Madame Nhu Goes to Beverly Hills // silk pantaloons, slender ankles, barbecued monks, ancient history that cannot be applied today
I run my fingers over a photo / torn from a magazine & folded / inside Sons and Lovers. / She's got one hand on her hip / & the other aiming a revolver at some target hiding / from the camera. Flanked by a cadre / of women in fatigues, she's daring / the sun to penetrate her ao dai. / High-ranking officers let their eyes / travel over silk as they push pins / into maps under a dead-looking sky.
Shadows crawl from under her feet. / Does she know soldiers undress her / behind dark aviation glasses? / She's delicate as a reed / against a river, just weighing the gun / in her hand, a blood-tipped lotus / rooted in the torn air. / Another kind of lust blooms / in flesh, ominous as a photo / on a coffin waiting to be / lost among papers & notes, / but it still hurts when a pistol / plays with the heart this way.1
She tiptoed daintily down the gangway steps, a breath-taking vision of loveliness under the television arc lights, mink stole draped carefully over a figure-hugging ao-dao national costume and silk pantaloons that couldn't quite hide a pair of pretty ankles. She waved timidly at the newsmen below, and as they looked up into her soft brown almost eyes with their "please-protect-me-I'm-fragile" look, the carefully planned, hard-hitting, searching questions seemed to vanish from their minds. Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu, the talking doll from Saigon, had arrived in New York.2
There is a line I read somewhere—maybe uttered by a military man, maybe a journalist, but recorded in some slab of a book on the war in Indochina, and maybe repeated in an academic essay—that the war would not have gone on so long had Vietnamese women not been so pretty. It’s a horrible thought. I don’t believe it’s generally true, either. But, narrowly, in the case of Madame Nhu, maybe it applies.
When Madame Nhu arrived in the United States in October of 1963, she was representing the regime of Ngô Đình Diệm as an unofficial ambassador.3
The wife of Diệm’s brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, she had been instrumental in building connections between the Americans and the regime. She was elegant. She spoke English and French fluently. She was beautiful. She was cosmopolitan. Her aristocratic family had close links to the French colonial administrators and the Japanese occupation, and she provided some of the same services to the Americans.
The summer of 1963 had been tough. For the Diệm regime, their fight was not only to stop godless communism from sweeping over the border but also a crusade to build a Christian nation. They had enacted sweeping morality laws. Pornography, dance halls, and prostitution went first. This was useful: it took profits away from powerful organized crime groups. Next, the Ngô brothers, following Catholic doctrine, banned all forms of contraception, and, soon, more frivolous things, often selected by Madame Nhu herself, were subject to bans, including certain types of Western dress (this included the underwire brassiere, apparently), fortunetelling, most popular music, and beauty contests. And they had given Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục, the eldest Ngô brother and Archbishop of Huế, free rein to enrich and strength the Church, and suppress the Buddhist majority.
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