The Dragon Roars

The Dragon Roars

Review of Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu, by Monique Brinson Demery

As a girl, Monique Brinson Demery would pull a Time-Life volume on the Vietnam War from her parents' bookshelf and stare at one photograph: a tiny, beautiful woman with a beehive hairdo, aiming a .38 pistol. The war had ended before Demery was born. The fascination never did. 

That fascination carried Demery to a semester in Vietnam, over her father’s incredulous protest: “I spent my twenties trying to stay out of Vietnam, and here you go, trying to get in!”  It fueled her pursuit of a master's degree in Asian studies, and finally to the question that drives this superb book: how did a woman under forty, barely five feet tall in heels, come to command the attention of a superpower?

Answering it required finding her. By the time Demery went looking, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu had been in exile for more than forty years and had long since stopped talking to anyone. Demery wrote anyway, letter after letter, year after year, explaining herself and asking for the chance to tell the story. In 2005 the phone rang. The conversations that followed constituted a courtship, with an imperious, wary subject testing her biographer at every turn.

Persistence was rewarded a second time. In 2012 a retired U.S. Army captain brought Demery a diary Madame Nhu began keeping in 1959, most likely looted from the presidential palace when the regime fell. Against the public image of a formidable power couple, the diary reveals a wife in private despair. Demery handles it as a scholar should, with care about provenance and with restraint.

In a household that prized sons, she was punished for her younger brother's outbursts. Marriage at eighteen to a man twice her age, at the price of conversion to Catholicism, was her escape.

The portrait that emerges is neither apology nor caricature. Demery traces the hardness to its source. Madame Nhu was born to an imperial princess who was herself still a child, left behind with a grandmother, and reclaimed only after a near-fatal illness. In a household that prized sons, she was punished for her younger brother's outbursts. Marriage at eighteen to a man twice her age, at the price of conversion to Catholicism, was her escape.

Demery gives the courage its full due. In 1946, Viet Minh soldiers marched Madame Nhu from her home with an infant in her arms. When an explosion sent guards and prisoners diving for cover, she alone kept walking across the bridge. During a 1960 coup attempt, with President Diem negotiating with the plotters, she told him he was acting like a baby and laid out the defense that saved the government. Facing down armed soldiers at a rally, she "did what she did best: she made a scene." She also pushed through laws ending polygamy and concubinage and securing women's right to own property.

Demery is just as unsparing about the cruelty and the folly. The morality laws banning dancing and beauty contests did nothing but anger people, who kept dancing. Her husband ran secret police and prison camps. When Buddhist monks set themselves on fire to protest the regime in the streets of Saigon, Madame Nhu cruelly quipped, “If the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.”. In Demery's telling, that single remark sealed her fate, because it made every grievance against the regime believable. The photograph of the burning monk was on President Kennedy's desk, when he sent a new ambassador to Vietnam to neutralize Madame Nhu and press the regime to reform itself. Within months the Ngo brothers were overthrown and murdered.

Why, Demery asks, did the blend of glamour and seriousness that served Jacqueline Kennedy so well fail so completely for Madame Nhu?

The book's most original contribution is its cultural analysis. Why, Demery asks, did the blend of glamour and seriousness that served Jacqueline Kennedy so well fail so completely for Madame Nhu? Her answer is that Americans had nowhere to put her. "Dragon Lady" was the label for any Asian woman who declined the meek, obliging role of Western fantasy. Nor did she fit the American ideal of the day, when most housewives told pollsters their duty was to put their husbands first. A woman who liked power, said so, and demanded credit was intolerable twice over.

Demery adds a point many will find uncomfortable. Madame Nhu was right about a good deal: that Americanization was driving nationalists toward the Communists, that Washington was plotting against her family, and that the Communists had partly infiltrated the Buddhist movement.

Exile brought decades of silence and tragedy, including the deaths of her daughters and the murder of her parents by her own brother. Demery's achievement is to give the caricature back her humanity without excusing her. This is biography as it should be done: exhaustively researched, hard-won, and wise about its subject and about us.