Finding the Dragon Lady (12 page)

I wore a dark blouse tucked into a belted red skirt—the lucky color. I had smoothed my hair into a low bun and wore small pearls in my ears. I wanted to show Madame Nhu that I was professional without being too formal. I told myself I was glad she had insisted that I bring Tommy. He was sleeping sweetly, tucked into a polka-dotted stroller with his teddy bear and blanket, thumb inserted into his perfect bow-shaped mouth. He played his part beautifully. It was up to me to strike the right tone: respectful, smart, capable. I had control over nothing else.

What, I wondered, would the Dragon Lady look like at eighty-one years old? I had spent so much time poring over pictures of her as a young woman, but the voice I had gotten to know over the phone conjured up another image. In my head, I imagined her with the same hairstyle, swept high above her head, except wintery with age. Her cheekbones, I thought, would be smooth but powdery, like rice paper. Did she still wear red lipstick? I suddenly couldn't picture her as anything other than a stooped and sad old woman who refused to stop wearing caked red lipstick—lipstick that bled slightly outside the imperfect lines of her upper and lower lips.

My imagination was running away. I had arrived early, and now she was late. I was spending too much time alone in a dim church, and scenarios flooded into my mind. Had she been watching me the whole time? From a darkened pew, waiting for the right moment to approach? I made a loop around the church, the stroller wheels clacking over the stone and tiled floors, but all the rows were empty.

After an hour, I heard the door creak open. My stomach flipped over, but it was not Madame Nhu. I was so nervous that the disappointment that washed over me felt more like a flood of relief. Tommy woke up, and his happy little squawks eventually turned into cries that echoed off the stone floors and up into the rafters. I wrestled his stroller up the side aisle, out the thick double doors, and fled to the discreet park to feed him. When I got back to my aunt's apartment in Paris, I found a message on the answering machine from Madame Nhu. She had broken her own rules by leaving a message saying that she hadn't come because she wasn't feeling well. Her foot hurt, she sighed, and she was taking that as a sign that we should postpone our meeting.

When we spoke next, she didn't actually apologize, not in so many words. But her voice sounded contrite enough, and of course I forgave her. The next time we would meet in her apartment, she said. I believed her. I waited an hour, in the lobby this time, but she didn't let me up the elevator. I forgave her again. She told me a woeful story: she wasn't sure she could trust anyone again. I would have to prove myself. The Dragon Lady was keeping herself tantalizingly out of reach.

CHAPTER 8

The Miracle Man of Vietnam

T
HE DOOR OPENED BEFORE
I could knock, and John Pham stepped out onto his doorstep. He was the father of my friend's sister-in-law. I had met his daughter exactly once, but John greeted me like a long-lost family member. He wore the standard uniform of the Midwestern grandfather, a checked shirt tucked into belted chinos. His big grin pushed his cheeks into taut-skinned apples. “Welcome to my home,” he beamed, then took my hand to shake it, pumping it up and down, as if he were bringing water up from a well. The seventy-one-year-old's handshake was still strong. Back when he was a young man, John had been the presidential family's personal security guard in Saigon from 1954 to 1963. Now he lived in a split-level ranch on the Kansas side of Kansas City.

The house had been John's home since the late 1970s. He had escaped Vietnam on a fishing boat from Da Nang, the place US soldiers had called China Beach, only three hours before the city fell to
the Communists in 1975. John arrived in the United States with his wife and ten children and no money. A friendly sergeant had advised him to take his family away from California—too crowded, he said. So John looked at the map and picked Kansas because it was right in the middle of the country.

The horns and tin whistles of a television show filtered down from the den. I got a timid hello from a grandchild passing through, and John smiled at the boy on his reluctant march into the kitchen. “Please,” John said showing me to the faded peach sofa, “sit. Let's talk together.”

John was slightly shorter than me, so even though I was sitting, I could still see the top of his head. The white of his scalp showed through the comb marks in his silver hair. It made him seem vulnerable. I tried to imagine him as a twenty-year-old kid, wiry and quick. He must have been a good shot to have been stationed as a guard inside the palaces. But it was hard to reconcile the smiling and kindly grandfather across from me with the hard-faced youth he had been. John had worked for the same notorious state security apparatus as the secret police squads that threw people into tiger cages—the cramped prison cells on Con Son Island where thousands were tortured, starved, and killed during the war. John's bosses, the president and his brother, lived just down the hall from John's post. He had spent nearly nine years working alongside Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife, Madame Nhu.

I was settling into my position on the sofa when I noticed the decor on the wall in front of me. Jesus hung on a golden cross, and right next to him, a portrait of President Ngo Dinh Diem. A yellow-and-red-striped flag hung in the corner. The president had been dead for more than forty years, South Vietnam had been lost for thirty, but in this house, the past was still very much alive.

I stayed talking with John well into the afternoon. The smell of lemongrass, vinegar, and seared meat wafted from the kitchen. John's wife came in, her hands on her apron, to ask if we would like a bowl of soup. She had made
bun bo hue,
a spicy beef stew from the central region of Vietnam. As I slurped up an endless tangle of rice noodles, John continued to talk about life in Diem's palaces, nostalgia for the country of his youth filling his voice.

In this house, Jesus and Diem were both saviors and survivors.

Born in central Vietnam in 1901, Ngo Dinh Diem had been a good student as a boy, but instead of following his brothers to France or into the seminary, he got into local politics. Diem entered provincial administration under the French as a district chief when he was twenty years old. Public officials in Vietnam were scholar-bureaucrats called mandarins; they were products of rigorous training and had to pass imperial examinations in writing, literature, history, and mathematics. In just a few years, Diem had risen to administrative supervisor; he was tax collector, sheriff, and judge for an entire region. His position entitled him to use a rickshaw, but Diem preferred riding his own horse to being ferried around by a coolie. He recommended bold reforms to his higher-ups, including more autonomy from the French and better education, but was ignored. Appointed governor of Phan Thiet in southeastern Vietnam in 1929, Diem earned a reputation for fairness and unshakeable integrity. He was so righteous that when the French continued to deny Diem his recommended reforms, he handed back all his titles and decorations and walked off the job. It was all or nothing.
¹

Diem brusquely retired from public view in 1933 but did not fade away. He carried on working behind the scenes until 1954, when he reemerged as a public figure.

The Nhus and their three children
arrived at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport early in the afternoon of June 25, 1954, only to find that the incoming plane from Europe had been delayed. Along with the Nhus, a crowd of several hundred people waited for the plane to arrive, including a senior general in the French colonial army, members of the imperial family, foreign diplomats, and officials in the South Vietnamese Armed Forces.
²
Madame Nhu's husband insisted that she and the children join this mix of some of the most important people in all Indochina to await the return of Nhu's older brother. After all, Ngo Dinh Diem had just been appointed the new prime minister of South Vietnam at a peace conference in Geneva, Switzerland. In what would become known as the Geneva Accords, the participants—the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China—put an end to the war between the Viet Minh and the French by agreeing
to split Vietnam into two countries along the seventeenth parallel. Ho Chi Minh would serve as president of the Communist north from his headquarters in Hanoi. Bao Dai, the former emperor, would be the nominal head of the non-Communist new state to the south, but he stayed in France. The real powers of the government would go to the still relatively unknown prime minister the Americans were championing, the man on John Pham's wall and Madame Nhu's brother-in-law: Ngo Dinh Diem.

Under Diem, the southern half of Vietnam would be “free”—free from colonialism, free from communism, but exactly what else was free about it was unclear. In theory, in two years, 1956, the country would hold elections. The Vietnamese would decide for themselves what they wanted, but until then, Communist North Vietnam was above the seventeenth parallel, and something entirely new would be created below.
³

Waiting for Diem to arrive
at the airport, Madame Nhu took the youngest boy, Quynh, in her arms to keep him calm. She tried bouncing him against her hip in the shade of the hangar and shifting from side to side in her high-heeled sandals. There was no containing the other two; after watching them squirm and pull at the collars of their nice clothes, Madame Nhu gave the eight-year-old and her five-year-old brother a nod, and they were off, tearing across the otherwise clear tarmac in a game of tag. The children didn't need to be called back when the airplane appeared. It was just a black dot against the bright sky, but it represented something huge and a little scary because it was unknown: freedom. Le Thuy and Trac came to stand by their parents, and together the family of five faced the roar of the incoming engines with their hands over their ears.

A fifty-three-year-old man stepped out of the plane and waved over their heads. Diem was squinting—had he grown unaccustomed to the brilliant tropical sun during his time away? Could he even see them there, waiting for him? After all this time, Diem still didn't look like the one of whom so much was expected. He had a moon-shaped face and a head that sat almost directly on top of his shoulders. Diem's black hair, slicked back like the bristles of a wet animal, accentuated the general
penguin effect of his big belly, characteristic white-sharkskin suit, and open-toed walk. He might have grown even rounder during his travels.

Madame Nhu had not seen Diem for four years, since his departure from Vietnam. Except for his brief stay with the Nhus in Dalat in the late 1940s, Nhu's older brother had always seemed a remote figure to her. He was almost the same age as her father, and before the First Indochina War, Diem had been too busy building a secret political party under the name Dai Viet Phu Hung Hoi, the Association for the Restoration of Great Vietnam, to pay much attention to his little brother's young wife. When the French had caught onto him in 1944, Diem had had to flee. He escaped with the help of the Japanese consul, who smuggled him out of the city by disguising him as a Japanese officer. Diem resettled in Saigon while the Nhus remained in Hue. He was safe there until after the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. Diem was eventually captured—although not by the French. Like Madame Nhu, Diem was taken prisoner in 1946 by the Communists. He was stopped while riding a train back to Hue, taken to a remote mountain hut, and held there for three months before being brought to Hanoi. The leader of the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh, had requested a face-to-face meeting.

Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem had a few things in common. Both were from central Vietnam, and both of their fathers had instilled an anti-French, anticolonial, and nationalist ethos in their sons. Ho had even studied at the school in Hue founded by Diem's father. Like Diem, Ho Chi Minh hoped that the Americans would help the Vietnamese in the anti-French struggle. He had reason to think that they might. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA, had intervened on Ho's behalf when he was a captive in Nationalist China. Ho had recited part of the American Declaration of Independence when he proclaimed Vietnam independent in August 1945, and his Viet Minh had joined US missions against the Japanese. At the same time, Ho Chi Minh was very much a Communist, a follower of Karl Marx and believer in the proletarian revolution. He wanted to build an independent, socialist Vietnam, but he also knew that he had the best chance of getting Vietnam to that independence by making common cause with capitalists, landowners, and the bourgeoisie, at least for a while.

He tried to convince Ngo Dinh Diem that they had the same goal: Vietnamese independence. Ho offered Diem a position in the government he was building, but by then Diem had heard about the murder of his older brother, Ngo Dinh Khoi, and nephew by the Communists in Hue. As Diem would tell the story, he threw Ho's offer back in his face. He had looked the wispy leader of the Indochinese Communist Party in the eye and replied, “I don't believe you understand the kind of man I am. Look at me in the face. Am I a man who fears?” Ho, Diem said, had been forced to look away. It is a stretch to believe that the hardened leader of the Viet Minh couldn't bring himself to meet Diem's eye, but Diem would maintain that Ho shook his head and replied almost shamefully that no, Diem was not a man who feared. The next morning, Ho Chi Minh let Ngo Dinh Diem walk out the open doors, a free man.
⁴

Considering that they would be at war with each other barely a decade later, it is not surprising that Diem would never publicly acknowledge staying in touch with the Viet Minh leaders. But recent research into Diem's activities around that time shows that in fact he did. Diem was interested in keeping his options open for as long as possible. He was waiting to see if a third way, neither French nor Communist, would be viable. Not until 1949 did Diem finally jump off the fence. He spurned the Viet Minh and at the same time declared the former emperor Bao Dai's collaboration with the French unacceptable. Standing alone was risky, but Diem was tired of half measures. “I advocate social reforms that are sweeping and bold, with the condition that the dignity of man will always be respected and will be free to flourish.”
⁵
Diem published a treatise to this effect under his name on June 16, 1949, hoping, according to scholar Edward Miller, to rally people to his cause. “The statement was widely read and noted within Vietnam, but it did not produce a new upsurge of popularity for Diem. . . . Its most immediate effect was to exhaust the patience of both the French and the Viet Minh.” Diem was breaking with everyone in order to start something new.