Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu by Monique Brinson Demery is an interesting story of the First Lady of Vietnam, Tran Le Xuan or Madame Nhu.
This is a fascinating story of political and personal survival in Vietnam during both the French and American occupations. Madam Nhu's story is a times, more fiction than fact - she is often portrayed as the iconic super-villainess of her time (the oriental Lucrezia Borgia or Lady Macbeth), at the heart of events but not necessarily to blame for them.
Author Monique Demery spent ten years searching for the elusive Madame Nhu, who drip-fed the story of of life to her, always with the promise of revealing more.
A women at the centre of one of the world's most notorious political crisis, she remained ever an enigma, despite the author's access to Madam Nhu is her latter years. Even in her own time, this woman was both fascinating, polarising, reckless, self-aggrandising, but never boring. Her story is at times both confusing and contradictory, and although Demery tries for redemption, we never really get to know the real woman.
read more here:
@ Time
@ Medium
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