XUAN PHUONG WAS BORN IN 1929 in Hue, a city in the central portion of Vietnam that the French called Annam, but she grew up farther south in Dalat. Her family was affluent, a direct result of its connection to the French government: her father was the supervisor of a French school.
When Phuong was in grade school, her uncle Hien came to live with her family. Phuong’s parents warned her and her siblings to not mention his presence to anyone, and Phuong quickly discovered why: Uncle Hien constantly criticized the French. After one week’s stay, Phuong’s father sent Hien to work as overseer on the family’s coffee plantation, 70 miles away. When Phuong went to visit during the summer, Uncle Hien showed her the crude shacks that housed the mois, the local plantation laborers. The French government, Hien explained, had given the plantation to Phuong’s father with instructions to hire only mois, as they could be paid cheaply. The memory of a sick old mois man too weak to work but too poor to purchase necessary medicine would forever haunt Phuong.
In 1945 Phuong went to live with relatives in Hue in order to attend high school. There she met her uncle Tay, another relative with dangerous political views. He told her about the Vietminh and their revolutionary aims for Vietnamese independence. And at her new school, called Khai Dinh for the father of Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai, Phuong learned even more when she was selected to join a club called the Association of Patriotic Students, run by Vietminh recruiters. Here Phuong first heard about someone named Nguyen Ai Quoc. She would later know him as Ho Chi Minh.
Her teachers were divided along sharp political lines: two were loyal to the Vietminh and three to the French. As enthusiasm for Vietnam’s independence intensified, students who actually wanted to study were viewed with contempt by those who were increasingly fascinated by the idea of revolution. Phuong began to do resistance work for Uncle Tay, creating propaganda leaflets and Vietnamese flags and carrying messages past Japanese sentries.
Toward the end of World War II, as the Allies were defeating the Axis powers, the Japanese (part of the Axis) and the French (part of the Allies) struggled for control of French Indochina. On the night of March 9, 1945, Phuong was awakened by the sound of gunfire. Her uncle burst into the house crying, “The Japanese have disarmed the French!” He went off to join the Vietminh, who sent Phuong and four other female students north to Hanoi to study midwifery. The girls would never know exactly why they had been chosen for this particular training, but they felt honored to have been singled out.
In August Phuong and the other young midwife trainees were told they must return home to Hue because the fighting around Hanoi would soon become intense.
Back in Hue, on August 25, Phuong witnessed the public abdication of Bao Dai, the Vietnamese emperor who had been a puppet ruler during first the French and then the Japanese occupations. Emperor Bao Dai stood in front of his palace dressed in his ceremonial robes, surrounded by his weeping family and three Vietminh officials. A man’s voice cried out, “From this day on, royalty is abolished in Vietnam.”
Many in the audience cheered. Others wept. The emperor handed his royal seal and his ceremonial sword to one of the Vietminh officials, who waved both items in the air before placing them on a table. A cannon fired 21 times. The emperor’s yellow flag was lowered and removed and the Vietminh flag raised in its place. The cannon fired again. Then the crowd ran into the royal palace and plundered it.
A short time later Phuong heard that the Allies had defeated the Japanese. Hue was overrun by representatives of the victors: bedraggled, emaciated Chinese soldiers from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s armies. After they left, soldiers of another nationality appeared in Hue. They were French. And they clearly intended to stay.
Phuong desperately wanted to help drive out the French soldiers. She left home and joined a small cadre, a group of trainees, young men and women who, like her, were educated and French literate. Their base was a large hut in a remote area, and their mission, under the guidance and training of a Vietminh leader named Sung, was to create propaganda leaflets. They disguised themselves as vendors and carefully distributed the leaflets to French soldiers at the local market. Phuong’s leaflets explained her background and motivations, why she and her comrades had left their comfortable lives to fight for their nation’s independence.
One evening the young women in the cadre placed some straw and peppercorns under a window of a hotel that was housing French soldiers. When the women set fire to the straw, it produced an enormous amount of smoke. The young women yelled, “French soldiers, do you know for whom you are fighting?”
The soldiers answered, “It is for you, Mesdemoiselles!” Then they shot into the darkness, but the young women all escaped unharmed.
Later the cadre traveled from village to village putting on simple theatrical productions that they hoped would inspire locals to embrace the revolution and support its fighters with food and shelter. The young actors had very little food to eat and no money; they were each supplied with only one rice ball per day. They slept in temples or on untraveled railroad tracks.
Phuong grew weary of the difficult, nomadic way of life, so she was relieved when she was eventually allowed to stay in one place with a group of former Hue students who were making explosives. From Hue, in March 1948, she was ordered to join Vietnam’s first national research institute on weaponry in the jungle near Mount Khe Khao, in the Bac Kan region. These 50 physicists and former students lived in a real house, the first Phuong had stayed in since leaving home. Still, her life remained difficult in many ways. For instance, the only available food—rice carried through long jungle treks to avoid French outposts—was often rotten by the time she and the others received it.
But they didn’t mind. Fascinated by the research, the team enjoyed a strong camaraderie and was thrilled to be directly useful to the resistance. Phuong also began to gather and edit articles for the institute’s newspaper, Dong, a Vietnamese word meaning “detonation.”
In September the institute was given orders to resettle in the jungle, about 125 miles from Hanoi, in Tuyen Quang Province. Because the new location was a populated area, local workers and volunteers joined the resistance workers, and the institute became more productive than ever before.
Five months later, on February 4, 1949, an accidental explosion ripped the hand off one of the workers. Phuong was deeply shaken. Hoang, the assistant director of the institute, found her alone after work hours. The two had long harbored secret romantic feelings for each other, and Hoang had come to tell Phuong he would soon be leaving for the war front. This news was too much for Phuong, and she burst into tears.
“Why are you crying?” Hoang asked.
Phuong told him that she was so upset by the accident that she had lost the will to remain in the resistance.
In response, Hoang proposed marriage, saying, “This way there will always be two of us to face it all.”
Phuong agreed, and the two were married on February 28. Phuong became pregnant, but before their son was born, Hoang was ordered to China for officer training and suggested she stay with his sister. Phuong gave birth to her baby boy, then traveled through the jungle on foot to her sister-in-law’s house. She was shocked when her in-laws treated her not as a relative but as a household slave, this while still expecting her to find employment outside the home. Phuong began to work at the Finance Service, the Vietminh’s financial headquarters. Then she left her in-laws and went with her baby to live in a dormitory with other Finance Service workers.
Ho Chi Minh lived nearby, and one day in 1951, Phuong met him. His appearance surprised her. “Nothing we had heard about him corresponded to this man in his fifties who was nothing but skin and bones,” she wrote later. “With piercing eyes and a small beard, he dressed in the way of ethnic minorities, with brown shirt and pants, and his famous sandals.”
He was also very kind, pitying the workers for their lack of quality food and advising them on specific health issues, such how to avoid malaria, a common jungle disease. Phuong was impressed that their great leader was so concerned with the details of their well-being.
And he was about to lead them to victory.
In October 1952 Ho’s top general, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Giap’s troops were occupying a small village called Dien Bien Phu, located near the Laotian border. When the French pushed them out, General Giap realized that Dien Bien Phu would be an ideal spot for a final showdown with the French army: the French would be isolated and dependent on parachute drops, whereas the Vietminh could be constantly reinforced from behind.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu offered the Vietnamese the exhilarating hope of independence from the French. Each evening, Finance Ministry workers excitedly assembled around a large map that depicted combat areas with red pins and French casualty numbers on labels. “The atmosphere was electric,” Phuong later wrote of this time. The slogan heard and repeated everywhere was “We work one and all for Dien Bien Phu.”
Vehicles heading to Dien Bien Phu passed by the Finance Ministry all hours of the day and night: people on bicycles carried their village’s required allotment of rice to the front lines of battle while trucks rolled by loaded with weapons and ammunition. Journalists, writers, and musicians all raced there as well, and Phuong heard many moving stories of long-separated friends reuniting at the front.
Hoang returned from China and was allowed to see Phuong for one night before he too left for the front, where he had been ordered to lead an artillery battalion.
On May 7, 1954, Phuong was at a printing shop discussing Dong’s latest issue with the printer. A radio was playing. Suddenly the broadcaster began to shout. The Vietminh had defeated the French!
Phuong rushed outside to join the crowds of cheering people.
After the victory, Hoang was redeployed, and the Finance Ministry moved out of the mountains to Hanoi. So with her toddler and a new infant son, Phuong walked from the mountain dormitory to the city. At one point she became completely overwhelmed with exhaustion and hunger. She went to a temple to pray for help but soon fell sound asleep. Two wealthy women who had come to the temple with a food offering took pity on her and gave the offering to her and her children. One of the women, Madame Tung Hien, had known Phuong’s father and insisted that Phuong and her children come live in her large Hanoi home. Phuong gratefully accepted.
But when Hoang arrived in Hanoi, he refused to enter Madame Tung’s home. “Why are you living at a bourgeois woman’s house?” he demanded.
Phuong explained that she had viewed the unacceptable alternative allotted by the Finance Ministry: an extremely tiny room.
“Phuong,” he replied, “why don’t you behave like everybody else?”
It was pointless to argue, and Phuong relented. Soon she was living with her children in a room so dark it needed artificial lighting even during the day. They had no furniture, only two jute sacks on the floor. Because the war was over and people who, like her, had previously lived in the jungle were now in Hanoi, the city’s population swelled dangerously. People filled the streets, waiting in lines for everything from use of a toilet to food and water.
Phuong rarely saw her husband. Hoang liked neither the stifling room nor the cries of his hungry children, so he spent most of his time in the army barracks, where there was nonetheless no more to eat than at home.
At work Phuong could see a new social class forming: Communist Party members received all the high-ranking jobs. They constantly harassed Phuong and other non-Communist employees about joining the party and eavesdropped on their conversations for any comments that might possibly be considered offensive to Communism.
Phuong began to have nightmares. “I never could have imagined that this time of peace would be so hard to bear,” she wrote later.
The government took complete control of all private homes and businesses in the city before turning to the countryside to initiate what would be known as “land reform.” To accomplish this, they trained small teams of educated people. Phuong’s team included five physicians, two of whom had lived in the jungle during the war. The team members were trained by a Communist doi, or team leader. “You people have benefited from good living in the past, whereas … we have always been exploited,” the doi began. “We are going to make you understand … why it is necessary to wipe out all landowners without the slightest pity.”
After their training, the group traveled from village to village. They would stay with the poorest family and ask them to identify the wealthiest villagers. The neighbors of one man, the owner of five taxis, falsely accused him of being a landowner. When a young boy tried to blindfold him before his execution, the doomed man refused, saying, “No, I want to look at this slaughter up to the end.” Just before he was shot, he said, “It’s shameful. Down with Communism.”
What have all these long years in the Resistance been sacrificed for? Phuong asked herself as she observed these grim proceedings. What happened to our lofty ideals?
When she returned to Hanoi, Phuong continued to hear the results of the land reform: each day’s denunciations and executions were broadcast to the public via loudspeakers. She felt as if she were witnessing the utter destruction of a civilization.
The land reform didn’t stop until the parents of a prominent Communist official were sentenced to death. Despite its supposed purpose of wealth distribution, the land reform’s two-year reign of terror had done nothing to raise anyone’s standard of living. Life was bleaker than ever for most.
Although they didn’t have much more money than anyone else, top Communist Party members owned the most beautiful homes and were the only Vietnamese to own cars. This new social structure affected the military as well: Hoang was forced to leave the army, “for the good of the people,” he was told. Officials had checked his background and determined that he was too bourgeois—middle class and materialistic. He spent all day and night lying down and staring at the ceiling in their tiny, airless room. Phuong feared he was becoming suicidal.
He eventually recovered some hope, and in 1963 Phuong was given a new job, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Four years later, while working there, she was asked to assist a German filmmaker named Joris Ivens, a personal friend of Ho Chi Minh.
As she helped Joris film life at the 17th parallel (the dividing line between the North and South), an area the United States was now heavily bombing, Phuong grew to admire the astonishing resilience of the people who lived there. Noticing her interest, Joris suggested to Phuong that she also become a filmmaker. After repeated requests to the government over a period of several years, she began working in Vietnam’s film industry and for more than a decade made documentary films for Vietnamese television.
Phuong, second from right, working on 17 Parallel—People’s War with filmmaker Joris Ivens, second from left, 1967. Xuan Phuong
By 1989, however, 60-year-old Phuong had grown restless. “I had spent my life depending on others,” she wrote later of this time, adding, “I had sacrificed all that I had for the benefit of a collective society. I reasoned that the moment had finally come for me to live for myself.”
The government allowed Phuong to travel to Paris and remain there for two years. And when she returned to Vietnam, she moved to Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, where she was allowed to open an art gallery called the Lotus Gallery, which she still runs to this day.
Ao Dai: My War, My Country, My Vietnam by Xuan Phuong with Danièle Mazingarbe (EMQUAD International, 2004). The English translation of Phuong’s originally French memoir.
Lotus Gallery website, www.lotusgallery.com.vn.
“Nguyen Thi Xuan Phuong—Galerie Lotus,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFvPPC-_Kr4/.
French-language interview (no subtitles) with Xuan Phuong in the Lotus Gallery.