Finding the Dragon Lady (25 page)

A major change for American women was in the wings. With her publication of
The Feminine Mystique
in early 1963, Betty Friedan would give voice to the “problem that has no name,” women's second-class status in society, and the book would launch the modern feminist movement in the United States.

The Madame Nhu whom
American women read about in newspapers didn't hesitate to ask for credit where she thought it was due—and to request it loudly. She was unapologetic about liking power and wanting more. A majority of American women “disapproved” of the idea of having a woman as president, and 20 percent of all women said female involvement in politics was a generally bad thing. Women were simply too emotional. The American public in 1963 had certain ideas about just what was appropriate in a First Lady. Madame Nhu was not it.

Jacqueline Kennedy played
the part much better. She looked like a movie star, was well educated, and spoke French. But Jacqueline Kennedy was also trapped by the conventions and stereotypes of the era.

While Madame Nhu was open in her admiration for Jacqueline Kennedy, using the words “elegant” and “refined” to describe her, the feeling was not mutual. Madame Nhu, Jacqueline Kennedy said, “was everything Jack found unattractive.” The First Lady of the United States was very specific in a recorded interview from 1964. Politically powerful women were pretty awful in general. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, was “a real prune, bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.” But in judging others, it was Jackie who sounded ugly—and like a relic from a bygone era.
²³

Her defenders might say that Jackie Kennedy recognized the constraints of her era, validating them to gently subvert them, turning them inside out. Perhaps. In 1964, she was all too clearly a product of her time and place. She bragged in her familiar breathy voice about her “Asiatic” marriage to Jack, equating subordination with femininity. As
for Madame Nhu, a real woman who happened to be from Asia, who refused to bow and scrape and act demure, Jacqueline thought she was just awful. Madame Nhu acted as if she resented getting power from men, instead of being grateful, and that resentment made her unsexy and masculine. “I wouldn't be surprised if they were lesbians,” Jackie whispered about Madame Nhu and Clare Booth Luce. Those kinds of women—ambitious women who wanted something to claim for themselves and weren't ashamed of it—were not welcome in the Kennedys' America of 1963.

CHAPTER 12

Burning Monks

M
ADAME NHU HAD BEEN
pleased with my success in finding the tiger-skin pictures for her—so pleased, she said, that she had decided it was finally time to send me a single-paragraph summary of her memoirs.

Summary of my book: The Holy Church must be defended
. Having received the Mission to spread the word around the world, so that others could know the Truth of what was happening in Viêt-Nam, I began my travels on September 11, 1963, at the Interparliamentary Union in Belgrade. In my absence, Vietnam was crucified as the “Christ of Nations.” . . . Everything comes back on the Holy Church, as the Secret of Fatima, to save the world from the Apocalypse . . . Madame Ngô-Dình-Nhu.

What was this?
The secret of Fatima? Christ of Nations? Instead of a precise summary of a once powerful woman's life, the paragraph sounded like an extract from a religious diatribe. When I asked Madame Nhu where her personal memories were—the smells, the tastes, the sounds—she replied obliquely.

“Coming,” she promised. “I just need to know that I can count on you.”

I should have known better.

My next challenge
—the final one, Madame Nhu promised—was to find the text of a particular speech delivered in August 2009 by an American, a Catholic bishop named William Skylstad, during a trip to Vietnam from Spokane, Washington. Someone had told Madame Nhu about the bishop's visit to an area close to the city of Hue, a place close to her heart. The bishop stopped at the Shrine to Our Lady of La Vang. To Madame Nhu the symbolism of an American bishop visiting La Vang—what's more, a bishop who was the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops—could represent only one thing: an apology for what had happened to her family. I had never heard of the bishop or the place, but I promised Madame Nhu that I would look into it.

Believers say that sometime at the end of the eighteenth century, a vision of Mary appeared in what is today the Hai Lang District of the Quang Tri Province of central Vietnam. At that time, Catholics in the country endured terrible persecution; their religion marked them as colonial sympathizers, and Vietnamese emperors were still trying to fight the French incursion. The Nguyen dynasty issued edicts to destroy churches, and Emperors Ming Mang and Tu Duc encouraged the repression of Catholicism by any means, even violent ones. Nhu's own Catholic ancestors had almost been wiped out. More than one hundred members of the Ngo clan had been herded into a church and burned to death in the early 1800s.

Mary was said to have appeared to a group of Catholics hiding from a massacring mob in the woods. She materialized wearing a Vietnamese
ao dai
and holding a child. Surrounded by lights, she told the people to keep praying and reassured them that their prayers would be granted.
The story was told and retold for a hundred years. By then, the French colonial influence in Vietnam had freed Catholics to worship openly, and the spot became a pilgrimage destination for hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics. On August 22, 1928, priests of the Catholic Church consecrated the site in front of 200,000 pilgrims. Madame Nhu was just a little girl, living with her Buddhist family way down in the delta. But she discovered La Vang in 1943 as a new convert to the faith when she had moved to Hue to be with her husband's family. Maybe she was drawn to the place because the consecration happened on her birthday. Maybe she liked the image of Mary. Or maybe she just liked getting out from under her in-laws and having a good excuse to leave the city. In 1959, the Diem government declared the area a national shrine. The church of La Vang was then promoted to a basilica minor in 1961, reflecting its timely anti-Communist recognition by the Vatican.

Ultimately, when it came to the speech, I came up empty handed. The bishop's office was as kind as could be. The bishop himself asked his secretary to send me his notes on the trip. I was able to tell Madame Nhu that the seventy-five-year-old had worn his black cassock and red sash despite the heat—the temperature had been about 104. There were 1,500 people at the shrine for Mass, but as for the speech itself, whatever the bishop had said had vanished into the humid air.

Madame Nhu's disappointment at my lack of results was audible. She wanted Bishop Skylstad to have said that Mary had appeared in Vietnam but never in the United States. She wanted him to link Mary's not appearing to Americans and what had happened to her family. She wanted to hear that the Catholic bishop acknowledged the terrible act Americans had committed and that they were paying the price. But I couldn't get that for her.

“C'est dommage,” that's too bad, she sighed. “You were like an angel.”

“Madame, I am sorry.” But was I really? I wasn't sure anymore. Her calls had become increasingly erratic, coming late at night or much too early in the morning. Lately, she seemed frustrated when I couldn't talk—because of the baby or her timing. I had even started to avoid the phone when the caller ID read “Unavailable.” When we had gone out of town for a week over the summer, there had been thirty-seven
hang-ups on the voice mail, sixteen of them consecutive. I was certain who the persistent caller was.

I began to doubt that Madame Nhu would ever give me her memoirs or, after reading the summary she was so proud of, that they would be readable. I was getting tired of the cat-and-mouse game. So I challenged her.

“I am not sure what good the speech would have done for your memoir anyway,” I said. “People want to know what actually happened. To you. Not your religious interpretation of things.”

There was a sharp intake of breath. The hiss of contempt in her voice filled my ear.

“The Vietnamese
know
the truth. Anyone who is worth it knows the truth. Too bad for the others. Who cares about the rest of you.”

I had triggered the same defense mechanism that had once walled her off from the world in Saigon. When Madame Nhu was First Lady, it was always “the diplomats” or “the Communists” working to discredit her. Her husband said that “foreign powers” were against them, “maybe . . . because we are Catholic.” I wasn't working against Madame Nhu in any way or for any reason. My intention was to help her. I wanted to get the memoirs that would help people understand and sympathize with her. But I had dared to contradict her, and for my sin, she would punish me with a long and stony silence.

Madame Nhu hung up on me. It would be almost a year before I heard from her again.

That same stubborn
insistence on always being right got Madame Nhu and her family into more trouble in 1963 than they could get themselves out of. The trouble with the Buddhists had started in Hue, with the oldest of the five living Ngo brothers, Ngo Dinh Thuc.

Thuc was dressed in his customary clerical robes when his car approached the outskirts of Hue one morning early in May. His heavy features and drooped jowls were far removed from the lean good looks of his brother Nhu, but Thuc's manner was distinguished and confident.
¹

Thuc, the archbishop of Hue, was being chauffeured back into the city after a visit to La Vang's cathedral on the morning of May 7,
1963. Six months before, the pope himself had elevated the church of La Vang from minor basilica to a full basilica. Practically, not much had changed besides the installation of a
conopaeum,
an umbrella-like structure with silk panels of red and yellow that would be used to shelter his Holiness if he came to Vietnam for a visit. But the designation for La Vang was special to Thuc, because he had helped turn the worn red patch of earth into what it was now: a pilgrimage site, a center for the cult of the Virgin Mary, and a financial “cause.” Thuc had overseen the construction of the marble Holy Rosary Square, the dredging of Tinh Tam Lake, and the erection of three concrete banyan trees to represent the Trinity. Government officials, from the vice president down, gave money even if they weren't Catholics, as it helped to be in the good graces of Diem and Nhu's big brother.

As the archbishop of Hue and the Ngos' older brother, Thuc was the head of the family. He stayed in the presidential palace when in Saigon, living for months at a time with Diem and the Nhus. It was a good vantage point from which to promote Catholicism. To pad his donations, Thuc also transferred what should have been public funds for the state of South Vietnam to the church. He blurred the line between church and state when Thuc was granted “concessions” from the government, transferring land, farms, businesses, and real estate to the church, making the Catholic Church the largest landowner in the country.
²
It would have been hard for Diem to say no to his older brother, especially as Thuc could claim to have the strong arm of God on his side. Thuc's corruption didn't benefit him directly—the land and the money went to the church. Those in the closest ranks of Diem's Catholic circle knew where the money and lands were going, and they didn't complain.

But most Vietnamese were not Catholic. They were Buddhist, at least in combination. The most popular Vietnamese religion is still a mix of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism with some ancestor worship thrown in. Most homes have an altar in the front of the house, as do many Vietnamese shop fronts. Madame Nhu had grown up in a household that identified with Buddhism and Confucianism. The smell of the joss sticks reminded her of the family altar in her Hanoi home, when on the new moon day the incense mingled with
the essence of orange and peach blossoms that her mother arranged before guiding the children to kowtow at the altar, overflowing with gifts. Madame Nhu should have known that Buddhism could conjure up powerful feelings of home and family for the Vietnamese, but the Catholic family she had married into didn't see things that way—especially not Archbishop Thuc, who interpreted the loose form of Buddhism practiced by most Vietnamese as religious ambivalence. He saw that ambivalence as a challenge and opportunity. His dream of converting Vietnam into a Christian nation seemed tantalizingly close. And Thuc did not do much to hide his own personal ambition: to be a cardinal in the Catholic Church, or even more.

On the drive back from La Vang, Thuc noticed flags flying all around Hue, colorful squares of garish blue, yellow, red, white, and orange in honor of Buddha's upcoming 2,527th birthday. The city of Hue was as close as Vietnam had to a religious center for Buddhism. It was the historic home of the Vietnamese emperor, who had served with the mandate of heaven.

But the flags were technically illegal. An obscure flag-flying law declared that only national flags could be flown in public places, and no religious flags were allowed anywhere unless they were the banners of a religious “institution.” Buddhism was no such institution. A leftover French colonial regulation labeling it an “association” had simply been rolled into the new country's laws in 1954. There had been so many other pressing problems. Unlike an institution, such as the Roman Catholic Church, an “association” like Buddhism was subject to government controls and restrictions. Had no one thought about changing the law? Or, as the frustrated Buddhist leadership accused, had no one been willing to change it?