Free Finding the Dragon Lady by Monique Brinson Demery

enough away from the windows for safety. They were five in all: Madame Nhu with her infant daughter, Le Thuy, her mother-in-law, her sister-in-law, and a niece. It was her sister-in-law Hoang’s fault they were still there at all. It was her house, although she lived, not so happily, with her husband, Am, and his family across town. The house provided Hoang with a kind of insurance in case things didn’t work out in her marriage. She had been unable to bring herself to abandon her only asset. For extra income she rented it to her brother and his new bride, and Madame Nhu’s status in the family, as newest wife and youngest sister-in-law from an aristocratic family with a rather scandalous reputation, had obliged her to go along with the arrangement and keep her mouth shut.
    Madame Nhu castigated herself for her naiveté, which she said had “bordered on idiocy.” Despite the fact that she must have been absolutely terrified, when she told me about it by telephone more than sixty years later, she showed shockingly little mercy for herself. I wondered at the harsh edge that had crept into her voice as the memories of that day intensified.
    Instead of taking shelter with the Jesuit priests down the road, Hoang convinced her elderly mother it was just as safe not to leave the house. The French might requisition it if they thought it had been abandoned, and even more harm might come to it in the Communists’ hands. Madame Nhu couldn’t defy her mother-in-law, so the women enlisted the gardener’s help to push the heaviest furniture together in the center of the parlor and piled on blankets and cushions. They spent the night listening to the explosions get closer and closer from their makeshift refuge, folded in on each other and praying for safety. They were still huddled together, wondering what to do with themselves in the sudden stillness of the morning, when the men came through the door.
    They were Viet Minh soldiers. No insignia distinguished them, but their uniforms pieced together from jute sacks gave them away. On their feet they wore nothing but bits of rubber lashed together to fashion a sandal. They carried machetes and long rifles, repurposed hand-me-downs from another war altogether. The French colonials had used the same arms against these soldiers’ fathers and grandfathers to show the natives who was in charge.
    The Viet Minh was more than just a nationalist movement, and Madame Nhu knew it. As the military arm of the Indochinese Communist Party, its members carried general insurrection to every corner of the country. Her brother-in-law and nephew had been two of their highest-profile victims: a local Viet Minh squad had taken Khoi and his son for questioning in August 1945, imprisoned them briefly, convicted them of being bourgeois traitors, and executed them. Madame Nhu’s husband had hidden upstairs in Hoang’s house when they came for him next. Madame Nhu herself had opened the door and lied coolly to the soldiers’ faces. Then, surprising even herself with how brazen a bluff she could manage, she invited the leader to come in and wait for her husband. Nhu slipped out under cover of dark and stayed mostly in hiding after that. On one of the rare and clandestine visits Nhu had made to his wife during the previous year, their daughter, Le Thuy, had been conceived. Aside from those hurried moments of intimacy, Madame Nhu hadn’t known where her husband was. By December 1946, she didn’t even know if he was still alive.
    Now they had come for her. Madame Nhu wished she could disappear. As the pampered daughter of a colonial puppet and imperial princess and the flashy new wife in the Ngo clan ensconced in the large house on the banks of the An Cuu canal, she represented everything the Communists were looking to take down. They wouldn’t let a prize like that slip away. Madame Nhu had to know that a pretense of humility and timidity was her best defense.