Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  From her front windows, Madame Nhu had a perfect view of the ancient capital. To the north, the vista on that chilly December morning looked as it did on any other day. The flag tower soared. The walls of the ancient citadel remained firmly rooted. The city’s nine cannons, symbolic of Hue’s divine protection, were trained on nothing at all. Beads of dew gathered on their cold metal.

  But the south side of the Clemenceau Bridge was strangely silent. The twisting alleyways were empty. By this time in the morning, there should have been a steady pulse of pushcarts and people. No boats were slipping up the An Cuu canal, no vendors sang out their wares, and no smoke from cooking fires puffed above the squat wooden houses that stretched to the city limits. Windows were shuttered and locked—for all the good that would do the people behind them.

  Late the night before, the distant rumbling that had surrounded the city for days turned into distinctive, acute booms that rattled the windowpanes ferociously. Madame Nhu knew then that they had ignored city officials’ orders to evacuate for too long. But as to who was out there fighting in the streets, “On l’ignorait”—no one knew.

  The Vietnamese were still reeling from all the shocks their country had suffered during the last year of World War II. Ruthless in their demands for labor and unquenchable in their thirst for raw materials, the Japanese had imposed crop requisitions at two or three times the rate of the French, sapping the countryside of manpower and resources. Hungry peasants ate into their seed stocks, which meant they planted still fewer seeds. Rice yields fell due to a particularly nasty spell of weather, and a devastating famine struck northern Vietnam in 1944. In urban areas, people got ration cards; in the countryside, people were cut off and left to die. Lines of walking corpses streamed into the cities. First came the men; straggling behind them were withered women, then children with bloated bellies and the elderly on spindly legs. The fields they passed through were silent. Even the birds had succumbed—the famine upset the natural order of the food chain. The hungry foraged for bugs and crickets for extra protein. They ate grass and leaves and even pulled the bark from trees. Every day, hundreds of corpses, people who had died from hunger on the side of the road, were gathered up for disposal. Historians estimate the famine’s death toll at over 2 million people.

  The famine of 1944 and 1945 became the perfect proving ground for Communist thought and ideology. The Communists breathed life into a political and military organization named the Viet Minh, but they kept the group’s identity cloaked in nationalism to try to reach the broadest base possible. Vietnamese who might initially have been put off by the close link to the Indochinese Communist Party were drawn to the Viet Minh. No one else—not the French, not the “independent” government propped up by Japan, and certainly not the Japanese themselves—did anything to alleviate the pain and suffering in the countryside. Madame Nhu had hardly noticed it from within her rarified cocoon. It was the Viet Minh who reached out with famine relief. Their network helped people find food, and their manpower helped farmers replant. They earned the devotion of the countryside for their actions.

  The loyalty of the people would come in handy in the wake of the Japanese defeat at the end of World War II, when Vietnam suddenly found itself in a political vacuum. The French assumed that they could step right back in to retake their colony and that they would be welcomed with open arms, but they were wrong. Many families formerly under the French thumb, like the Chuongs, had collaborated with the Japanese. They didn’t want to see the French return. The Japanese had dangled the promise of freedom in front of them, and not surprisingly they didn’t want the nation to revert to a French colony. But rich families like the Chuongs didn’t like the alternative the Viet Minh offered. Communist themes of class struggle and wealth redistribution threatened their comfort and safety. The leader of the Viet Minh, who also founded the Indochinese Communist Party, had finally stepped out of the shadows. On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam independent. He was ready to fight the French for the country, and suddenly the postwar period in Indochina devolved into a political mess. Who was in charge of what region changed from day to day, province to province. The most practical concern for a bystander like Madame Nhu was survival.

  On that chilly December morning in 1946, Madame Nhu didn’t know who was fighting whom anymore, but the women and children gathered in her parlor stood well enough away from the windows for safety. They were five in all: Madame Nhu with her infant daughter, Le Thuy, her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, and a niece. It was her sister-in-law Hoang’s fault they were still there at all. It was her house, although she lived, not so happily, with her husband, Am, and his family across town. The house provided Hoang with a kind of insurance in case things didn’t work out in her marriage. She had been unable to bring herself to abandon her only asset. For extra income she rented it to her brother and his new bride, and Madame Nhu’s status in the family, as newest wife and youngest sister-in-law from an aristocratic family with a rather scandalous reputation, had obliged her to go along with the arrangement and keep her mouth shut.

  Madame Nhu castigated herself for her naiveté, which she said had “bordered on idiocy.” Despite the fact that she must have been absolutely terrified, when she told me about it by telephone more than sixty years later, she showed shockingly little mercy for herself. I wondered at the harsh edge that had crept into her voice as the memories of that day intensified.

  Instead of taking shelter with the Jesuit priests down the road, Hoang convinced her elderly mother it was just as safe not to leave the house. The French might requisition it if they thought it had been abandoned, and even more harm might come to it in the Communists’ hands. Madame Nhu couldn’t defy her mother-in-law, so the women enlisted the gardener’s help to push the heaviest furniture together in the center of the parlor and piled on blankets and cushions. They spent the night listening to the explosions get closer and closer from their makeshift refuge, folded in on each other and praying for safety. They were still huddled together, wondering what to do with themselves in the sudden stillness of the morning, when the men came through the door.

  They were Viet Minh soldiers. No insignia distinguished them, but their uniforms pieced together from jute sacks gave them away. On their feet they wore nothing but bits of rubber lashed together to fashion a sandal. They carried machetes and long rifles, repurposed hand-me-downs from another war altogether. The French colonials had used the same arms against these soldiers’ fathers and grandfathers to show the natives who was in charge.

  The Viet Minh was more than just a nationalist movement, and Madame Nhu knew it. As the military arm of the Indochinese Communist Party, its members carried general insurrection to every corner of the country. Her brother-in-law and nephew had been two of their highest-profile victims: a local Viet Minh squad had taken Khoi and his son for questioning in August 1945, imprisoned them briefly, convicted them of being bourgeois traitors, and executed them. Madame Nhu’s husband had hidden upstairs in Hoang’s house when they came for him next. Madame Nhu herself had opened the door and lied coolly to the soldiers’ faces. Then, surprising even herself with how brazen a bluff she could manage, she invited the leader to come in and wait for her husband. Nhu slipped out under cover of dark and stayed mostly in hiding after that. On one of the rare and clandestine visits Nhu had made to his wife during the previous year, their daughter, Le Thuy, had been conceived. Aside from those hurried moments of intimacy, Madame Nhu hadn’t known where her husband was. By December 1946, she didn’t even know if he was still alive.

  Now they had come for her. Madame Nhu wished she could disappear. As the pampered daughter of a colonial puppet and imperial princess and the flashy new wife in the Ngo clan ensconced in the large house on the banks of the An Cuu canal, she represented everything the Communists were looking to take down. They wouldn’t let a prize like that slip away. Madame Nhu had to know that a pretense of humility and timidity was her best defense. She held the baby tighter and kep
t her eyes down.

  They looked like cavemen to Madame Nhu. Even their smell was primal—sweat, smoke, and wet earth. She could barely make out what they were saying to her, much less what they were saying to each other. The toneless speech of commoners in the central region had continued to elude her, despite the three years she had been living in Hue. Distinct rising and falling tones distinguish words from one another in Vietnamese, and to the well-bred northerner, the flat, pounding noises these men lobbed across the room at each other sounded like savage grunts.

  Madame Nhu’s dog whimpered pitifully from another room. Quito, a German shepherd, was a magnificent and loyal animal. After her husband had left her all alone, the dog had kept her safe from the Chinese Kuomintang troops stationed in the city after September 1945. They had descended on the city like a swarm of locusts.1 When a motley crew of them decided to settle in her garden, Madame Nhu, her cook, and the housekeeper had tried to scare them off by making a ruckus, banging ferociously on pots and pans and yelling. The men hadn’t budged—they weren’t field mice. They saw that Madame Nhu was pregnant, her husband was nowhere to be seen, and her only company in the big house by the river was two old maids. The ragged troops, sick of war and starved for food, warmth, and the comforts of home, began to think they would be more comfortable inside the house. Madame Nhu looked vulnerable enough standing alone at the window, clutching at something behind her rounded belly, but then they saw what it was. She was holding a dog loosely by the collar. He performed well, baring his teeth and laying his ears flat against his head. The threat worked, and after that the men had left her mostly alone, a blessing for which she couldn’t help but thank her darling, snarling beast.

  He had had no chance to come to her defense this morning. She had locked the dog up in another room for the night. It was a foolish mistake.

  The Viet Minh soldiers turned their attention to the piano. It was a fine instrument that Madame Nhu had tried to have transported out of the house, along with the few valuable heirlooms of lacquer and silver, which she had asked the Jesuits to store in their monastery in case something like this should happen. But the piano had jammed in the doorway. The men encircled it, running their hands over the glossy wood, but not out of any particular admiration. Human skin oils leave a rainbow residue in their wake, dust and grime can scratch a prime paint job, and touching the strings, given the difficulty of keeping them in tune in the tropics, during wartime no less, would ordinarily have constituted an unspeakable trespass. The callused fingers were seeking something as they probed under the hood and around the insides. The men were looking for hidden communication devices. They seemed to think the piano, with all its strings, was some sort of telegraph.

  Finally, the Communists decided to detonate the piano. “Imbeciles,” Madame Nhu had fumed. “They didn’t even know what a grand piano was!” But Madame Nhu didn’t actually watch as they packed the cavity with gunpowder. Perhaps the Communists had known exactly what the piano was all along, and blowing it up was their revenge for the bourgeois decadence on display. But it is possible that something else caused it to explode. The cast-iron harp of the grand piano might have suffered during the hasty attempt to move it. If the harp had cracked or the frame had been weakened, the tons of pressure holding the strings taught might have released in a cataclysmic boom. Whatever the cause, the eruption blasted an enormous hole through the main section of the house.

  Amid the wreckage, Madame Nhu set to gathering up what she could for baby Le Thuy: blankets and diapers, a change of clothes, and a large basket to carry it all. Then, before she was forced out of her home, she put on a coat, a wool redingote, a bit like a coatdress that fastened narrowly at the waist with darts and tucks. It had been fashioned in Europe, an unimaginable luxury during the last years of war and privation. It was the warmest piece of clothing she owned. Tropical conditions ruled her corner of Southeast Asia ten months out of the year, but December in central Vietnam was predictably damp and cool—conditions that would only get worse the farther she got from home.

  She was herded out of the city under a gunmetal sky, part of a human stream pouring down the road, heading inland away from Hue. They were mostly women, children, and the elderly. Baskets bobbed along like flotsam, carried across the shoulders of women using the traditional dong ganh, long poles balancing a basket on either end. Much was made of the fact that their shape resembled the long and narrow contours of the country itself. The full baskets on either end represented the fertile deltas, the Red River of Tonkin to the north and the Mekong of Cochinchina in the south. The area in the middle, the long hard yoke that rubbed the skin off the back of the novice, was the rocky and relatively infertile region in the center of the country, the area that the refugees now tramped through.

  The roads cut like a red gash through flooded fields. They were awash with clay and scented with manure from the water buffalo in the fields. The road itself got too dangerous as soon as the concrete towers came into sight. The French army had constructed these watchtowers along the country roads to keep watch for Viet Minh troop movements, so the captives cut through the rice paddies instead. They were corralled single file on narrow dikes. To avoid soaking the only pair of shoes she had with her, Madame Nhu had to measure each step minutely. It was exhausting work, carrying her daughter in one arm and the baby’s things in the other. She tried to keep pace with her sister-in-law and her niece; her mother-in-law, a tiny, fragile thing, was carried on the gardener’s back and hung back a little farther. Around them, the rice grasses rippled like waves. The vast sea of emerald was broken by white marble gravestones—ancestral burial plots that served as a constant reminder that death could lurk nearby.

  Where the paddy ended, the procession of women and their guards had to return to the road. They were approaching a bridge when a loud blast shattered the air. “Nm xung!” Get down! The guards crouched at the edge of the road. Pebbles scattered as the quickest women scurried down an embankment. Others followed, heads tucked low, elbows around their ears, their baskets abandoned on the road. The road to the bridge was suddenly deserted except for Madame Nhu and the baby she clutched in her arms.

  Madame Nhu knew that decomposing bodies would have washed up against the pilings and abutments. She had been close to bridges like this one before and had heard others graphically describe the scene. From where she stood, she thought she could smell the putrefaction. Whether killed by the Viet Minh or caught in some crossfire, what did it matter? They were the bodies of fallen fighters too poor or too far from home for a proper burial. The swollen corpses of those anonymous unfortunates were rotting and leaking their fluids into the very same shallows where she was being told to take cover.

  Madame Nhu simply couldn’t go. It was too awful. It had begun raining, but she planted her feet in the center of the red-clay road and held on even tighter to the baby. She would not take refuge like the other women among the dead; she’d rather join them as a corpse herself. It was the first time Madame Nhu had seen, at first hand, the grim reality that had gripped her country for the last few years, the same years that she had spent as a newlywed, then a young wife and new mother, far removed from political intrigues. She’d moved into Hoang’s fine house. She had servants, including a cook, a gardener, and a nanny for the baby, to tend to the business of homemaking for her. In her spare time, Madame Nhu had taken up the don trang, a delicate instrument that resembled a lute. She was also content to be pushed around town in her pousse, which she had actually had brought to Hue by train after her wedding. She boasted that its northern comforts were so envied that people would stop and stare at her daily passage along the banks of the An Cuu canal to dine with her mother-in-law. But she could never be entirely sure if they stared out of admiration or with some more sinister intent. Now all such luxuries were gone.

  To Madame Nhu, standing there in the rain, death leered at her from every angle. It was a grim kaleidoscope. Yet, she insisted, it was liberating. If she stayed on the road to cross
the bridge, she wondered, who would come to get her? Her captors or whoever was shooting at them? She doubted either of them would be brave, or foolish, enough to risk it. Madame Nhu felt free. How tired she was of adhering to pointless expectations. Her shoulders fairly ached from all the slouching toward whatever it was she thought she was supposed to do. She straightened and looked ahead into the mist. What would come next she didn’t know, but she would look it in the face, and she would make her own way. Madame Nhu believed that in that moment in the rain, surrounded by desolation but strangely untouched by it, she began to understand things. She would not step down into the filth and decay; she would hold her place on the high ground.

  Madame Nhu flipped up the hem of her coat. It was long enough to fold over the baby’s head, making a sort of shield from the rain, which was falling hard and cold. Le Thuy thought it was a game of hide-and-seek and pushed her face out, giggling with delight. When Madame Nhu insisted and tried to position the coat again, the baby only laughed more. Peels of high laughter escaped from the woolen folds of Madame Nhu’s coat. The joyful sound rolled over the battleground as mother and daughter set off across the shaky wooden beams of the bridge.

  As fantastic an image as it must have been, Madame Nhu wasn’t the first woman to cross a battleground with a baby. The Vietnamese have a rich mythical history featuring noble and heroic mothers. One of the fabled Vietnamese kings, Le Loi, is said to have hidden from the Chinese Ming invaders in the skirts of his mother. The mother myth is tied to the creation story of the Vietnamese people, and the mother’s affection and devotion are credited with the remarkable feats of Vietnamese heroines. The Communists would be the most effective at conflating maternal sacrifice and patriotism in their revolutionary propaganda, but Madame Nhu would also try, during her years in power, to use motherhood as an image of righteousness. So, I had to wonder, did the Vietnamese emphasis on Quoc Mau, or National Mothers, influence Madame Nhu’s version of herself in the story? Whatever the case, her perceived invincibility became her reality. Madame Nhu’s audacious bridge crossing boosted her confidence that she would survive this trial and whatever else might come.