. She had worn long gloves and a lace mantilla that drape
d over her dark hair and cascaded past her shoulders. The profession of faith, which Le Xuan read aloud, proclaimed her new belief in God, his son Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the church and all its sacraments. Three times—at the mention of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—the priest poured water on Le Xuan’s forehead, signaling a washing away of her sins. Then Le Xuan received her baptismal name. They chose Lucy, after St. Lucia, the patron saint of the blind. A Christian among pagans, Lucy had chosen to remain a virgin and clawed her eyes out instead of marrying a pagan suitor. Le Xuan’s most beautiful features, her liquid eyes, stayed open during the ceremony, newly vigilant to the senses she most had to guard against—sensuality, pride, and vanity.

  Sometime before the ceremony and behind closed doors, the groom’s family had paid a thach cuoi, a bride-price, to Le Xuan’s family. Traditionally, the payment acknowledged the loss of the bride to her family and monetized the forfeit of her labor. The fact that the Chuongs were an urban, rich family changed nothing about the custom. The Ngos may have paid entirely in cash or included practical items: cloth, jewels, meat, and tea. The bride-price for Le Xuan was determined by the status of her family, and thanks to their shifting allegiances, the Chuongs’ status was still very good indeed in Japanese-occupied Hanoi.

  The Chuongs’ garden was transformed into a lavish oasis for the wedding reception after the full mass. The early May air was fragrant, full of blooming lilies and aromatic frangipani. Women flaunted their rationed silk and cosmetics. Some might have pulled their formal attire from careful storage, preserved in tissue from the era of carefree parties—before the mess of war. Others dressed in obvious contraband: women who knew the right men sported the latest fashions.

  Wartime privation had not yet stemmed the Chuongs’ supply of French champagne. It flowed into the clinking goblets of the guests, who were, as Madame Nhu would recall wistfully, the “tout Hanoi”—all of Hanoi who mattered, that is.

  All eyes were on the eighteen-year-old bride when she entered the garden. In Le Xuan’s official bridal portrait, taken on her wedding day, her features are composed and serious. Her hands are clasped in front of her but hidden from the camera under the wide sleeves of a traditional robe. The expanse of red silk is embroidered with Chinese symbols of double happiness and dotted with exquisitely detailed blossoms. Bands of imperial yellow follow along the neck and sleeves, a style befitting the daughter of a royal princess. Around her neck hangs a heavy medallion of the finest jade; matching rosettes adorn her ears. A heavy black turban sits back on her head. Underneath, her hair is parted severely down the center and wound tightly around her head. Le Xuan’s eyes are lightly kohled and her eyebrows painted on carefully. Her lips are stained, and her cheeks are powdered. She looks like a china doll that might crack if she dares to smile, but a powerful marital alliance of this kind was a serious matter. Le Xuan had assumed her new role impeccably. From now on, she would be Madame Nhu.

  CHAPTER 5

  Long-Distance Phone Call

  MONTHS WENT BY. I HAD SENT MADAME NHU more polite letters, reintroducing myself and giving her my background. “I want to tell your story,” I wrote. My mind churned through an endless list of possibilities to explain why she wasn’t answering me. What if Madame Nhu was not as grateful as I assumed she would be for the attention? Maybe she didn’t even know she was the Dragon Lady.

  I daydreamed about what our first conversation would be like. I saw myself flying to France, sitting on her crushed-velvet divan, chatting over a porcelain cup of tea and sweet peppermint candies . . . but it was taking more and more energy to pin my hopes to the same starting place everyday. I really thought I had imagined every possible scenario for how and when Madame Nhu might choose to contact me, but I was wrong.

  One Saturday morning in June 2005, when my husband was still asleep in bed, a deeply, unmistakably pink plus sign bloomed on the home-test stick. I was pregnant. It was something of a shock since my husband and I had been trying to get pregnant for over a year. Doctor’s appointments and blood work and invasive ultrasounds and second opinions had left me with an ugly-sounding diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome. Without medical intervention, I was told, pregnancy would be nearly impossible. And yet, I was standing there, staring at the sodden stick in absolute shock, when the kitchen telephone rang.

  “Bonjour,” a gravelly voice said through the receiver. “Madame Demery?”

  I barely managed to squeak out a oui. It was hard to swallow. My heart was exploding out of my chest. Could it possibly be who I thought it was? Who else would it be? I briefly wondered if I was dreaming.

  “Is this, I mean, are you Madame Nhu?” There was no point at all in playing it cool. The Dragon Lady was on the phone. And I was pregnant. And yes, it was Madame Nhu. But her barrage of questions came at me so fast, they yanked me right out of any blissful dream state.

  “Are you a government agent?”

  No, no, I assured her.

  “Your husband then? Perhaps your father, anyone in your family?”

  I promised her that no government had ever employed anyone in my immediate family.

  “Have you been hired by police, or perhaps the New York Times?”

  An interrogation like this would have sounded certifiably mad coming from anyone else. But I took every question seriously. Eventually, Madame Nhu declared herself satisfied.

  “Bon,” she said definitively, “that is behind us. Good.”

  Then she laid out the ground rules. Madame Nhu would do the calling. She would not give me her telephone number. She would not speak to anyone else who picked up the phone; she would hang up. And she would absolutely not leave messages on my answering machine. I agreed to all the conditions easily.

  “Bien sur. Of course, Madame.”

  “I will call you again in three days.”

  Madame Nhu and I began to talk by telephone on a fairly regular basis. I got to know it would be her when the caller ID on the telephone read “Unavailable.” She tended to call in what was the late morning for me and the early evening for her, given the seven-hour time difference. She might start in with a tidbit of Vietnamese history that she thought I should know. Sometimes she repeated herself. She recounted the standard fare of Vietnamese fables—of Vietnamese heroines like the Trung sisters or Lady Trieu vanquishing Chinese invaders. I was pretty sure it was a pretext. She was testing me, getting to know me. Stories would give way to questions—about my family, my religion, and my knowledge of the Bible. None of my answers seemed very satisfactory.

  I learned that it was better to let Madame Nhu talk. She would stay on the phone longer, and it would inevitably lead her back to the past. From there I could tease out little vignettes from her childhood and ask her what she remembered about the different eras of her life. But when I asked a question that Madame Nhu deemed too probing, she would shut me right down. It might be a frivolous question about life in the palace in Saigon—for example, I had heard a rumor that she had gold toilets. When I asked her about it, she called me a silly child. If I tried to ask about the regime shutting Buddhist monks and university students up in the infamously squalid tiger cages, she told me to be careful of my sources. The political opponents of her regime, she said with a serious edge in her voice, had been duped by the Communists.

  I told Madame Nhu about my pregnancy after my husband and I had told our families but before we shared the news with many of our friends. I told her, almost shyly, about the amazing coincidence—about how she had called me on that same morning and about how it had been difficult to get pregnant at all.

  Madame Nhu was effusive. “Mais, c’est merveilleux!” Maaaarvelous! She almost sang her praise. “It is exactly as I supposed,” Madame Nhu spluttered. “It confirms what I suspected!” I wondered a little at all the emotion she was showering on me; it was a strange way to say congratulations, but what could I say other than, “Merci”?

  The situation was awkward and quickly got more so. Madame Nhu said the next words
slowly into the phone, like she was sharing a secret with me.

  “You are an angel. You have been sent to help me finish the memoirs. And then everything will be revealed.”

  I wasn’t naive. I took much of what Madame Nhu said with a heavy dose of skepticism. I was no angel—but memoirs? Finally, she held out the promise of personal details—where she met her husband for the first time, what their wedding was like, and what kinds of games she had played with her children. I fairly drooled at the thought. If she wanted to think that I had been sent by God, maybe it would encourage her to be more open with me.

  The memoirs tantalized, especially when, as she proudly told me herself, they would “illuminate all the mysteries.” Madame Nhu had been an eyewitness to history making and political intrigue at the very highest levels. I was a little in love with the idea that somehow I had been chosen, if not by God, then by Madame Nhu.

  I was flattered. It was impossible for me to separate out whether I actually liked talking to Madame Nhu or just liked the idea of talking to her. The feeling was simply thrilling—like the early stages of a romance. She led me on, and I followed.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Crossing

  I WAS THE PERFECT AUDIENCE FOR MADAME NHU. I was eager for her acceptance, I played by her rules, and I usually believed what she told me. Why should she lie? And her harsh judgment of her own early character made her all the more believable.

  “I was still in the days of unconsciousness,” Madame Nhu mused to me about the young woman she had been on a December day in 1946. At twenty-two, still a young bride, she was a brand-new mother. After her wedding in Hanoi in 1943, Madame Nhu had followed her husband to his home in the city of Hue. According to ancient legend, the city sprang from a lotus flower in the mud. History instead grants all the credit for the 1802 founding of the imperial capital of Vietnam to one of Madame Nhu’s own ancestors, Emperor Gia Long. Seven kilometers southwest of the South China Sea in the center of the country, the city is Vietnam’s intellectual and spiritual heart. The two-story villa the Nhus rented from a family member was well situated in Hue’s modern section. It anchored a corner of what was known as the Triangle, a bustling residential and business community named for its irregular shape, bounded by a canal on one side and the Phac Lat stream on the other.