I don't know, but it was perhaps the result of her reflections on an extraordinary life tied closely to the tragic fate of her nation in a turbulent time.
She was a formidable character, and very charming, so why was she so misunderstood in her lifetime?
She was a member of the colonial elites in a postcolonial society where the social status of such elites were not automatically accepted by ordinary people. As a woman, she was a very self-confident and outspoken person with a strong character, and sometimes relished in being herself and challenging cultural norms. Her behaviour may have been interpreted as arrogant, reckless, and foreign by many Vietnamese even though men who acted like her would have been forgiven.
Why do you think that she barely mentions her 1963 USA press tour in her memoirs?
I don't know. It was perhaps a traumatizing experience for her to recall in detail.
What was the most difficult task in editing her memoirs?
The most difficult task was to create an accurate and complete family tree of Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu. It is hard to believe how difficult this task was since her family was so prominent--she was of royal lineage through her grandmother being a granddaughter to the third emperor (Thieu Tri) and a half-sister of three later emperors (Dong Khanh, Kien Phuc and Ham Nghi) of the Nguyen Dynasty. Yet there is so little accurate or verifiable information available about that grandmother (without conducting time-consuming research in Vietnamese government archives). Like all monarchs, Nguyen emperors had numerous female partners besides their official wives, and information about them and their female children were often missing in official records as women were not treated with equal attention as men in Vietnam's Confucian society. Another reason has to do with politics. After the end of the Nguyen Dynasty's rule in 1945, and especially after the last Emperor Bao Dai was deposed as Head of State in 1955 by Ngo Dinh Diem, public information about the Nguyen lineage became less and less available. In communist Vietnam, the Nguyen Dynasty's legacy had fared much worse: until recently it had been considered a "traitorous" dynasty who sold their country to the French.
Accurate information about President Diem's family was also hard to obtain. The reasons for this lack of information are complex, but I believe one main reason has to do with the dramatic downfall of the Diem government that led not only to the deaths of Diem and his two brothers in the aftermath but also to the deliberate efforts by their enemies to discredit them or even erase them from history, and to the avoidance of publicity and stigmatization by those previously associated with him, especially his relatives and friends. After decades of public oblivion and erasure, reliable information about the family gradually disappeared and was replaced by myths and rumours.
The Ngo-Dinhs had a very difficult task in dealing with all these challenges while in power, do you think Madame Nhu helped the situation or escalated the tensions in South Vietnam?
I can say she played her role in earnest to her last breath. She did what she thought to be her obligations to her family and to her country. She did what she thought to be the right things to do to support President Diem. She ran for election to the National Assembly, championed a Family Law that contained some radical propositions, organized and trained a women's militia, and performed the functions of a first lady with remarkable pomp and character.
At the same time, she was just a human being and certainly made many mistakes. She could have paid more attention to and been more sensitive to cultural and social expectations while remaining the woman she was. She could have been more diplomatic in certain situations and deployed her charms more to win more friends rather than creating more enemies for the government of South Vietnam.
What did you learn from working on this project?
I learned so much about Madame Nhu and her family! Beyond that, I also acquired a better understanding of the politics in the First Republic of the Republic of Vietnam through her memoir. The boxes of documents the family donated to our US-Vietnam Research Center offered fascinating information about her visit to the US with her daughter in 1963 as well as other documents. (We have made these documents available online. For those who are interested, consult this link: https://usvietnamcenter.uoregon.edu/ba-tran-le-xuan-madam-ngo-dinh-nhu/). Editing her memoir gave me the impetus to search for more information about controversial historical events whose accounts have not been definitively settled. I had to know the details of what happened and the views from different people so that I could understand the memoir and provide additional information to readers if necessary.
Do you plan on writing a biography about Madame Nhu?
Besides the boxes of documents mentioned above, we have collected hundreds of documents from the National Archive II in Vietnam. If I have time, I hope to write a book that tells the story of her trip to the US in 1963 and the aftermath of the coup as a way to disentangle the Republic of Vietnam's complex relationship with the US.
Are you working on any projects for 2026?
We've had a very busy year in 2025, which marks the 50th anniversary of the end of war in Vietnam and the birth of the Vietnamese diaspora (1975). I've given many talks across the country at universities and community events this year. Besides Mme Nhu's memoir, we've just published a memoir about Ngo Dinh Diem written by a person who lived with him for nearly nine months in New York in 1951-1952 before Diem became Prime Minister and later President.
There is an ongoing exhibit of the Vietnamese dress "áo dài" that includes many sets donated by Madame Nhu's family to our Center. The exhibit is held at the Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. I was part of the curating team and we are trying to complete the exhibit catalog for publication early next year. Some Vietnamese American communities have expressed their interest in having the exhibit travel to their locations next year and beyond.
Next year we plan to publish a few manuscripts currently in various stages of preparation. One is "Love, War, and Imprisonment," a collection of poems by one of the most prominent poets of the Republic of Vietnam, Tran Da Tu. The poems were translated into English by Professor Emeritus Keith Taylor and will be published together with their original Vietnamese poems by Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press.
We are also working on the translation and publication of two edited volumes on the Republic of Vietnam. These are: Nu-Anh Tran and Tuong Vu, eds. Building a Republican Nation in Vietnam, 1920-1963 (University of Hawaii Press, 2022) and Trinh Luu and Tuong Vu, eds. Republican Vietnam, 1963-1975: War, Society, Diaspora (University of Hawaii Press, 2023). We also plan to publish a book on the challenges facing civil society in Vietnam today.
