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As a child, she remembers herself as unhappy, unloved, and in rebellion against her mother, a celebrated local beauty who kept the Hanoi equivalent of a salon. "If you are unjust," the young girl told her fiercely, "I will ignore you." When Beautiful Spring was 16, she met Ngo Dinh Nhu, chief archivist at the Indo-China Library and an admirer of her mother's. To Beautiful Spring's distress, Mother forced her to address herself to Nhu as "your little niece." Nhu lent his little niece books, helped her with her Latin lessons. Constantly in her mother's shadow, Mme. Nhu wanted to marry and get out of her house. Her mother's list of selected young men held no interest for her. "Then," she recalls matter-of-factly, "I said to myself, 'Why not that man, Ngo Dinh Nhu?' "
The Nhus were married in 1943. She converted from Buddhism to her husband's Catholic faith, today says that "the sacraments are my moral vitamins." Her daughter, Le Thuy, was born in 1946, and was followed by sons Trac and Quyhn, and daughter Le Quyen. Candidly Mme. Nhu admits that she has "never had a sweeping love. I read about such things in books, but I do not believe that they really exist. Or perhaps only for a very few people."'
Rice Diet. Three years after the Nhus were married, the Indo-China war broke out. All the Ngo Dinh brothers were militantly anti-Communist and anticolonialist. Their father, Ngo Dinh Kha, had been an officer in the old imperial court but quit in a dispute with Viet Nam's French overlords, despite being virtually penniless, and went out and farmed his rented rice fields side by side with his peasant neighbors. Diem himself left politics before World War II rather than work with the French. In that tradition, Nhu, his wife and family were opposed both to the Red Viet Minh "army of liberation" and to the French with their puppet Emperor, Bao Dai. When the Viet Minh overran Hué, they shot Diem's oldest brother and the brother's only son, for months held Diem himself captive before turning him loose. Nhu and Can both escaped from the Reds, but Mme. Nhu, her infant daughter and her aged mother-in-law were taken prisoner in December 1946.
For four months, Mme. Nhu lived on only two bowls of rice a day in a remote Communist-held village. She had only one blouse, one pair of pants and one coat. "I got to hate that coat," she says. "It was wasp-waisted and very fashionable. But for months it was my only blanket. After that, I always said I would only own loose, practical coats, just in case." Mme. Nhu's smooth, well-kept hands were a constant source of contemptuous amusement for her tough peasant captors. "I cannot bear the Communists," she says. "They considered me a child, I don't know why. They seemed to have some indulgence for me."
When the French army began moving out into the countryside, Mme. Nhu's captors prepared a hasty retreat north. But because her mother-in-law was incapable of making such an arduous trip, Mme. Nhu was granted a safe-conduct pass to a nearby village. With her child and the old woman, Mme. Nhu holed up in a convent in the village until the French forces arrived. Shortly afterward she was reunited with Nhu.