Finding the Dragon Lady (4 page)

Like Khiem, Madame Nhu had been cut out of her parents' will. Her mother simply believed that her middle daughter “had no need of being provided for by me.” Madame Nhu didn't agree. While Khiem's murder trial was bogged down in appeals, she hired Khiem's lawyer
to represent both her and the mentally incompetent Khiem to reclaim part of their dead parents' estate. Madame Nhu's motives were opaque if not duplicitous: if Khiem lost his insanity plea and was found guilty, and if they managed to overturn the inheritance issue, Madame Nhu would get his share. The case was thrown out of the US court system because of the conflict of interest.

Soon after the murders
, Madame Nhu stopped speaking to the press altogether. “This is a family affair,” was her final statement. The family was indeed remarkable: one Dragon Lady daughter exiled to Rome, one murdering son locked up in a mental institution, and the oldest child, Le Chi Oggeri, living a seemingly normal life as a professor and artist in North Carolina, left to mourn the loss of her parents. “The end did not match the beginning,” Le Chi wistfully told the reporters from the
Washington Post.
“For such beautiful lives, it should have been a beautiful end.”

The Chuongs are buried
less than five miles from the home they died in. Rock Creek Cemetery is a sprawling eighty-six acres of pastoral beauty in the northwest corner of metropolitan Washington, DC. A narrow paved road dips down and rises again; headstones dot the hills like masts bobbing in an undulating sea of green. They bear some illustrious names from the past—Roosevelts and Adamses—and some distinguished contemporary names, like Tim Russert and Gore Vidal. The Chuongs' double plot is in Section L, halfway up one of the smaller rises.

The twin headstones are of rose-colored granite, with a simply carved lotus below each of their names. Ambassador Tran Van Chuong. Princess Nam Tran Tran Van Chuong. The ground has shifted in the twenty-five years that they have lain together on that hill. Madame Chuong's grave is no longer perfectly straight but just slightly off kilter, as if she is leaning into her husband.

On the spring morning I visited the Chuongs, long grasses waved around the headstones and between the graves, making them look slightly unkempt. With my sister-in-law and infant niece sleeping in
her portable car seat as company, I imagined that we were the first visitors the Chuongs had had in a while. I was suddenly self-conscious about having arrived to visit them empty handed.

“Should have brought flowers,” I mumbled to myself.

My sister-in-law stepped forward and joined me at the gravesite. She placed the baby's carrier between the graves, dropped to her knees, and began to tug at the weeds. Together we made quick work of neatening up the site. As we pulled at the clumps of tall grasses crowding the headstones, the scent of wild onions bloomed in the air. The smell would linger on our fingertips for only a few hours, but the satisfaction of seeing and grooming the graves stayed with me. It was symbolic of the task at hand. To find out anything about the Dragon Lady, I would have to put her family life in order and place the Chuong family into the larger context of Vietnam's history. The important thing was to tell the story before it suffered the neglect of a forgotten grave.

Before leaving, I rested one hand on each headstone. The image of the Chuongs' kindly faces from the newspaper floated before me. I was so sorry for them; what a terrible way to go. The words of Le Chi, their oldest daughter, echoed in my head: “The more you tell about the glories of the past, the more horrible the end becomes.”
⁷

CHAPTER 3

A Distinguished Family

T
HE MORE I LEARNED ABOUT MADAME NHU'S
early years, the less glorious her family's past seemed. It became hard to reconcile the smiling faces of the elderly couple pictured in a 1986 Washington newspaper with the darker portrait of the Chuongs that emerged. Madame Nhu's “miserable” memories of childhood fell into place when I understood that no one, certainly not her mother or her father, had any inclination to think that the little girl, born in a Hanoi hospital on August 22, 1924, might amount to anything significant.

A traditional birth would
have taken place at home with a midwife, who would have said that this particular spirit was reluctant to be born because the baby was in a stubborn position, refusing to come down the birth canal. She would have disapproved of the forceps, shiny instruments and modern science, as interference with heaven's will. A midwife would have left this child, born blue, silent, and immobile, to
return to whatever crossroads exist for unborn souls hovering somewhere between heaven and earth.

But no midwife was there that day. The child was going to be a boy. The mother was so sure of it that she had arranged to give birth in the hospital. She suffered through the terrible agony of the long labor, knowing it would be worth it—for a boy.

The French doctor may have feared that he would be blamed if anything happened. It was his first time delivering a Vietnamese baby since his arrival in Indochina, but this was a special case.

The young woman lying soaked in sweat and blood on his table was Madame Chuong, born Princess Nam Tran, a member of the imperial family. The fourteen-year-old's exquisite beauty was so rare that it later earned her a legion of French admirers, who nicknamed her “the Pearl of Asia.”
¹
Although schooled in the domestic arts of homemaking, as well as singing and sewing, she would never need to lift a porcelain finger, except to ring for a servant. Her most important duty as wife would be to bear her husband a male heir.

Her husband hailed from a family of powerful landowners. As the eldest son of an esteemed provincial governor in French Tonkin, Chuong had been given the very best of everything, from a Western education to a bride with royal lineage.
²
The Tran family was also related to the imperial throne, making Chuong a distant cousin to his bride.

The French doctor must have felt great pressure to save the pale form that finally came out in a great gush of blood and fluid. This was the doctor's chance to prove himself—and the superiority of Western medicine. He took a firm grip on the infant's ankles and laid a series of well-placed spankings on the tiny backside until the first cries rang out.

With that, the newborn came howling into the world.
³
It was a girl.

What did the fourteen-year-old
Madame Chuong make of her newborn daughter, a scarlet-faced bundle, now screaming in her arms? When she came into the world, there was little reason to suppose her fate would differ much from that of centuries of Vietnamese women before her. In the East Asian Confucian tradition, boys were expected to provide care for their parents when they aged, and only males honored the ancestor
cult of Vietnam. Traditional Vietnamese sayings capture the disappointment of a daughter's birth: “One boy, that's something; ten girls, that's nothing”; or “A hundred girls aren't worth a single testicle.”
⁴
On their marriage, men brought into their families the most prized possession of all: a daughter-in-law, who would be released from her role as virtual servant to her husband's family, his mother in particular, only when she had produced a son of her own. It was a vicious cycle.

Madame Chuong had already given birth to a girl. Her first child, Le Chi, was born less than two years before, and Madame Chuong had convinced herself that this second child would be a boy. She was so certain that she had already bought baby-boy toys and baby-boy clothing.

A second daughter only postponed Madame Chuong's freedom. Until she gave birth to a boy, she was the lowest person in the hierarchy of her husband's family. What's more, her husband's mother had been making some ominous threats. She wanted her son, Chuong, to take a second wife if the second child wasn't a boy. Chuong, after all, was the firstborn son of the illustrious Tran family—he should be given every chance to sow the family's greatness with his seed. Polygamy had been part of the cultural tradition in Vietnam for centuries. Royal daughter-in-law or not, a woman who gave birth only to daughters wasn't worth very much. Failures should be written off quickly.

It was a dismal prospect for the fourteen-year-old Madame Chuong. If her husband took a second wife, and if that one succeeded where she had failed, in giving the family a boy, Madame Chuong and her girls would be fearfully trapped in submission to others for the rest of their lives. It wasn't long before she set her mind to the fact that she would just have to do it all over again—and again—until she had the son she expected. And the one expected of her.

The new baby girl was named
Le Xuan, or Beautiful Spring. Except it wasn't spring. August in Hanoi typically marks the beginning of autumn, and that year was no exception. It seemed that the early days of autumn had turned the city a little cooler, providing a refreshing break from the long, hot summer. Willow branches hung down, kissing the surface of the lake, inviting the breeze to dance in their leaves
and the city's residents out into the open air to enjoy the fleeting mild season before the cold winds from China swooped in.

Little Le Xuan and her mother were not to enjoy a moment of it. Vietnamese tradition required that the newborn and its mother remain practically bedridden in a dark room for at least three months after the baby's birth. The room was supposed to be a cocoon for mother and child. Even bathing routines were restricted. The custom evolved from practical concerns having to do with infant-mortality risks in the tropical delta, but in practice the postpartum gloom must have been stifling. Except for the necessary traditional-medicine practitioners and fortune-tellers, Madame Chuong's visitors were limited to her closest family members.

The family astrologer was one of the first people to see the new baby. His job was to determine the fate of this child by cross-referencing the birth date, zodiac season, and birth hour with the positions of the sun and moon and to take into account any passing comets. It seems very possible that the fortune-teller intended to boost the spirits of the miserable young mother he found trapped in a dark room for three more months with the baby girl she didn't want. He exclaimed over the baby's fate: “It defies imagination!” The child, he told the stricken Madame Chuong, would rise to great heights. “Her star is unsurpassable!” The little girl would grow up believing in her fortune and also that the shining prediction had made her mother profoundly jealous. The result was a lifetime of strained mother-daughter relations and endless suspicion.

Madame Chuong was
by all accounts a young and ravishing beauty from Hue, the imperial capital in the center of Vietnam. Emperor Dong Khanh, who ruled briefly from 1885 to 1889, had been her grandfather. A succession of her cousins had sat on the throne ever since. As a member of the extended royal family, she was considered a princess, and she exemplified traditional loveliness with one exception: when she smiled, her teeth were pearly and white. She had resisted the customary practice of lacquering her teeth with calcium oxide to turn them black. To her elders, her white smile looked rotten, like a mouthful of bones. Long white teeth belonged to savages and wild animals;
blackening them warded off fears that an evil spirit lurked inside the person. A mouthful of glossy black teeth was a traditional sign of elegance and beauty.

But to Chuong, the white smile of his young bride made her the perfect image of a modern wife. Chuong had become accustomed to European pleasures when he was a student abroad; he had a taste for French poetry, wine, Western movies, and motorcycles. Stepping away from tradition himself, Chuong had cut the long hair worn in a bun and abandoned the practice of wrapping a turban around his head typical of other men of his class and education. Long hair was a Confucian ideal, the value of filial piety applied to the body, hair, and skin, all extensions of the life bestowed on children by their parents. But Western ways were taking hold. Chuong embodied progress with his short hair, suit, and position as a lawyer with the colonial administration. As such, he would never accept a girl with blackened teeth as his wife.

The couple married in 1912.
⁵
The date of birth on Madame Chuong's headstone, and the date given to the Metropolitan Police Department for the 1986 death report, was 1910. This would have made her only two years old at the time of her marriage.

It was not uncommon for girls in the countryside to be married off at a very young age, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, but rarely was a toddler given away as a bride. The fact that both families were members of the elite made even less sense; they could have afforded to wait. A plausible explanation is that Madame Chuong's birth date had been conveniently confused, allowing her to age gracefully in the United States, far from anyone who would contradict her version of the truth.

But age confers status to the Vietnamese. There would have been no reason to try to appear young. Maybe Madame Chuong really was a two-year-old bride. An uncharacteristically long time passed after the marriage before the royal cousins started a family. Their first child, daughter Le Chi, was born almost a decade after their wedding date. Maybe the baby bride needed to reach childbearing age.

Chuong was still a boy himself on their wedding day. He was born in 1898, making him only fourteen years old when he wed. Chuong was the eldest son of Tran Van Thong, a
thong doc,
or esteemed provincial governor, in French Tonkin. According to his dossier in the French
colonial archives, Chuong left both Vietnam and his bride shortly after the wedding. He went to France and North Africa to continue his studies.