Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Madame Nhu met up with the group again on the other side. As the other women had waited for the firing to stop, then followed their guards by wading farther downstream to cross, Madame Nhu had time to rest before she continued on the march. Presumably she hadn’t thought to run away because there was nowhere for her to go. Flooded alluvial fields gave way to rocky terrain. At around 5 p.m., the soldiers halted the flow of staggering women and children. The shadows had finally grown too deep to navigate the winding paths through the thickening trees. There was no shelter except for the overhanging branches. Each captive was given one ball of cold cooked rice, no more than a handful. It had been an impossibly long day. If they had taken the main roads, Madame Nhu was certain they could have covered the same ground in half the time. But they had travelled into a new world. Madame Nhu had woken up to witness the end of the only lifestyle she had ever known and tramped through an interminable dusk only to get halfway to the unknown.

  And yet, that very night, Madame Nhu found her spirits bolstered again. The prisoners were ordered to arrange themselves in a neat row; their heads were counted, and they were finally granted permission to lie down. The coat Madame Nhu was wearing was the only thing between herself and the cold, wet ground. She made do as best she could. She probably laid the coat sideways, using the extra length to roll herself and the baby into a woolen embrace. Mother and daughter dropped into an uncomfortable sleep.

  Rough hands shook the captives awake a few hours later, and a gruff voice told them to stand. As Madame Nhu came to her feet, there was much stomping and yelling. Someone had escaped! The alert was shouted through the night sky. Torches were lit, the prisoners lined up again. A group of armed soldiers was dispatched to search the forest while the captives counted off one by one. “Mot, hai, ba . . .” Madame Nhu spoke her number and then another, adding one on behalf of the infant in her arms. Maybe it dawned on her right away, or maybe she realized it only later: no one was in fact missing. The guards had made the simple mistake of overlooking the sleeping baby wrapped in Madame Nhu’s arms. It took them a while to sort out the error. Madame Nhu enjoyed watching the soldiers go through their emergency measures. The bumbling, half-asleep Viet Minh tripped over themselves looking for an escapee who was right in front of their eyes. All the fuss over a fugitive, and it was just a baby. It was hard to be afraid of people if you were laughing at them.

  Things looked better in the morning. The day wasn’t as wet. There was some comfort in knowing that the march would come to an end before the day was over. And the incompetence of those self-important soldiers was a morale boost that fortified Madame Nhu.

  The marchers arrived in the afternoon at a modest farmhouse. Madame Nhu took note of a vegetable patch and well-tended garden. A Viet Minh leader appeared, wearing fashionable, Western-style clothes, a tennis sweater tied around his shoulders. His name was Bay, the Vietnamese word for the number seven. It was common for large Vietnamese families to name children according to their birth order. One of the first things he did was to seek out the young bride from Hue among the arriving captives. The instruction was a significant insult to the older women Madame Nhu was traveling with: he should have addressed her husband’s mother or her sister-in-law first. Instead, Madame Nhu recalled, he bowed and assured her that he would do everything he could to make their stay a pleasant one.

  What did Hoang, Madame Nhu’s sister-in-law, make of the breach of etiquette? Did she think back to the rumors she had heard? Madame Nhu’s mother’s liaisons, so clearly relayed in French diplomatic cables, must have taken on salacious detail in the gossipy versions traded over tea or betel nut. In a memoir written decades later, a friend of the family recreated a dialogue among the Ngo family to make sense of the internal conflict regarding Nhu’s choice of a bride.

  The matriarch, Mrs. Kha, warned her son with an old proverb: When you want to buy a pig, you look at the sow first. When you buy a wife, you look at her family.

  “Telle mere, telle fille,” brother Can had said. “She will not be different from her mother.”

  If Hoang harbored any suspicion of Madame Nhu, it was confirmed when the Viet Minh leader Bay greeted her first and when Hoang witnessed the easy charm her sister-in-law used to get more rations for their group. Hoang’s anxiety was assuaged, however, once she saw the room they were assigned to. There was one big bed for the five women to share. Madame Nhu wouldn’t be able to sneak around easily.

  When she talked about Bay, Madame Nhu used the French slang term for Communists, calling him a coco. It almost sounded like an endearment coming from her, and Madame Nhu remembered Bay warmly as one of the few civilized cocos she had ever met. He made the captives—Madame Nhu, her daughter, and her in-laws—as comfortable as he could, given the meager means available. The women received three bowls of rice a day and little to eat besides that, except when Bay arranged for sardines and milk. The five of them stayed on the farm, sharing one room and one bed, for nearly three months. When the French bombs began to drop too close to the farm, and he could no longer guarantee their safety, Bay arranged for the release of Madame Nhu and her family, personally signing the pass granting them safe passage to a convent. And many years later, when Bay rose to become the highest-ranking Communist in the central region, he would make polite conversation and remember to ask after Madame Nhu’s health when negotiations put him in touch with anyone from the Ngo regime.

  Almost overnight, Madame Nhu had gone from pampered princess to starving waif, but if anything she had more confidence in herself than ever before. She had been defiant and brave and borne witness to the ineptness of her captors. In the end, even their leader seemed to defer to her. She knew in her heart that she would survive.

  The effort of recounting the events of so many years past tired Madame Nhu. By the end of the story, I could hear fatigue in her voice, in the way the last sentences rattled through the receiver like dried stalks of bamboo. But I wasn’t quite ready to close down the conversation. I wanted to preserve the moment, and the spirit of sharing confidences, a little longer if I could. I offered some platitude. I don’t remember what it was now because I was so busy trying to keep up, scribbling notes on the unprecedented account she had just given me.

  I was hoping for a Gone with the Wind–style crescendo to mark the end of the story—like when Scarlett crumples to the red earth, shakes her fist at the sky, and vows never to be hungry again. Madame Nhu reminded me a lot of Scarlett O’Hara: both had been taught to defer to men, to look nice, and to stay sweet, and both had indomitable spunk. They were feisty and stubborn. They had a solid core underneath the fancy layers. Women like that could turn on the charm and turn it off. They did what they felt they had to do to get through the rough patches; they could be conniving and manipulative.

  But instead of coming up with some grand “Tomorrow is another day” epithet, Madame Nhu returned to her characteristic brusqueness. On my end of the phone, I could only shake my head silently as she prepared to deliver the usual send-off.

  “Bon. Alors. C’est tout.” Good. So. That’s all. And just before the click, Madame Nhu said, “I would never wear such a wasp-waisted coat again.”

  CHAPTER 7

  A Mountain Retreat

  “YOUR TOMMY LOOKS VERY HAPPY and very healthy,” Madame Nhu cooed over the phone. She had called to congratulate me after receiving the “It’s a Boy” announcement in the mail. We had sent it out to our close friends and family—and at the last minute I had mailed one to Paris. It featured a picture of Tommy tacked onto heavy card stock. She remarked right away on the card’s red color and declared the baby’s future “very auspicious.” The voice she used with me had changed. It was softer, higher in tone. The abrupt and awkward pauses of our early phone calls had eased into a more conversational patter.

  We talked about the birth, the baby’s sleep schedule and feeding, and, to my surprise, breastfeeding. Madame Nhu was an unlikely champion. From what I understood, most Vietnamese women of a certain class from
her era had used nursemaids—and I could understand why. In those first few weeks nursing the baby, I was constantly in various stages of undress and dishevelment, a cause and consequence of feeding on demand. I had nursing bras and baby slings and elaborate wraps. The ao dais in Madame Nhu’s wardrobe were made of silk and fastened with a row of hook-and-eye clasps, making it impossible to do a hasty feeding. One splash, one leak, one messy drool from the baby would have ruined the garment forever. And yet, she boasted, “I breast-fed each one at least six months.” It was hard to picture the Dragon Lady with an infant on her breast, let alone four times over. I must have sounded surprised because she laughed a little as she confessed that it wasn’t really her idea. Rather her husband and his family had wanted it that way. But in all, Madame Nhu said, she had enjoyed it. All that reminiscing left her sighing into the receiver, “I so love babies.”

  Le Thuy had been born in early 1946 amid the chaos of the postwar period. The chaos had morphed into a full-blown war by the time Madame Nhu gave birth to her next two children, boys Ngo Dinh Trac in 1949 and Ngo Dinh Quynh in 1952. Madame Nhu became a mother just as the world she knew was turned upside down and given a good shake.

  But at least Madame Nhu and her husband had been reunited. While his wife, daughter, mother, and sister were being forced out of Hue with bayonets, Nhu was working in the shadows, establishing a network of other non-Communist political figures. Despite his discretion, he eventually aroused the suspicion of the Viet Minh in Hanoi, and Nhu had taken shelter in Phat Diem, a Catholic town in Ninh Binh province.

  Nhu crossed paths with his wife’s parents in Phat Diem. The Chuongs had sought refuge there—making a characteristically dramatic arrival by throwing themselves on the steps of the Catholic church with Viet Minh soldiers just a few steps behind them. Chuong had tried to buy his way into the good graces of the Viet Minh by making “enormous” donations to the government of Ho Chi Minh, and he and his wife were apparently quite put out by the fact that the Viet Minh couldn’t be “more flexible” when it came to dealing with them. The Catholic priest of Phat Diem granted Madame Nhu’s parents shelter in his church, despite the fact that they were Buddhists.

  From Phat Diem, a network of Catholics gave Nhu, and eventually the Chuongs as well, safe passage to Saigon—with Chuong disguised as a monk and his wife dressed as a peasant woman.1

  Madame Nhu had been at her sister’s home in Saigon when she received an urgent message from a Redemptorist priest to come to the rectory quickly. Instead of receiving bad news—she still feared Nhu might be dead—she was led to a room where a visitor awaited her: her husband. The reunion with her parents would come later; for now, the Nhus had to find a way out of Saigon. The French were suspicious of Nhu’s activities, and the Chuongs’ wartime collaboration with the Japanese cast a long shadow over the entire family.2

  The Nhus moved to Dalat, a picturesque village nestled among pine forests and mountains in Vietnam’s central highlands. And despite the war, Madame Nhu came to call those years her “happiest times.”

  Dalat had been carved out of nothing, specifically for happy times. The French had decided at the beginning of the twentieth century to build a resort town up in the mountains as a retreat from the heat and the squalor of the cities. It was designed to be very segregated, which the founders believed would make the Dalat experience all the more enjoyable. The French were creating a spot to make them forget they were in Indochina at all—a “white island” in the tropics.3 They built their houses like ski chalets, and the train station looked like the one in Deauville, a seaside town in Normandy. They planted crops for the foods they missed. To this day Dalat’s markets are full of ingredients to make a proper French soup: leeks, celery, carrots, onions, greens, and potatoes.

  Madame Nhu’s family had been going to Dalat “forever.” They loved it for the same reasons the French did. It put them above the reeking mess of humanity in the overcrowded and hot cities. There were fancy hotels, golf courses, and French and Chinese restaurants. There were also nightclubs and theaters and jazz music. Madame Nhu’s cousin, the Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai, had a palace in Dalat, as did the French governor-general.

  Dalat still has a reputation for leisure and luxury; it is now the honeymoon destination for Vietnamese newlyweds. Dalat reminds me of Niagara Falls with slightly less neon lighting and infinitely more karaoke. Stenciled pink hearts and red roses are stamped everywhere—even on the ubiquitous party slogans displayed on bright yellow banners hanging over the main streets. Christmas lights flicker up the trees all year long. Swan-shaped pedalos are for rent along the lakefront. They churn up the placid water of the man-made lake in the center of town, making the water silty and soupy. Famed for its flowers, the town feels more like the Valentine’s aisle at CVS in mid-February. The state’s rush to plan and manage the lucrative industry of romance tourism has trounced Dalat’s natural beauty.

  When the Nhus arrived in the spring of 1947, Dalat was no longer as Madame Nhu remembered from her youth. The mountain’s jungle brush had reclaimed large swaths of the city. The worldwide depression that hit Vietnam in the early 1930s had set the budget for tourism well back. By the time war came to Europe in 1939, Dalat had been badly neglected. The tennis courts were cracked and choked with weeds. The casinos were shuttered. Nightclubs and cinemas had been shut down, and the boardwalks along the lake were empty. During the war, the Japanese had rounded up and interned anyone who tried to stay. The Palace Hotel had no visitors—the once majestic staircase had collapsed, and there was no one to pay for renovation. Wild boars and jungle cats encroached on the borders of the city.

  The Nhus stayed in a borrowed house at 10 rue des Roses. It belonged to a doctor friend of Madame Nhu’s father, and although it wasn’t a large villa, Madame Nhu’s parents came to stay, as did Nhu’s older brother, Ngo Dinh Diem.4 French writer on the Far East Lucien Bodard said the place was “tawdry”; Madame Nhu would only say that “you wouldn’t want to cross the garden to get to the kitchen after dark because you wouldn’t want to run into a tiger.”5 But sacrifices were only to be expected—a war was on.

  The new war would become known as the First Indochina War, but back before anyone knew there would be a second one, it had other names. To the Vietnamese, it was the War of Resistance; to the French it was the Guerre d’Indochine; either way, it began just as soon as World War II was officially over. The war in Europe had left France badly battered—the economy was broken, as was basic infrastructure—and Vietnam’s vast natural resources glittered. They had been France’s for the taking once; why not again? Recolonizing Vietnam would reconfirm the old colonial notions about French superiority. It was a cause the whole country could rally around—never mind what the Vietnamese themselves wanted.

  The French ran headlong into the Viet Minh. France had a modern army and state-of-the-art weapons, as well as ever-increasing American funding. The Viet Minh relied instead on the ingenuity of recruits, surprise guerrilla tactics, and the sheer determination of people brought in from the villages, fields, and cities who had had enough of foreign domination. The war would rage for eight years. Estimates vary, but historians put the casualty count for the Viet Minh side somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 dead. French casualties would exceed 75,000—more dead than the United States would incur in the next war fought on Vietnamese soil.

  The war’s decisive battle took place on May 7, 1954, in a far northwestern valley of Vietnam called Dien Bien Phu. The French were out-smarted. The Viet Minh had managed to surround them with heavy artillery and men. The French lost their will to fight. After a hundred years, they finally packed up and went home. It was an early lesson in how futile any attempt to exert long-term foreign control over Vietnam would be. If only the Americans had been paying better attention.

  The war’s front lines were very far away from the Nhus’ mountain retreat. Madame Nhu called it une guerre bizardouille, a weird little war. She described her life in Dalat as safe and simple and left politic
s out completely. Madame Nhu tended to her growing family, had babies, took care of chores around the house, and cooked family meals. The same woman who had grown up with twenty servants rode her bike to do the daily shopping in the market and accompanied her daughter to school. All the while, her husband Nhu was indulging in his orchid-raising hobby.6

  But nothing in Dalat was ever quite what it seemed. The very premise of the place as a white island of healthy rest and repose was one big deception. For one thing, it was never isolated from the Vietnamese. The place was built on the sweat and blood of forced labor. Despite the endless supply of human capital and the emphasis on luxury, the colonial builders had run out of money. Ironically, the resort built as a getaway where people could go to get healthy was a breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes because of the man-made lakes. Dalat was not a sleepy hideaway from the war either. It became the de facto headquarters for French political and military ambitions in Indochina. Moreover, Nhu was not nearly as interested in orchids as he appeared. He was cultivating something much more dangerous.