Read Online Finding the Dragon Lady by Monique Brinson Demery - Free Book Online

really thought I had imagined every possible scenario for how and when Madame Nhu might choose to contact me, but I was wrong.
    One Saturday morning in June 2005, when my husband was still asleep in bed, a deeply, unmistakably pink plus sign bloomed on thehome-test stick. I was pregnant. It was something of a shock since my husband and I had been trying to get pregnant for over a year. Doctor’s appointments and blood work and invasive ultrasounds and second opinions had left me with an ugly-sounding diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome. Without medical intervention, I was told, pregnancy would be nearly impossible. And yet, I was standing there, staring at the sodden stick in absolute shock, when the kitchen telephone rang.
    â€œBonjour,” a gravelly voice said through the receiver. “Madame Demery?”
    I barely managed to squeak out a oui . It was hard to swallow. My heart was exploding out of my chest. Could it possibly be who I thought it was? Who else would it be? I briefly wondered if I was dreaming.
    â€œIs this, I mean, are you Madame Nhu?” There was no point at all in playing it cool. The Dragon Lady was on the phone. And I was pregnant. And yes, it was Madame Nhu. But her barrage of questions came at me so fast, they yanked me right out of any blissful dream state.
    â€œAre you a government agent?”
    No, no, I assured her.
    â€œYour husband then? Perhaps your father, anyone in your family?”
    I promised her that no government had ever employed anyone in my immediate family.
    â€œHave you been hired by police, or perhaps the New York Times? ”
    An interrogation like this would have sounded certifiably mad coming from anyone else. But I took every question seriously. Eventually, Madame Nhu declared herself satisfied.
    â€œBon,” she said definitively, “that is behind us. Good.”
    Then she laid out the ground rules. Madame Nhu would do the calling. She would not give me her telephone number. She would not speak to anyone else who picked up the phone; she would hang up. And she would absolutely not leave messages on my answering machine. I agreed to all the conditions easily.
    â€œBien sur. Of course, Madame.”
    â€œI will call you again in three days.”
    Madame Nhu and I began to talk by telephone on a fairly regular basis. I got to know it would be her when the caller ID on the telephoneread “Unavailable.” She tended to call in what was the late morning for me and the early evening for her, given the seven-hour time difference. She might start in with a tidbit of Vietnamese history that she thought I should know. Sometimes she repeated herself. She recounted the standard fare of Vietnamese fables—of Vietnamese heroines like the Trung sisters or Lady Trieu vanquishing Chinese invaders. I was pretty sure it was a pretext. She was testing me, getting to know me. Stories would give way to questions—about my family, my religion, and my knowledge of the Bible. None of my answers seemed very satisfactory.
    I learned that it was better to let Madame Nhu talk. She would stay on the phone longer, and it would inevitably lead her back to the past. From there I could tease out little vignettes from her childhood and ask her what she remembered about the different eras of her life. But when I asked a question that Madame Nhu deemed too probing, she would shut me right down. It might be a frivolous question about life in the palace in Saigon—for example, I had heard a rumor that she had gold toilets. When I asked her about it, she called me a silly child. If I tried to ask about the regime shutting Buddhist monks and university students up in the infamously squalid tiger cages, she told me to be careful of my sources. The political opponents of her regime, she said with a serious edge in her voice, had been duped by the Communists.
    I told Madame Nhu about my pregnancy after my husband and I had told our families but before we shared the