Finding the Dragon Lady by Monique Brinson Demery

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 andexperience. 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