Juxtaposition to my grandmother who was a big character in the story it was very and xenophobic so how she shaped my life as well and part of the reason i became an engineer was because of that and in pursuit of a career in the arts early on. In this book you sort of see you are reading i would hope you are reading with the context of this little kid who i am showing you eventually grows up and has this amazing moment in history. Wide view open the story with a wave of . Host in some ways she is the cause of a lot of trauma and she was very verbally abusive and very homophobic as i said and xenophobic. But on the flip side of that ironically in some way she made me a writer because she made me were withdrawn and maybe an observer of the world versus a participant. Also that led me to become, to learn how to read people. I had to know how to read people to know how to respond and not get called a you know what by her by others. All that power of observation and reading in between the lines made me a writer in a way and maybe sit back and look at what do writers do after all that record and look at the world and try to see it from a different angle. So she plays a big role in that sense. Also again the homophobia so there is always this constant tension between us, the idea that she was on the one hand a loving caretaker which she was because she lived us with us for 20something years but at the same time there was this dark side. It was interesting to explore that in the book because ive done so in my poetry. But in the book, and the memoir in the pros my grandmother comes across as very different. She comes across as this gregarious wonderful funny per person which he was on the surface. The poetry digs into, digs right away into the internal character whereas in prose this book i had to create the external characters. So you know it was a loving relationship. Im not complaining so to speak but she was very significant in that way. Host the cuban culture tends to be a machismo culture doesnt it . Guest one of the reasons im excited about this book in ever since i wrote page one i was interested in seeing that intersection and how those things collide. The idea of cultural sexuality that i cant separate who i am growing up as a cubanamerican kid from my sexuality and my artistic identity. You have the strangulations of things so i studied engineering partly because of the homophobia of my grandmother but also as a cultural circumstance. Where workingclass immigrant family and the idea that of a career of the arts was within the realm of possibility. I love to see how all these three things but up against each other and complement each other to make this little kid called ricky become who he is and again the idea of the village. We cant separate those components in and of themselves. I have all these great labels that i love, first latino, first immigrant, first man to read at the inauguration. All of those things come together as one person and part of the selfish reason for writing the book was to explore how those things connected and what is that unique sort of recipe that makes a human being a human being. What really excites me about the book is that something thats not talked about often and as you said the machismo element you have that combined with xenophobia so my grandmother another example of her being a main character anything that was culturally odd is also perceived as clear so things like fruit loops or american foods were clear. Why are you eating back . Toys she could understand. Anything in english was immediately suspect and thrown into the band. All those interesting link are to make this crazy guy named richard happen. Host Richard Blanco did you ever come out to your grandmother . Guest no i did come out shortly before she passed away and in the acknowledgments of this book one of the reasons i think this book was also important was i learned to hate her, to understand her, to forgive her, to love her and i think that happened finally with this book. I did sort of have a moment of peace with her on her deathbed so to speak. At that age she was already in her early 80s and you udall again its also a generational thing so i didnt officially come out but i had come out to my mother and the rest of the family. She still insisted that i was going to be a confirmed bachelor but i would have children. And she would bribe me. She at one point offered me 10,000 to mary someone. This was my grandmother. He didnt know whether to laugh or cry. I wanted to take the money and when i said yes half fooling around she said okay but i will give you 5000 when you get married in 2000 every time you have a kid. As i said my grandmother was the smartest and the dumbest person i have ever met in the world. Host what was it about poetry that attracted you . Guest you know i have always had a left brain right brain. I have always delved in both worlds and have since i was a little kid and some of that is in the book as well, sort of engineer mind as well as the artistic mind. But again the things that werent courage more so in an immigrant family and more the traditional careers and things i would have a better life than they did and doctor lawyer engineer. I picked engineering and went about my business as an engineer i was thinking that someday id do something creative. It wasnt until i was 24 and it was through working as an engineer that i realized how much writing was involved. It was like writing reports, writing proposals, writing studies and i started falling in love with language. From matt i just wrote a poem one day. I think i have thought poetically and the book i try to infuse that poetic sensibility and the passages. The challenge with a poet writing prose is that your members to tell the story and i learned that. I was always impressed by images and the selfcontained ways in which something can have meaning. I remember my first poem was about watching a woman scurry down a staircase on her way to work late in red pumps. I dont know why. They were probably horrible poems i dont have them now. I always saw glimpses and that was my entry into the creative world. At first you know i just did it for sheer pleasure and love of the art, sheer creative curiosity and i think i still do but i had no expectations when i first started writing them look what has happened. Host can you make a living as a poet . Guest i can now. I do now actually but mostly through readings and lectures and whatnot so yes that has been a wonderful result of having such exposure from the inaugeration and reading the inaugural poem. I think most poets in general probably a good 90 something usually teach so is the way to be in the field so to speak and make a living while teaching and still being involved in your craft. Its been a wonderful sort of, its a wonderful path as well but teaching has its own career too. It makes its own demands and theres a whole other set of qualities. You can be a great poet and be a horrible teacher and you can be a horrible teacher and be a great poet but thats the one way that poets earn a living. Host do you still practice engineering . Guest i . Guest i wasnt earlier naafa go ever since they explode exposure at the inaugeration. I am traveling 80 of my time. Because of the magnitude and exposure that the inauguration gives me and gives poetry people are calling on the most unexpected places. Next week i have to read at the federal reserve. Im reading at engineering firms. All this has kept me quite busy and happily so when i also feel a sense of purpose and a sense of exposing people to poetry that are not the usual suspects and to watch their eyes light up when people realize poetry is and what they thought it was, that poetry is still a vibrant relevant art, that is not something stuck in a High School English book that they didnt understand. So that is part of what keeps me going but ive been practicing engineering all my life. I have taken hiatuses here and there to teach that yeah i have always carried both and im a little bit apprehensive because i have always done both. And i have to keep my left brain busy. When i dont weird things start to happen by creating spreadsheets to figure out how many times to change the cat litter or Something Like that. It gets crazy. Busy hands are happy hands, that applies to my left brain and i dont want to start taking out out of my poetry because i start approaching my writing with this very analytical mind which helps in editing but not necessarily these initial phases of work. There has been a fork in the road drawn for me. There are a lot of signs that say keep going this way. Host how long, how many drafts did it take to get to the palm read at the inaugural . Guest i have at home probably a stack this thick again and drafts might mean, with poetry drafts might mean you change to words and then you throw it in the drafts pile. I only had a week and i had to write three poems in three weeks as the story goes. So there wasnt room. In some ways there was incredible pressure and in some ways im kind of glad i didnt have six months to write that poem because god knows what would have happened and i would have ended up locked up somewhere thing. Theres something to be said about giving yourself a time limit on writing. So yeah i mean it took drafts and drafts and drafts that there is a big turnover right in the middle and part of that had to do with my own Creative Process and funny feeling that i have the authority to speak the way i was speaking in the poem. The connection to america that i had to did dig deep inside and as a poet you cant fake honesty and real emotion in that poem. Part of the writing process was to connect with what that moment was really about and what it meant to me and once i connected with that emotion it was easier to go back to the poem and speech of the palm in a different way. The first draft was a little winded. It was talking about pilgrims and all this and it was a process that personalize the palm but also served as connecting in a way that was general enough that would let people into the poem. Host whitest the prince of los cocuyos and when you are 16 and a half years old . Guest well i wanted to take the book i didnt want it to be a comingout story. I wanted it to be a cultural comingofage story to a certain degree and it seemed like a natural pause. At 16 or 16 nmap theres a big break in ones life and after that the whole new set of experiences and emotional growth happens. If i turn that page into that phase i would have had another 300 pages so theres a practical reason for it. The book is sort of a dawning awakening and the cover will reflect that. Its digging right to the cost. You know what will happen and it sets up are my second part two. It seemed like a natural pause. At first i thought it was going to write up to my first trip to cuba and when i moved to connecticut and move back to miami and by the time i was eight years old i had 70,000 words. I thought this is not going to happen. Theres going to be i makes sense to me now so im happy with that ending. Symbolically launching myself into this world. We know, we can infer whats going to happen. Its just right at that edge where there was a very poetic moment actually. Host Richard Blancos the prince of los cocuyos a miami childhood comes out in the fall of 2014. You are watching booktv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Next from the Chicago Tribune printers row looks best Monique Brinson demery on her biography of madame nhu the former first lady in South Vietnam. Steam welcome everyone. Its good to see you here this morning is my pleasure to welcome today Monique Brinson demery the author of the amazing book finding the dragon lady the mystery of vietnams madame nhu. Demering holds a masters degree from Harvard University and east asian regional studies and which you may contact with madame nhu who was the unofficial first lady of the South Vietnamese government in 2005. You were the first journalist to interview her in almost 20 years. Demery is based in chicago and we were happy to welcome you. Thank you for having me and thank you for coming today. Is such an interesting book. Im curious how you first came to be interested in writing a book about two what a lot of people might be an unlikely an unknown subject someone who is known to scholars in the history of vietnam war but probably not wellknown to other people. How did you become interested in madame nhu . Is started by omission so my mothers friends and my dad is american so vietnam was really hard to talk about in our family. It wasnt clear to me what had happened there. Every time i tried to ask the adults around me it was too controversial to talk about. There was this nagging question of boquet what happened in vietnam . Every time i looked at the books there were cori pictures that you have seen of vietnam or good napalm apocalypse now pictures and then i flipped the page and heres this beautiful, stylish very cosmopolitan looking women than they are calling her that dragging dragon woman or the diabolical sex dictatress. What is not to be interested in . I started digging around and out of curiosity i wanted to read a book about this woman because her life sounded interesting to me putting the pieces together. I would have known that she grew up during the French Colonial period and i thought someone has written a great historical bodice ripper about this woman. There was nothing. There were just these articles from the 60s that have been written about her and no biography and no historical fiction and what i noticed was no obituary. That led me to think wow she still alive. Alive and somewhere out there. She was a source of great fascination for writers in the early 60s on vietnam. There was very much of it built up image of her in United States but then after she went into exile in rome and also later in paris she really does disappear from record. So you have a lot of sleuth working in tracking her down. I mentioned there was no obituary. There is no obituary for madame nhu but what i did find right away is an obituary for her parents. In 1986 her parents were living in georgetown. They made their home there after he resigned in protest from his daughter and soninlaws government so they have been living in georgetown and in 1986 they were murdered in their sleep by their only son. I thought, this is reallife . This is nonfiction . Of the mystery mystery drew me in and i was the last time madame nhu emerged from her selfimposed seclusion to say you know this is a family affair. Leave my family alone and at that time she was living in rome where she was as you mentioned back and forth between rome and paris during those years. Did you start out and the parents, did you start out thinking about writing about their lives perhaps and she became such an inch think figure to you along the way . I certainly thought there was something there. Im going to get their names from that they were 90 and 86 or something when they were murdered and they were murdered i went in their pajamas. That to me seems those heartbreaking and sad. I started digging into it and what i found was these sympathetic elderly couple had in fact lived quite a life before that. Madame nhus mother was known as the pearl of the orient by the french and the french archives i found all these references to who she had slept with inquiry and then she slept with the japanese. And then to further confuse things she was 14 when she had her daughter. 14 years old. So i thought theres so much contradiction here and she wasnt just the sweet old lady. She was the sweet old lady who slept around quite a bit but the she also had a daughter at 14 so all those questions lead me to pursue them. A very aristocratic family. We need to take a step back and explain exactly who madame nhu was. Her brotherinlaw, the brother of her husband became president of South Vietnam in 1956 or 55. 54 he becomes premier. Madame nhu is the de facto first lady because the present of South Vietnam and there were a few titles before that, Prime Minister premier but we will for simplicity colon the president. He was a bachelor and a bachelor makes him sound like he was going to vegas on the weekends but he was really very moral. He slept on the hard wooden. He personally signed entry visas in and out of the country staying up late at night. There is this very catholic austere man who needs a first lady. He needs someone to host the parties and go to the orphanages and post the flower shows so his younger brothers wife becomes this woman and shes perfect for her. She looks great for the cameras. She likes to be out there and plus this finally gives her a voice. All of her life to think madame nhu have been looking for this purpose. She was the second child. She had been overlooked as a child. I think she always had a bit of a chip on her shoulders so for her to be handed this, here you go, be the official hostess, she took it and really ran with it. Yes, and she basically occupied this roll up until 1963 when the government was upended by a coup. Her husband and her brotherinlaw see him were both executed. Thats right in madame nhu was overlooked overwhelmingly elected by an unrealistic 99. 9 of the population to hold seats in congress in their legislature. By doing so she was still the first lady hosting parties but she could also pass laws so madame nhu madame nhu pass family and morality laws. Some of there are some of them are wellintended but South Vietnamese women were not able to open bank accounts. They were not allowed to own property. Before the laws. Madame nhu recognized what her husband and his brother did not, that 50 of the population was being ignored except by the economists who are doing a great job of recruiting women. Madame nhu thought lets give these women semitense and power and she did in sort of took it upon herself to be the voice of the women. She wasnt like most vietnamese women. She came from a very aristocratic family. They spoke french at the dinner table cell for her to suddenly declare herself the voice of the vietnamese woman was a little presumptuous. She was unable to write in vietnamese come is that correct . She didnt write. She could but she expressed herself most fluently and french which is of course what she studied in school and what they spoke at home. The other laws that she passed were a little ridiculous. We are thinking about them in context it seems to make sense. Vietnam is a country at war and the communists were doing a very good job of saying okay this is a war and we have to treat it seriously. Nhu said no, we have to take a series of. So she outlawed dancing along with prostitution. She outlawed hand holding and kissing but she outlawed underwire bras, but she wore them. So she had these sort of, this moral like high horse, and then the best was her sister had been married off young like a madame nhu head, this is her older sister issues married to a guy who worked for the government. They fell out of love i guess come in a, and she fell in love instead with a french guy. He was a big game hunter and madame nhu thought you cant leave good upstanding vietnamese guys for a french guy. Disappointing colonial. So when her sister tried to divorce her husband, madame nhu outlawed divorce, and the story goes, theres a record of this but the story goes madame nhu sister slashed her wrists and going to the pound and madame nhu locks up in hospital and takes her own mother to come back to saigon to break up the daughter then goes to the United States enters the french guy anyway. They are still alive, correct . I believe so. She lives in north carolina, correct . I tried to reach out to her with letters, but the event unanswered. So her husband has published a couple memoirs at this time, and they been published by a small press and candida, perhaps selfpublished. Quite interesting. One of the things remarkable about your book and her store, and i should point out you mentioned her looks, a real striking figure is hard to characterize her but the image on the cover really says it all. You all probably cant see it from a distance, but she knows how to handle a pistol. And especially with the sort of beehive haircut that gives a nice lucks been she did have a fashion thing. A high collar, a manager in color and madame nhu was one of the first to say, you know, if youve got it, flaunt it. So she cut the neck down so you could see kind of her collarbone. At the time this was like really risk a. So the president , her brotherinlaw, said dont you think thats a little too flashy quick she said Something Like, its not your neck that is sticking out, its mine so shut up. Thats a great line. What is going to say though is its fascinating not just from a geopolitical standpoint and from a historical standpoint but it really is a family saga as well. One also where you see someone who is able to use whatever we think about her, and we can come back to that end a little bit, has this incredible amount of gumption. She managed to create herself and to really direct her own idea of what a public image would be, with an iron will pick anything thats really fascinating about her. And it seems like when you may contact with her, many years later, that that sense of herself was still very much intact. I love the word gumption but i think thats a great description. And yes, madame nhu was going to tell her own story. So when i did find madame nhu she was in her early 80s, and she sort of said to me, this is great. You are the angels that god sent to me. We are going to do my memoirs. Youre going to get me a book deal, its going to be great. And i was like, all right, you know. But i wanted to hear what she had to say but she had very specific way of seeing her past, which is understandable. Perhaps we all revise history in our own way but madame nhu, she was vietnam was the center of the universe and she was sort of the thing everything revolves around. So she was very much at the center of her story, but then again it was also understandable. Her husband and brotherinlaw were killed by the sanction of the americans and should gone through this life had been quite hard. And so i think to make sense of it she really turned to religion and that was the only way that she could really make sense of things, and biblically or ordained. A joan of arc idea, survivor story. How did she come do you think its just the force of her personality gave her the presents she had in the government . The american thought she was really the problem behind the problem that were very clear with, in the South Vietnamese government, that she was the one pulling the strings. I think the way that you write about or she does come across as a who had an unbelievable amount of influence over what her brotherinlaw did. Do you think thats just come you know, force of the personnel because you write about, for example, when she was taken a prisoner of war in 1946 by the communists, and that this figure images from that who is so strong. Is that your sense of it or do you think her role has been somewhat overrated in government . I think it is actual bit of both, if thats possible. Madame nhu has the story of when shes taken by the communists and shes carrying her infant daughter, walking across the bridge and bullets are flying and she emerges unscathed. For her, she was like oh, yeah, i got i a. All got to do is be brave. And that message, that, in the face of your in any, stare him down, and stand strong the matter what you do dont back down, that was kind of her motto. Everything she tried to pass that on to the brothers. There was one point when they ty were negotiating, there didnt t attend to attend an institution to open up his government and madame nhu thought that was just awful, that he would dare to share power and all of us do. She convinced him to stand firm. In some way yes, she had the power to convince the brothers that they did need to open up the government. They needed to lock all the doors and keep it even more but i think the other thing is just the appearance that it looked like the men were following what she said. Kennedy said Something Like she looks like she is leading the meant around by her apron strings. So theyre just sort of following and i think i was just as dangerous as any real power, to make it, they were sort of an estimate by her and that was kennedys biggest fear is that they would look like america was following us for late around and that was not going to fly. Yes, and so much of her criticism of, well, i should put it this way. So much of her reaction to what was taking place in vietnam, modernization, its neocolonialization if you want to call it that, westernization that started to appear in South Vietnam, in the late 50s and 60s that she run it against, was very much a criticism of america. It put her very much, because so much of that was made possible by the influx of Foreign Policy money from the United States, which put her very quickly i think on the opposite side of the thinking of the government of the United States. States. She was happy for the money. Lets be clear, that was how they were funding the fight. But what they wanted was the money but then stay out of our business, let us run our government. And the United States obviously wanted Strings Attached to that money. When things were going the right way, for example, the United States tried to send in Ground Troops a lot earlier but the brothers of said absently not. You know, these have to be advisors only. It wasnt until much later that the vietnam war escalate into what it became. There were several trenches attempts against the government began in 1960, i believe. Coup attends. A couple of air men desperate she narrowly survived spent there was a direct hit on madame nhus bedroom. Some rogue South Vietnamese air force pilot was tired of this sort of bossy lady, pushy lady. One of the vietnamese i talked to said she was, talked to big. She was too much. One of these South Vietnamese air force pilots was upset about it and did a direct hit of her sweet. So there was this gaping hole. Madame nhu fell through she said three stories again, one of her sort of survival, she survived it, it was magical. But she hurt her arm but one of the childrens nannies was killed but otherwise no one, no one in the family was hurt. And then finally the protest against the government began to escalate in 62 and 63, and there are, for the first time very strong confrontation with the buddhists in vietnam, which he described very well. Why dont you tell us about how those protests started and what, i think this is really when madame nhu filter place, a bad figure in history around the buddhists protest to if you will remember, there was the famous pictures of the Buddhist Monks burning themselves at traffic stops. I think they were seven who committed suicide that way, the way of protesting against the government. It started with a law that had been on the books since colonial time. No flag was allowed to flya state like but, of course, nobody really paid attention to the. There had just been a catholic festival and white and gold flags have been flying all over, and so for the buddhists birthday sometime in may, one of the brothers, so theres the president , his brother, madame nhus husband who was kind of ahead of the secret police, also in charge of all the politics, he was kind of a guy who did the dirty deeds, and there were a few other brothers, one of whom was the archbishop of a city in central vietnam. When is coming into town one when he noticed that buddhist flag was flying to i. So he ordered people to take it down and there was this backlash by the buddhists of why are you enforcing this random law now against the backing down and saying, youre right, were making a mess out of this, they cracked down and it was suddenly a protest by the buddhists. People started firing on them. People were killed, and so then assessing we are sorry, things got out of hand. The family played the communist. Blame the communist. Sort quickly turn into a mess, and basically the buddhists repression was less, less repression in the way we think of now than more of a vehicle for every grievance you think of because no one had been allowed to say anything against this family. But 90 of the country was buddhists so anyone could identify with this, youre putting down these people, so it would everybody jumped on the bandwagon. Elderly monks were self immolating, which means they were letting themselves on fire. When madame nhu solid, she sounded like marie antoinette. You know, great, lets clap our hands and have a barbecue. The most cruel response you get to old Buddhist Monk lighting himself on fire and that just spread like wildfire around the world. People couldnt believe that she could be so callous. Now, from madame nhus perception was the buddhists have been intoxicated, which doesnt mean drunk, it means poison. They been intoxicated by communism everywhere a very loose knit association organization. There were no strict rules coming in, coming out. Madame nhu was pretty sure they had already been infiltrated by kindness. And it turns out actually that by 1968, the United States even agreed, yes, they had been used as a cover by communist. But it was such a shocking thing to say and then to be so light casual about suicide, its unforgivable. Its never, i dont think its ever a good tactic for a leader who is dependent on foreign aid to castigate Buddhist Monks for protesting in the name of religious freedom and whatever else. And that is really when i think at that point that the u. S. Government knows that is a problem on its hands, and it passively supports the coup that will,. Correct. In august, president kennedy okayed a change in government. The new ambassador was sent over to saigon goes with the understanding that he is there to go look for alternatives to the summit has been in power now. And it takes some, theres some false starts but, you know, some real alternatives have finally been identified. The brothers are killed in november 1, 1963, which many of you know thats just a few weeks before kennedy himself was assassinated. So madame nhu is a conspiracy figure in some of these who killed kennedy questions. Many think it has something do with madame nhu, but i can assure you it doesnt. But it was a terrible, terrible time. And so kennedy seems really shocked that the brothers had been killed. By all accounts he gets up when he hears the news and he is visibly shaken, cant believe it, they killed the brothers. But he was the one who sort of gave the okay to go ahead and topple this allied country, this from the regime and overthrow the. For him to think they couldve got any other way, a little naive. At the time she was on a tour of the United States. Did she believe that if she came to the United States to convince people that there was a grave threat, if our government was not supported that communists would topple South Vietnam quite quickly. So she came to the United States on a speaking tour, and quite a spectacular tour. She went to a lot of colleges, did a lot of television. And it was probably a lot harder come at a time is a lot harder to do that than it probably is today i think. What was her reception like when she came to the United States . It was very next. So as you say she came to the United States because she been asked to leave vietnam. By now the buddhists thing that really escalated. The United States thought the only thing, th the way we can tp this down restore any order is if madame nhu just lease. So this is been something that the brothers have not going to but finally they said okay, madame nhu, youve got to get out of vietnam. Shut up and basically. So what is she go . She comes right to the United States and goes on it this press relations to. She doesnt understand, she was invited to speak at harvard and columbia and georgetown, and shes also invited by meet the press and all of these press organizations. She doesnt understand why she feels like the government hasnt rolled out the red carpet for her. Was and she invited . She doesnt get this separation between the press and the government. Because in her country of course like the government, the press can only see what the government wants them to see. For her it was really totally befuddling to the end of her days. They said to go home. Why didnt they want me to . She goes, ghost in your comment goes to washington, d. C. , comes to chicago. She stays in the blackstone hotel, and what my favorite poems of the trip is she goes to dallas and theres a ranch there and she gets invited to go shooting. So her daughter dresses up in like western gear and apparel has the first kind of teenage romance with a texas guy. And her reception that madame nhu gets from her mother, was very worried about madame nhus visit to the United States so she posts a state department has had an estimate as has madame nhu really shouldnt come you. I have arent all that the in these to throw tomatoes after and if they see her to run her over with the car. This is her mother. She does get tomatoes for better. She also gets Standing Ovations from fordham, from georgetown, from a lot of Catholic Education speed is good to say, she really mapped out the Catholic College and universities, i can or as part of her tour was she presented at that point as her catholicism commune, very important part of her political ideology, if you want to call it that. Was she seen in that light, in 1963 in the United States . I assume to the extent that she was hitting, you know, places like fordham, georgetown, they were very much selfconscious that. Was the part of her reception as well . I do think that part of the political closet of the South Vietnamese government was based on something called personalism which is this philosophy that started in france in the 20s and it was a catholic closet, supposed be an alternative to pure capitalism and communism but it was kind of his third way. That was a cornerstone of their government. No one could quite understand how that translated to South Vietnam, and so that was really the problem wasnt marketing. But the regime had bought all the property outside of rome, and property of course enormous pretty and expenses of the bought large tracts of them with the idea that they would send a South Vietnamese functionaries over to rome to go get in doctor naked in their version of personalism. And then come back to South Vietnam. That didnt work out so well for them but it was a place that madame nhu after her family was itself empowered, she go back to the land outside of rome which was not very valuable and sell it off piece by piece. I was always curious about that in a relationships with kennedy, the fact he disliked her so much and was were interested in how the catholicism worked into that. You would almost think that there might be some kind of, you know, sense of closeness between her and kennedy that was obviously not there. If anyone, the person who had the fondest thoughts about it would have been lbj. Thats right. Madame nhu convinced he was flirting with her but i think he must have flirted with everyone. But the connections between the family in saigon and the Kennedy Family in washington come is really, its uncanny. On paper they look like they shouldve gotten along great. Catholic dems, both governments run by a lot of family members, and very anticommunist. So they should have really gotten along well, but as it turned out they didnt, and Jacqueline Kennedy was a real critic of madame nhu. She thought madame nhu was just sort of pushy, what did she call her . She called her everything that jack found unattractive, when sort oppressed, she boasted about her own marriage to president kennedy saying they had this marriage which so what is that . Who knows, sort of submissive and madame nhu is anything but submissive. Starring the power of full comments iconic canadian asian woman. Or shes a very submissive kind of geisha girls. So theres these two ways asian women have been portrayed. And so, when women rise to certain level of politic