Finding the Dragon Lady (5 page)

The teenaged Chuong's timing was impeccable. He left Indochina just before World War I broke out. Leaving even a year later would have been impossible in wartime. World events forced young Chuong to stay far away from his homeland for over ten years. He was able to take advantage of educational opportunities that were available in Europe but unheard of for a Vietnamese, even one of his social standing. Chuong attended schools in Algiers, Montpellier, and Paris, receiving his law doctorate in 1922.
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He was the first Vietnamese to do so.

During the years that Chuong was studying abroad, colonial tension in Vietnam had escalated. French authorities had begun to recruit “volunteer” native Vietnamese for the European war front, forcing thousands of peasants and impoverished workers to report for duty. The French swiftly tamped down any hint of riot or rebellion and turned the countryside “upside down” in search of traitors.
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There was also a growing chorus of disapproval about the educational opportunities available to the Vietnamese. The first, and for a long time the only, French lycée, Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon, catered to the sons of European administrators. But with war raging in Europe, a shortage of personnel loomed increasingly large. The colony realized it needed to recruit more French-trained natives into the civil service if it hoped to survive. The hope was that spreading French ideas among the Vietnamese would bind the natives more closely to the mother country. The result, however, was ironic: by schooling the Vietnamese in Western principles, including those of freedom and the history of the republic, the educational reforms helped to spark a quest for political empowerment that would prove impossible to extinguish.

When Chuong finally returned to Vietnam at age twenty-four, his years of Western scholarship were handsomely rewarded. He landed an exalted apprenticeship in the French colonial judiciary and was awarded French citizenship on September 16, 1924, less than a month after the birth of his second daughter.
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Not long after Madame Chuong and her baby girl emerged from their postpartum isolation, Madame Chuong became pregnant for the
third and final time before her sixteenth birthday. In 1925, she bore the boy she had so hoped for, Tran Van Khiem. The birth of a son put a decisive end to her childbearing responsibilities. It also confirmed Le Xuan's lowly position in the family.

Chuong was promoted
to a new job near the town of Ca Mau, near the southern tip of the country, hundreds of kilometers away from the urban luxury of Hanoi. It was a high-profile post within the French colonial administration. Although the promotion would mean moving away from the cosmopolitan pleasures of the capital in Hanoi, rising to such a high-level position was a professional coup for a native Vietnamese.

There was only one small casualty: the Chuongs' middle daughter, Le Xuan, would be left behind. Like a chit at a coat check, Le Xuan was a token of exchange between her father and her paternal grandmother. It was a kind of proof of his filial devotion and a sign of his intent to return, but really it was nothing more than a symbolic gesture to make his mother happy. If keeping the child honored her, it was a small price to pay.
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The cluster of well-appointed homes with red-tile roofs surrounding a courtyard that made up the Trans' family estate shouldn't have been a bad place for a girl to grow up. The patriarch, Le Xuan's grandfather, was a large landowner, and anyone in his household was like a local celebrity in the lush green countryside of northern Vietnam. Le Xuan's grandmother was highly educated, which was exceptional for a Vietnamese woman of her day and age. Even as she had aged, and even as her eyesight had failed, she continued to read passages from the Vietnamese classics, or had them read to her.

Vietnamese stories are filled with strong, intelligent, and decisive women, but theirs is not always a happy ending. Was it here that Le Xuan heard pieces of the beloved and often-recited Vietnamese epic poem
The Tale of Kieu
—the story of a talented young woman, wellborn and extraordinarily beautiful to boot? Jealous of the girl, fate forces her to abandon her true love and sell herself into prostitution to save her father from prison. Kieu struggles in an unjust world, but she remains a model of integrity and righteousness. More than just a tragic heroine,
she symbolized the Vietnamese people, caught in the moral degradation of political change. Though the story was hundreds of years old, in 1924, the year Le Xuan was born, Kieu was formally honored as a national cultural hero. The woman-as-victim officially became the most beloved heroine.
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Le Xuan's grandmother certainly did not see herself as a victim of anything. She presided over a sprawling household that included herself and two other wives and all of their children. In addition to her first son, Chuong, she had given her husband three more sons and two daughters, after which she had considered her wifely duties fulfilled. To avoid any confusion about that fact, she simply installed a pillow bolster down the middle of their marital bed. She also introduced her husband to his second wife, who bore him seven more children. In order to prevent the second wife from gaining too much power, she introduced her husband to his third wife. Each one of the wives and their children held a distinct rank in the family hierarchy. The skill of the grandmother, the matriarch, showed in the fact that none of them ever obviously sabotaged each other.
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Le Xuan's paternal grandparents' home was the perfect place to observe the disjointed and conflicting roles that Vietnamese women, especially members of the elite, assumed. Certainly, there was a clear emphasis on the behavioral code of Confucianism. Wives and daughters-in-law were expected to be outwardly dutiful and compliant. But behind the villa's closed doors, another reality prevailed. Men were not expected to pay attention to domestic affairs. Practical matters, like the family budget, were left to the women. It was understood, if not discussed, that women held the real power inside the family. If the family were a country, the husband would be the nominal head of state, in charge of foreign relations. The wife would be the minister of the interior and in control of the treasury.
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At first, Le Xuan's daily upbringing was entrusted to the care of nurses. Even the domestic help understood the base position of their child charge, so they mostly ignored her. She was a nobody in the traditional order of things. The nurses handed Le Xuan off to the gardeners who played with her like a toy. It just so happened that the gardeners employed at her grandparents' home were local petty thieves and village
thugs, men ordered by her grandfather's court to serve time for their wrongdoing by doing good for the community—or the community's chief, her grandfather. She followed the men around as they took care of the animals. Sometimes she was even bathed alongside the animals.

Within a year of her parents' departure, the little girl became deathly ill. Madame Nhu would always claim that her parents never cared for her, but she concedes that the Chuongs returned from their new post in the far south as soon as they heard. It couldn't have been an easy trip to make. There were no rail lines linking the country, and the provinces were too distant for road travel. The most obvious means of traveling from south to north would have been by steamer ship along the coast. For ten days and nights, Le Xuan hovered between life and death.

Once Le Xuan's mother returned, she did not let her little girl out of her arms. But this, at least as the little girl would come to understand it, wasn't out of love, or even concern, for her middle daughter. It was a reproach directed at the child's grandmother. In the wild arena of family politics, her sick child had just earned the young Madame Chuong an edge over her mother-in-law.

Le Xuan recovered her health. She would remain scrawny for the rest of her childhood, but what she lacked in strength, she made up for with sheer will. Le Xuan would need to be scrappy. The severity of the illness had made her mother more suspicious than ever of her middle daughter. When she had last seen her, Le Xuan had been a black-haired infant with round cheeks. The skinny, hollow-cheeked girl she came home to could easily have been the child of a household servant or local peasant woman. Suspicion that her child had been switched nagged at Madame Chuong for the rest of her life. Her two other children knew this and exploited it, teasing their middle sister about being the nurse's child. And Madame Chuong used it as an excuse to forgive herself for not loving her middle daughter like she loved the other children. As the little girl grew up, she would feel like “a bothersome reminder for her [mother], an object of morbid doubt [and] family infighting.”
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Once Le Xuan was well
enough to travel, the Chuong family made their way back down the coast, all together now. They settled into life in the remote province of Bac Lieu. Madame Chuong, not even
twenty-years old, presided over a large home with servants and an out-sized tract of land.

With the cosmopolitan diversions of Hanoi now far away, the Chuongs reverted to a more traditional Vietnamese family life, one with distinctly Confucian leanings.
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Free of her mother-in-law and her oppressive judgments, Madame Chuong managed the homestead, as she had been raised to do. Still, after a taste of city life in Hanoi, with all its Westernized pleasures, the quiet of the countryside and the traditional duties she assumed must have seemed tediously old-fashioned. Madame Chuong had left behind the chance to participate in the new opportunities emerging for women in cosmopolitan society. The wife of a modern man in the city, aside from running her household and supervising her children's education, could stand beside her husband in a social setting. This must have seemed impossibly exotic to the young girl living the life of a traditional Vietnamese wife and mother, as women had for centuries before her.

Did she dare to hope for something different for her own daughters? Judging from the educational opportunities she pushed for her girls, the answer seems to be yes. And yet, on those occasions when their educations conflicted with family hierarchies, centuries of tradition won out. The ground rules of a proper, traditional lifestyle demanded loyalty to family and fidelity to an ancient culture. Women were expected to obey three submissions, first to their father, then to their husband, and finally to their sons. Women were also encouraged to display the four virtues: management of the household income, decorum, harmonious speech, and virtuous behavior.

The ideals of domestic femininity were spelled out clearly in classic Vietnamese texts, manuals in “family education in verse.” Written to be read aloud in singsong for easy memorizing, they made expectations for household management and morality clear.

                  
Do not talk to a man who is not a relative;

                  
Do not say hello to him, so as not to arouse suspicion.

                  
Do not frequent women who are not virtuous;

                  
Do not alter your clothing without reason;

                  
When sewing, do not let your needle be idle;

                  
When alone, do not sing or declaim poetry;

                  
Do not look out the window with a pensive air.

                  
. . . Do not shrug, do not sigh;

                  
Do not laugh before you have even said a word;

                  
When laughing, do not show all your teeth;

                  
Do not gossip or talk crudely.
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Le Xuan learned early that she must defer to the established role of middle daughter. Her parents and elders were to be honored and obeyed, and so were her siblings. Le Xuan occupied the most menial position in the family. Her aggravation at being told what to do started at a young age. “It is something like a game my [brother] used to tease me with when I was a child. I would be sitting down, and he would say, ‘Sit down.' So to show that I was not sitting because he ordered me to do it, I would stand up. But then he would say, ‘Stand up.' It made me very angry.”
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Another child might have reacted differently, becoming docile as she acclimated to the reality of her circumstances. But Madame Nhu remembered her childhood as an infuriating time. She craved attention and approval. To get it, she had to work a little harder, cry a little louder. Even as a little girl, she believed she was entitled to more.

Le Xuan's formal education
started when an old, turbaned tutor with two fused fingers came to the family home to instruct her and her two siblings. At the exceptionally young age of five, she was sent off to boarding school in Saigon with her sister.

Young Le Xuan was studious and serious. Her younger brother envied her good grades and intelligence. When she was away, he missed his sister as a playmate, but when she returned, he often felt frustrated by their differences in ability. He didn't like being treated as the baby. One day he got so frustrated that he ripped her writing plume out of her hands and threw it at her head. The sharp tip stuck straight into her forehead. Le Xuan ran upstairs with the feather sticking out of her
head and ink running down her face to show her mother. Her younger brother was not perfect, she wanted to scream.