Madame Nhu - Early Years

Early Years

Trần Lệ Xuân was born into a wealthy aristocratic family in Hanoi, French Indochina, then part of the French colonial empire. Her given name means "Tears of Spring" Her paternal grandfather was close to the French colonial administration, while her father, Trần Văn Chương, studied law in France, and practicing in Bac Lieu in the Mekong Delta before marrying into the ruling imperial dynasty. Her father also served as the first foreign secretary for Indochina under Japanese occupation. Her mother, Thân Thị Nam Trân, was a granddaughter of Emperor Đồng Khánh and a cousin of Emperor Bảo Đại.

She dropped out of Lycée Albert Sarraut, a prestigious French school in Hanoi. She spoke French at home and could not write in Vietnamese; as an adult, she drafted her speeches in French and had them translated into Vietnamese. She gained a reputation in her youth as a tomboy who loved ballet and piano, once dancing solo at Hanoi's National Theatre. She had an elder sister named Trần Lệ Chi (married French man named Etienne Oggeri and changed her name to Lechi Oggeri) and a younger brother, Trần Văn Khiêm.

When she became an adult, her mother introduced her to a series of eligible young men, but she insisted on Nhu. He was fourteen years older and referred to her as "little niece" in accordance with Vietnamese custom. In 1943, aged 18, she married Nhu, and converted from Mahayana Buddhism to Roman Catholicism, her husband's religion. After an uprising by the Viet Minh in August 1945, her brother-in-law, Ngô Ðình Khôi, the eldest of the Ngô brothers, was buried alive, and Nhu and another brother, Ngô Đình Cẩn, were forced to flee.

She, her mother-in-law and her eldest daughter, at the time a baby, were captured. Thinking her piano was a radio for communicating with French colonialists, the Viet Minh blew it up and then exiled her to a remote village for four months, where she lived on two bowls of rice a day. The French dismissed Nhu from his post at the National Library due to his brother (Diệm)'s nationalist activities, and he moved to Đà Lạt and lived comfortably, editing a newspaper, where his wife bore three more children.