Finding the Dragon Lady (8 page)

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.

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 kept her eyes down.