Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 463 - Was Madame Nhu The Downfall Of The South? Viet History Makers - Madame Nhu

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463 - Was Madame Nhu The Downfall Of The South? Viet History Makers - Madame Nhu · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to the Viet history makers, sub series with Kevin Fam and myself, today we are returning with a really controversial person and we're highlighting somebody who, you know, we think that
0:17
[SPEAKER_02]: the question of patriarchy and patriarchy and Vietnam plays a big role in the history of the politics and this particular person, you know, the question is did the strong patriarchy create this person over the years?
0:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back Kevin.
0:38
[SPEAKER_00]: good to be back as always, you know, I have to admit, Ken, I remember during our first episode, we had finished and we were like, okay, who are we going to talk about in this series?
0:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And you mentioned Madame New and my first reaction was O'Gahno.
0:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
0:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
0:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would we do that?
0:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
0:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what do you think of when you hear the name Madame New?
1:01
[SPEAKER_00]: What comes to mind?
1:03
[SPEAKER_02]: dragon lady corruption things that were wrong with the South.
1:09
[SPEAKER_02]: All of those things, all of the things that could have gone wrong with the South.
1:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But there also is this incredible boldness, I think that comes with her.
1:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I have to admit, in the process of researching for this episode today, I actually changed my perspective on that on you.
1:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It's become more complex nuance, so I want to share that with you today.
1:32
[SPEAKER_02]: But, and that's the thing, I think, with so many historical figures of Vietnam or any country, you know, I think
1:41
[SPEAKER_02]: as we get into understanding who people are, there's layers in their sides, there's angles to people that sometimes require a lot more.
1:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, the more people are looking to Martin Luther King, the more people realize that, you know, who's a flawed man as well?
1:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
2:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And everybody has their version of Luther King, you know?
2:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Like any hero or villain, somebody is going to interpret them differently.
2:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Madam Yume, she seen as a sinister woman, as you mentioned a dragon lady, she was quite powerful in the South Vietnamese regime of President Godin Zia.
2:24
[SPEAKER_00]: She was married to Godin Zia's brother, Godin Yume, and the brother was not just a brother, but he was the chief
2:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And she is famous in the eyes of the world because when Buddhist monks were burning themselves to death in 1963 to protest the Zoom government, she famously responded by calling it a barbecue.
2:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said, let them burn and we shall clap our hands.
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that is how the world knows her.
3:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's the taste that we were left with
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
3:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is actually really significant for the Vietnam War in general, because President John F. Kennedy, at the time, is going to say to his close friend Paul Faye.
3:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, he said, and I'm quoting him, that God damn bitch.
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: She's responsible.
3:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I apologize for my language, but I was quoting the president at the time.
3:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But what does that quote mean to you, Ken?
3:51
[SPEAKER_02]: She was the warm in the apple.
3:54
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think she was the one who really screwed things up for the bigger politics for the US.
4:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that if she wasn't around, you know, if she wasn't around the brothers,
4:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if they would have been assassinated.
4:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's like everything to say, right?
4:16
[SPEAKER_00]: This is really interesting, Ken, because my first reaction hearing Kennedy say that was, well, look at how misogynistic he is.
4:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He's just blaming all the women.
4:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He's blaming the only woman when it's all the men's fault.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's saying, she's responsible.
4:32
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a great perspective.
4:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't think of that.
4:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, that's where my brain should have gone first.
4:38
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I think about things like this, I don't think men are women.
4:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I just think if it was another guy, Kennedy could have said that, Goddamn asshole.
4:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And he could be referring to a man.
4:50
[SPEAKER_02]: It just happens to be that the label is on a woman and he has to call her a bitch.
4:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I get it.
4:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have to be very cognizant of these gender kind of these gender calling out because it's a woman.
5:08
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think if it was a man, I think that leaders will probably refer to other people in ways that are, you know, I think my radar is going up when there's racial
5:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Really, yeah, this is, I'm tap dancing right now because I'm trying to figure out how to make it a fair reply, but I can't do myself out of this right now.
5:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It's showing my colors.
5:43
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like, ah, I don't, you know.
5:46
[SPEAKER_00]: We all deep down, patriarchy on this subject.
5:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I agree.
5:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I grew up in the can, we grew up.
5:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We cannot escape it.
5:56
[SPEAKER_00]: we cannot become woke just by thinking about it.
6:01
[SPEAKER_02]: But thank you Kevin for bringing this up.
6:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it is a problem.
6:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that if I can't cop up to it and admit that, I didn't think about that right away.
6:12
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't think about, oh, there's one woman in this whole like country and Kennedy's calling her out.
6:19
[SPEAKER_02]: That is really a problem.
6:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe, yeah, maybe.
6:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But let's let's turn.
6:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So she becomes a symbol, a woman who is a symbol, a really bad symbol for many Americans who are against the war.
6:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Because in the American anti-war eyes, she symbolizes the cruelty and correctness of the South Vietnamese government.
6:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And the cruelty of the
6:50
[SPEAKER_00]: American government, which is supporting the South Vietnamese government.
6:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So Americans call her the Dragon Lady, and she looks in acts like a Dragon Lady or a diabolical femme fatale.
7:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a term in French.
7:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, okay.
7:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so that that's the another thing.
7:09
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like what came first the image of the dragon lady or did this dragon lady come first and then we've all adopted this idea of this dragon lady as a result of a madam knew I'm just joking around, but you know like that that is a reality as well.
7:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
7:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So the femme fatale, the caricature of a femme fatale is a woman who's mysterious, seductive, beautiful, but uses her beauty in a way to trap men in dangerous situations.
7:41
[SPEAKER_00]: She uses her beauty to manipulate and betray, which is very smart, very gold oriented.
7:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the femme fatale caricature.
7:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that Americans are going to just project that onto Metamune.
7:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, she kind of helps this character, caricature when she says things like, quote, power is wonderful.
8:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Total power is totally wonderful.
8:06
[SPEAKER_02]: How is that not menacing?
8:08
[SPEAKER_02]: How is that not, you know, putting her right in the, the spotlight for being such a cocky and bad human being.
8:18
[SPEAKER_00]: But, but maybe I wonder though, don't all humans want power?
8:24
[SPEAKER_00]: No, some of my students, I have some and some of them are like, yeah, I want power.
8:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to follow me, you know?
8:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that all people, I don't even think most people are like that.
8:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I think most people when given the opportunity of power back out a little bit, you know, there's a heavy responsibility to power.
8:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Can do you watch the white lotus?
8:49
[SPEAKER_02]: No, but I
8:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, it's so good, but there's this one moment where this character tells us a little brother, you know most people their followers actually.
9:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
9:00
[SPEAKER_00]: and most people are lost and they just want to follow someone.
9:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So you just need to seize that opportunity.
9:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think there's a lot of truth in that.
9:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and you know what it is, it just boils down to energy levels.
9:13
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, most people are lazy.
9:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Most of us are lazy and I don't mean that in a in any crazy way.
9:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I just think that we just want to make a lot of money in joy or life.
9:25
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, if you say most people are really money hungry or want money, I would agree with that.
9:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Most of us don't want to be, you know, in a mess, in a mess at work, in power struggles, nobody wants that.
9:40
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, so I think that's a rare, I think that's a rare trait in a human.
9:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
9:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, so she says that power is wonderful.
9:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of me was also thinking that if you were a communist Vietnamese, you probably would have been happy when she made those remarks about the Buddhist, right?
9:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it helped your side because everyone will hate her and her government and that will help your side.
10:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's possible that maybe she unwittingly
10:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But Ken, so why should we talk about her in reading about her life and her world?
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that you learn a lot more than just her.
10:25
[SPEAKER_00]: You learn about how Vietnamese people, some Vietnamese people collaborated with the French, with the Japanese and with the Americans.
10:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You learn about some of their reasons.
10:37
[SPEAKER_00]: their strategies, their calculations, you learn about gender roles and expectations in Vietnamese society.
10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just want to recommend a pretty good book to those who are listening if they want to know more about Madame New.
10:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called Finding the Dragon Lady, the Mystery of Vietnam's Madame New, and it's a book by Monique Brinson Demerary, published in 2013.
11:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
11:03
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, let's jump into Madam News live.
11:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's go one one one last or more thing to say, I remember growing up in my household Madam News was almost not a saint, but she was definitely elevated to a very good person.
11:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Really?
11:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
11:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
11:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
11:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
11:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Like how so?
11:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what are some examples?
11:26
[SPEAKER_02]: She was strong, she helped her husband and her husband's brother.
11:33
[SPEAKER_02]: She was a good woman.
11:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember Catholics in my world, really revered and respected her.
11:42
[SPEAKER_02]: She was a leader.
11:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't recall a whole lot of badmouthing.
11:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And until I got into the bigger world of like,
11:50
[SPEAKER_02]: families that were Buddhist, families that were not really practicing Catholic as a religion anymore.
11:57
[SPEAKER_02]: People who kind of were leaving Vietnam for so many years now and understanding the sort of the bigger political picture.
12:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I began to see her as a different person, as I'm exposed to more Vietnamese around the world.
12:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean around the world as and remove from the inner Catholic protection.
12:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, now that you mentioned that, I think I have the same experience, because I cannot recall hearing it, but not about her.
12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I grew up raised Catholic.
12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, I only started hearing bad things about her when I got into college.
12:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I just wanted to bring that up because, you know, that's, you know, something that a lot of us, I think when we hear stories from Vietnam, we're normally we're given just sort of like what are family things of these some issues.
12:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that we as, you know, people who are on this journey, curious, we need to just be able to open up all these things without any, you know, any inhibitions.
13:13
[SPEAKER_00]: John, John late swan, so she was not mad.
13:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm new all the bad.
13:17
[SPEAKER_00]: That was her original name.
13:19
[SPEAKER_00]: She was born in Hanoi and she grew up in privilege as you might imagine.
13:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Her father was a wealthy businessman and he was a lawyer.
13:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He was apparently the first Vietnamese to become a lawyer or to get a law degree in 1923 or 26, I believe, I forget the exact date.
13:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But her mother was a cousin of Emperor Baodai.
13:42
[SPEAKER_00]: and she was raised by servants, and she took French in school and ballet lessons.
13:50
[SPEAKER_00]: She went to a French school with French children, so she spoke French with her parents.
13:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And already, you can kind of imagine, right?
13:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is a young Vietnamese girl growing up surrounded by French people.
14:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that word power is now under like I completely understand why she thinks that that's a good thing now because I think if you're floating around your own small world and you're hanging out with powerful people speaking your own secret French language.
14:23
[SPEAKER_02]: and you're hovering over other people, the peasants of the town that you live in, yeah, power is gonna be very seductive and keeping power is important for some little girl like that.
14:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Hmm, interesting, yeah.
14:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, would you do you think that she, she became detached from?
14:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, for sure, for sure,
14:53
[SPEAKER_00]: in a place like Vietnam I mean you're now your heads above everybody else you're you're not even when you walk you don't even touch the floor anymore yeah i mean this i think this is a good question though i really wonder like how how how attached was she to the Vietnamese at all like did she mingle with the Vietnamese did she feel like a nexian or did she feel more of a connection yeah to French kids but one thing we know is that her best friend was actually a Japanese girl
15:23
[SPEAKER_00]: in school when she was growing up and that's interesting, right?
15:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they felt like outsiders together.
15:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So another interesting thing about her growing up was that her mother, Madame Jun, would host French guests in their home.
15:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And her mother would continue this tradition that women would do in France where they would have a salon, you know?
15:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So to invite to guests and so that they can debate, have intellectual philosophical discussions.
15:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So she would invite the mother would invite French guests to the home.
15:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And then after 1939, Japanese gas, because as we know, the Japanese occupy Vietnam starting around 1939, 1940 during the Second World War.
16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And so...
16:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm quoting from the book by Monique Demary that I had mentioned, quote, there were spirited debates about the proper role of women, the value of education for women, and the balance between family health and public life, and how can Vietnam become modern and free?
16:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So these were the sorts of debates that the parents would discuss in the home,
16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: One interesting thing is that the French authorities described Madame New's mother as, quote, beautiful and very intriguing.
16:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In animal circles, it is known that she is the one in charge.
16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: She directs her husband.
16:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So her mom is very, I guess, it in charge, right?
17:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Dominary, maybe?
17:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the mother, Madam Chu, even took a Japanese lover in 1939, is in that interest.
17:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's so very non-traditional.
17:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can now imagine how open sort of Madam You might have been, in thinking of other ways of living, other than the Vietnamese traditional Catholic way,
17:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but also like think about how this is probably strategic.
17:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The Japanese take power in Vietnam, and then immediately the mother dates a Japanese ambassador, right?
17:49
[SPEAKER_00]: She's looking out for her family.
17:51
[SPEAKER_00]: She's trying to make sure that her family is in the good graces of whoever's in power in Vietnam.
17:59
[SPEAKER_02]: That's some next level, some next level thinking.
18:06
[SPEAKER_00]: To the French, it was an ominous sign that a woman, a smart and ambitious as Madame Choum, would choose the Japanese over the French.
18:15
[SPEAKER_00]: She was doing what she could to help secure her family's good position in quickly shifting political sands.
18:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So her mother is strategic thinking about her family,
18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1943, when Madame New is 18, by the way, I'm just calling her Madame New, that's not her name, but just to keep this simple.
18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: She's not Madame New yet.
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But when she's 18, she marries no denue, and then she becomes Madame New.
18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: But they had met when she was 15, so three years before that.
18:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting is that I think it's possible
18:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, like, maybe flirting with no denue or had a thing that that was what I got from a book a little bit.
19:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
19:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It gets crazier and crazier and crazier and crazier with her because you have to keep in mind that the mother of Madame U was not much older, I mean, she had Madame U when she was like 16.
19:22
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it might be wrong here.
19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have the information in front of me, but it was either like 15, 16 or something when she was really young.
19:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
19:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about Nodinew.
19:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
19:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you know much about Nodinew?
19:36
[SPEAKER_02]: No, because we did his, we did an episode about his brother and we Probably should do one about Nodinew.
19:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But more importantly, we should probably do one about madam news mother because she seems to be the The really colorful one here, but no, I don't know much about Nodinew
19:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
20:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It kind of surprised me because, I mean, I grew up hearing that the Ziem family was very anti-communist, so they must be like anti-worker or something, this is my only impression in my head.
20:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I learn that, the father would say things like, a man must understand the life of a farmer.
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And anyway, so it makes sense to me now that their philosophy would be personalism, which is taken from
20:51
[SPEAKER_00]: a French Catholic philosopher named Immanuel Moonier, who was very sympathetic to Marxism.
20:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So they were explicitly anti-capitalists and they cared about workers.
21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, learning that kind of surprises me.
21:06
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a present.
21:08
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a joke surprises me.
21:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
21:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, Metamune is then later captured and held in a communist controlled village,
21:20
[SPEAKER_00]: two years after she marries Nodinu.
21:22
[SPEAKER_00]: She talks about how she ate just two bowls of rice a day and then
21:28
[SPEAKER_00]: As of the South ramps up their war with the Communists, she founded an organization called the Women's Solidarity Movement, and this is to fight Communists in the South.
21:41
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was a criticism that the members of this movement were paid twice as much as the conscripted men, and this drained money from the South Vietnamese army, and it did nothing.
21:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's another criticism of her.
21:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And she had one official position, which was a deputy to the National Assembly, so she was voted in by Catholic refugees coming from North Vietnam.
22:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, back to her husband, no denue.
22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's a political theorist and advisor to Ziam, and he runs the secret police that will send opponents to prison in former French prison islands,
22:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Madam New was raised Buddhist, but she converts to Catholicism when she married, so go to New.
22:31
[SPEAKER_02]: That's crazy.
22:31
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you bring in barbecuing monks when you're raised as a Buddhist and you convert to Catholicism?
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good point.
22:42
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good point.
22:44
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good point.
22:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good point.
22:45
[SPEAKER_02]: How they got most to me?
22:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I wonder.
22:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I did not know that.
22:50
[SPEAKER_00]: if she ever, I wonder if she ever really identified as being Buddhist?
22:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
22:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
22:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe when you jump into a power position and you know, you are in a different religion, you look back, like sometimes when I look back on my,
23:09
[SPEAKER_02]: My years as a Catholic, there's a rebellious nature to how I feel about those years, right?
23:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I gotta put that in check.
23:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to really put that in check the way I communicate to the world.
23:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So, NoDinZM comes to power in 1955.
23:24
[SPEAKER_00]: that's when Vietnam is divided into the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, in the north, Vietnam, Zanchou, Gonghua, and the Republic of Vietnam in the south, Vietnam, Gonghua.
23:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So, remember that Nodin Ziem was able to consolidate power over many different competing groups in Saigon.
23:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yet they've been swinging the gangs, religious groups,
23:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Metamu would urge Nodinziim to act and she would always kind of be domineering about it, and this embarrassed him actually, so he exiled her to a convent in Hong Kong.
24:04
[SPEAKER_00]: which is kind of funny to think about.
24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But then he changes his mind and he says, okay, come back and he takes her advice.
24:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's how he's able to smash his opponents apparently he listens to her.
24:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So she and her husband keep very close to Nodin Ziem that even live with him.
24:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And apparently she would get really angry and get it.
24:25
[SPEAKER_00]: She would get into violent rage when she thought that Ziam was showing any weakness to the communist or any other regime's opponents.
24:35
[SPEAKER_00]: So some say that she was kind of like a counterweight to Ziam.
24:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So Ziam is shy.
24:41
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not confident, but she is the opposite of that.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's going to,
24:47
[SPEAKER_00]: give him his allies and his critics unwelcome advice threats.
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And she would really just badger his AIDS.
24:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's quite dominant here, right?
24:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's gonna argue with Ziem and be dominant.
25:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Now for sure, she and Ziem never have any kind of,
25:06
[SPEAKER_00]: romantic relationship or sexual relationships.
25:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing like that, right?
25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: ZM is very prudish and one time ZM questioned the modesty of her low cut dress and she snaps back and she says, it's not your neck that sticks out.
25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It's mine.
25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So shut up.
25:25
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I
25:26
[SPEAKER_02]: The more you talk about her, the more I think about how we are sounding to people who are older than us, or to people who are sympathetic to that time in the South.
25:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I can hear people like my mom and her friends saying, but you guys are, where are you guys getting this information from?
25:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And you guys didn't live what we live through, they're needed to be a powerful force with those
25:56
[SPEAKER_02]: we needed somebody powerful like Madame U to crush the communists.
26:01
[SPEAKER_02]: You guys don't know what you guys were talking about.
26:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Like as I'm sitting here listening to this.
26:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Hold on, but I, but what I feel like one can hear what we're saying and be like, yeah, we're showing how Madame U was a force a powerful force, right, right, right.
26:15
[SPEAKER_02]: But in my head, I'm like fighting back because I'm softer, I think, you know, when I think about the killing of the opposition,
26:24
[SPEAKER_02]: how brutal you need to be.
26:26
[SPEAKER_02]: All of these things, you know, like, there's a lot going on in my mind because of how controversial she is, you know, and I think 50 years later or 60 years later when you're looking at history, it's just different.
26:41
[SPEAKER_02]: We're sitting in, we're talking about different contextual clues here.
26:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So in 1958, she helps get a bill passed that outlaws divorce and abortion and contraception, even dancing and wrestling and polygamy.
26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's very puritanical, you would say.
27:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But also this takes power away from men.
27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Because before a man could just divorce whenever they want, or they could get more wives, but now she's going to actually take away that power from men.
27:14
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1962, she survives a bombing the bombing of the presidential palace by two South Vietnamese pilots who were rebelling against Ziem.
27:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was actually a hole from the explosion and she fell through it.
27:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And she thought that
27:31
[SPEAKER_00]: who were beginning to turn their backs away on Xiam and the news.
27:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So in 1963, she goes to the United States to essentially promote Xiam and to defend his role in South Vietnam.
27:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But, and this is pretty interesting.
27:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Even her father, who was at the time the South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington, he refused to meet her.
27:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So her father, her parents and her mother are turning away from her.
28:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And at universities, American students would throw eggs at Madame New.
28:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And when she was in LA in November of 1963, she learns that a coup had killed Ziem and her husband.
28:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So they were shot in the back of an army truck.
28:21
[SPEAKER_00]: After that, she leaves, of course, she goes into exile in Paris.
28:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, she's not going to go back to Vietnam, right?
28:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So she goes to Paris, and then from there, she moves to Rome, and she passes away in Rome.
28:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But so essentially, we don't really hear from her until South Vietnam falls to the communist, and then she comes out and she says none of this would have happened if the
28:50
[SPEAKER_00]: interesting piece of information here is that her brother was charged with murdering her parents.
28:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's brutal.
29:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, so that's the how the book by that I had mentioned earlier by Monique, how it starts with the crime scene of her, of her brother strangling to death,
29:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is happening, he's convicted in Vietnam.
29:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I forget where he was convicted.
29:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But so the dispute was over his inheritance.
29:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there was always deep deep tension between, well, not always, but later, her parents publicly disowned her in 1963 and on her last trip to the United States in 1963, her parents left her standing on their doorstep
29:51
[SPEAKER_00]: with the door shut in her face and in her father called her power mad and they said, we don't wish to know you anymore and her mother urged Americans to throw eggs in tomatoes at her.
30:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, she's going to go on to actually defend her brother and she's going to say that her brother didn't do it.
30:12
[SPEAKER_00]: That
30:12
[SPEAKER_00]: that this was a conspiracy by pro-cogniness forces trying to make them look bad.
30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, that's a lot of tragedy there.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
30:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, she basically lost everybody in her family, you know, the two brothers, mom and dad, and the brother.
30:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, if the brother is, you know, convicted, he's locked up, loses all five of these people that are very close to your
30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I don't know if he actually went to jail.
30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he, you know, he was seen as insane or something like that.
30:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know the details there.
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But okay, at this point, we've gone through some of the major things in her life.
30:56
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing that I want to talk about, the thing that changed my perspective of her, is this speech that I read by her,
31:02
[SPEAKER_00]: She gave this speech in October 29 in 1956 at Independence Palace.
31:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And the title of the speech was the Vietnamese woman in the course of history.
31:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have to admit, when I was reading this speech, I was just blown away because she sounds like, she sounds like a philosopher.
31:20
[SPEAKER_00]: She sounds like a political theorist and anthropologist, a historian, a feminist,
31:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's quite a sophisticated text.
31:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about it.
31:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So just some context.
31:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is October, 1956.
31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: A few days earlier, October 26, Moden Zim had announced.
31:42
[SPEAKER_00]: the adoption of a Constitution for South Vietnam and the Constitution gave Ziem the power to declare and rule by emergency whenever he wished.
31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So it gives him the right to suspend temporarily the freedoms of everybody, like the freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, other civil rights.
32:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's kind of like Ziem saying, I'm in power now, right?
32:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she comes out and she gives
32:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's go into the arguments here.
32:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very feminist speech.
32:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So she starts by saying that.
32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: In Vietnam, if a boy, a little boy, shows any sign of intelligence then the family will nurture, will praise it, you know, will guide it, will help it.
32:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to quote her now.
32:32
[SPEAKER_00]: If the sun were to show a bit of intelligence in addition to some inclination to independence, the family dazzled by these striking signs of a promising character would never try to inhibit it.
32:45
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the daughter, it's entirely different.
32:48
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, if she showed such signs, the family immediately desperate at the idea of having brought forth a little monster, only for fear of ridicule and attitude created by the prejudices of a patriarchal society, does all within its power to snuff out those germinations of character and reduce them to a normal pattern that is to nothingness.
33:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's saying that if a boy shows intelligence and independence, Vietnamese people, families are going to praise, but if a girl does it, they're going to snuff it out as tuna's possible.
33:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is because of patriarchy.
33:26
[SPEAKER_02]: She's not wrong.
33:27
[SPEAKER_02]: She's definitely not wrong.
33:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And we used to it today too in families.
33:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know what, when I read that, it suddenly like made a lot more sense to me.
33:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like she's really angry at patriarchy.
33:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's really rebelling.
33:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And that in my view is pretty cool.
33:46
[SPEAKER_00]: That's like, yeah, admirable now.
33:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Now this image of the angry fierce, domineering dragon lady makes sense.
33:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like, she's a rebelling against patriarchy.
33:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And another, yeah.
34:00
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I love it.
34:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that we're learning about that detail, and I think why not, right?
34:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Why not have that situation happen?
34:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I think it's...
34:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The growth of a country requires these sort of thorns in the side of the country, you know, it requires it.
34:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And but you can't take away this whole, you know, monks in barbecue statement and that's hurtful.
34:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But then you begin to understand like there's complexity in all of these people.
34:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
34:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So her indignation, her viciousness, her anger.
34:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Once we put it in the context of
34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly we're more sympathetic, right?
34:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So this interesting part of this speech is where she talks about sociologists.
34:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So she says there are many sociologists who believe that primitive human societies
34:58
[SPEAKER_00]: were matriarchal.
34:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I don't know how correct she is.
35:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I don't know which social sociologist she's referring to.
35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what they say in the anthropology literature, but she says that there are many tribes in Africa in the North Pole, in Tibet, all over the world,
35:17
[SPEAKER_00]: that have been matriarchal.
35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So a matriarchy is when women are in power, a patriarchy is when men are in power.
35:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And she says that it's easy to see why there was a matriarchy a long time ago.
35:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And the logic is this, the men would go hunt.
35:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And women would stay in the caves to do everything else.
35:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They would make clothes with the skin of the animals that were hunted, or make cloth from cotton and other plants.
35:44
[SPEAKER_00]: They would tame the animals.
35:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The woman would divide the catch as she wished, because the man was too exhausted to do anything else.
35:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's using like a logic, it like makes sense, right?
35:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the man does hunting and then the woman has all the power in the home, which is real power because apparently in this imagined world where it's just hunter-gathers, there is no public sphere.
36:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the important part is in the cave.
36:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So she argues that the man
36:20
[SPEAKER_02]: There's anthropologists like Margaret Meade who wrote about all of these, you know, setups with the patriarchy.
36:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can imagine that, well, I think Vietnam was a patriarchy about 1,000 years ago.
36:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we, I don't know if it was you and I or another professor that brought that up.
36:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Clearly, there's history of patriarchy in the world.
36:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's
36:45
[SPEAKER_02]: probably has made sense.
36:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I think Egyptians had matriarch as well.
36:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, one thing I hear is that we shouldn't confuse matriarchy with matrilineal society.
36:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, right, right.
37:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And matrilineal is the birth of the lineage that comes from the birth of the mother.
37:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Like the Jewish religion is matrilineal, right?
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
37:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And so some, I think I don't know much about it, but I think some people are going to say, there's no hard evidence that there were any real make sure articles.
37:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Anywhere, anywhere, you know, but but also in Vietnam, this could, there, this might be somewhat of a myth.
37:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course there might be truth to it, but
37:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But I've heard some people say that, well, this is one way for Vietnamese nationalists to identify a pre-confusion existence of the Vietnamese people, you know, to say that that is what made the Vietnamese distinct interesting.
37:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's no real power structure in all of mankind you're saying.
37:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I've heard that I don't know if anybody has identified with great confidence that there have been maturical societies anywhere in time.
38:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Audience, if you're listening, if you're paying attention to this very particular topic, we would love to hear from you because this is, first time I've ever heard anybody push back about maturarchy.
38:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if it's true that the high batom took power for those two years where they ran a, you know, a monarchy, then that is an example of a matriarchy.
38:31
[SPEAKER_00]: But of course, that's like legend, right?
38:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, do we know that?
38:34
[SPEAKER_00]: No, we do not.
38:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
38:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So, so, so going back to the speech by Metamune.
38:40
[SPEAKER_00]: As I was reading this, it almost seemed like it wasn't just a feminist text in the sense of advocating moral equality of women and men, but at moments it almost sounded like a woman's supremacy text that women were better than men.
38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she'll say things like quote,
39:06
[SPEAKER_00]: but that she has even emancipated herself to become man's Lord and Master.
39:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost as if like women were meant to rule.
39:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she says that then comes along patriarchy.
39:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And in patriarchy, women don't hate men.
39:25
[SPEAKER_00]: They just want liberty.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So matriarchy, which she thinks really existed,
39:37
[SPEAKER_00]: But patriarchy, she says, imprisoned women, it gave them no legal protection, and men made all kinds of laws and customs to reinforce imprisoning women.
39:50
[SPEAKER_00]: She's a deep thinker.
39:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
39:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she gives a very anthropological sociological account.
39:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she says in a matriarchy, polyandry is rational.
40:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So polyandry is when women have more than one husband.
40:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So she says, it's rational.
40:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's why it's rational because if your husband goes hunting this like the caveman times, if your husband goes hunting, he's far away.
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But you need kids, so you couple
40:22
[SPEAKER_00]: many husbands.
40:24
[SPEAKER_00]: But in a patriarchy, polygamy, which is when a man has more than one woman, that's irrational, because the woman is already confined at home.
40:35
[SPEAKER_00]: She's always at hand, quote, so one should be sufficient for each man.
40:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I love the logic.
40:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
40:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I like this logic that
40:49
[SPEAKER_00]: any argument for polygamy, so men having more than one woman is really an excuse to quote satisfy a male vice and to subject women.
41:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she goes on to give many examples of ways of subjecting women.
41:05
[SPEAKER_00]: She talks about physically disabling women.
41:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So foot binding in China.
41:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So she talks about how the Lord liked small feet on women because he knew that she wouldn't go far.
41:19
[SPEAKER_00]: she wouldn't go alone.
41:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the West, women wear corsets for the pleasure of their master.
41:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she goes on to point to all these examples throughout Vietnamese history of the Vietnamese people having a long tradition of the matriarchy.
41:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So she says,
41:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The Vietnamese have always been a matriarchy way back in time.
41:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You can see it in many legends.
41:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we start with the Queen Oka, right?
41:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The famous with the King, Lacklunk one, right?
41:51
[SPEAKER_00]: If we had 100 children, the kings, half of kids went into the ocean and the Queen raises.
41:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So we are all
41:59
[SPEAKER_00]: ruled by the queen, you know, that's the origins of the Vietnamese people.
42:04
[SPEAKER_00]: She mentions, do you know who this is, uh, to teach in, she's a woman warrior for, uh, who is born around, 225 AD and, and this quote is quite famous.
42:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I see this around, but I'm gonna read it.
42:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is by Jiu, Tijin, so she says, I wish to ride the Tempest, walk over the unchanged waves, behead the sharks of the sea of the east, clean the national territory to the frontiers of our enemies to save the people from their distress.
42:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I will never condescend to imitate those who bow their heads, bending the back to remain the servants of others.
42:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a pretty bad ass quote.
42:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, she's saying, you know, I'm never gonna be a servant.
42:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna be back enemies.
42:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So Madam Yuh goes on to, you know, this is a weird part in this speech.
43:01
[SPEAKER_00]: She praises examples of Vietnamese women who had what she calls feminine virtue.
43:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And she gives an example, because when I saw that term feminine virtue, I was like, what do you mean by that?
43:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And she tells the story of one woman, her husband left to be an ambassador to China, whatever.
43:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So she waited faithfully at home.
43:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she learns that her husband died.
43:24
[SPEAKER_00]: while he was away.
43:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when his body came back, she killed herself.
43:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, that's feminine virtue.
43:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
43:36
[SPEAKER_02]: That requires some unpacking because I think that maybe we don't understand the full contextual background here.
43:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
43:44
[SPEAKER_02]: It's crazy.
43:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I think more.
43:45
[SPEAKER_02]: The more I hear about Madame Mew, the more sympathy I have for her,
43:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I really do, somebody who's, you know, really struggling in a sea of patriarchy at the time.
44:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It really, you really needed somebody like that to really turn the ship around when it comes to women's rights and just the understanding of of women's roles and how unfair it was.
44:19
[SPEAKER_00]: In Vietnam, in the, at the turn of the century, in the early 20th century, you can find many manuals explaining how a woman and how a girl should behave.
44:31
[SPEAKER_00]: like these were manuals of behavior.
44:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just want to quote from one of these manuals.
44:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a classic Vietnamese text, you know, it would spell out the ideals of femininity.
44:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And so these were meant to be read aloud or sung for easy memorizing.
44:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm just going to quote from it.
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So it says, do not talk to a man who is not a relative.
44:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not say hello to him, so as not to arouse suspicion.
45:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not frequent women who are not virtuous, do not alter your clothing without reason.
45:07
[SPEAKER_00]: When sewing, do not let your needle be idle, when alone do not sing or declaim poetry.
45:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not look out the window with the pence of air.
45:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not shrug, do not sigh, do not laugh before you have even said a word.
45:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you not gossip or talk crudely, I've heard my mom throughout the years quote her grandfather and her father when they're teaching my mom how to be a woman.
45:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I've heard these things don't show your teeth, don't laugh, don't
45:45
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, don't wear a clothing that, you know, and I sit trickling through my mom and really backwards thinking.
45:52
[SPEAKER_02]: It really is detrimental, I think, to the existence of a woman.
45:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think about my mom and how she relates to my daughter and sometimes I'm thinking, I don't really, I haven't caught her laying down the law yet because my daughter's only eight, but if that ever came up, I think I would have to like intervene.
46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: interesting, interesting.
46:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, yeah.
46:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So it goes to show that this really was a think and Vietnam and stretches across time here.
46:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
46:23
[SPEAKER_00]: So Metamu, then in her speech, he gives a long list of women who were intellectuals, like poets and translators.
46:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she says, quote, it's hard to name all of them because obeying a tradition full of modesty in our country, they rarely sign their poems.
46:40
[SPEAKER_00]: with her name.
46:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So they give a pseudonym.
46:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So all these great poems might actually be written by women.
46:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she's full on going to rebel against Confucian principles or what she thinks are Confucian principles.
46:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So she talks about the three submissions.
46:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So the woman must submit to the fob, to her father, to her husband, and to her eldest son.
47:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she says, having ruled Vietnamese for women for centuries, this has been disastrous for women.
47:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So she says, one shutters at the thought of the girl who was maltreated by those three men.
47:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
47:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
47:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
47:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Did she ever have children?
47:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, she had a few children.
47:28
[SPEAKER_00]: She had a few children.
47:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They still want, probably are living so or impaired?
47:32
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you know what?
47:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I read that tragically, again, tragic one.
47:36
[SPEAKER_00]: A several of her children died.
47:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The audience is going to have to like this.
47:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It escapes me, but she had a few children.
47:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if any are living.
47:48
[SPEAKER_00]: There might be one, but I do know that a few of them had passed away.
47:55
[SPEAKER_00]: like in accidents, like premature death, but so she's going to say in this speech that fortunately matriarchy is still influential.
48:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And so women in Vietnam still have an independent spirit, capability of initiative, women have evolved and matured, quote, she wishes no longer to be
48:24
[SPEAKER_00]: a doll without a soul.
48:26
[SPEAKER_00]: She wants to be treated in equality that is to say as a reasonable and useful companion.
48:33
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when I read this, I really thought of
48:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I like a Mary Wolston craft, like the feminists and Simone de Beauvoir, like the French and you know, who wrote the second sex, I mean this speech is really, if I were to teach a course on feminists theory, I would assign this speech, right.
48:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And Madame Muses says,
48:55
[SPEAKER_00]: All women must insist that we be consulted, or at least informed of everything, which can have any repercussion on ourselves, for man has absolutely no right to decide by himself on a thing which has consequences for women.
49:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And she says, men and women must collaborate.
49:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It's better than men doing everything himself, because he can make mistakes, right?
49:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So quote, all considered this collaboration is surely better than carrying all the burden on himself, decisions, actions, responsibility, and also risk in case of error.
49:35
[SPEAKER_00]: to air is to be human.
49:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And to find before him in his home, and also rated women, angry, thinking and acting in the manner of those vengeful mobs who brandished the clenched fist at their fallen dictator before lynching him.
49:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god.
49:52
[SPEAKER_00]: God.
49:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, she's saying here that she's like, men, you better consult the woman in the home because if you don't, she's just going to be
50:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I, um, I just looked up the surviving children.
50:11
[SPEAKER_02]: There are two surviving children or no known reports of their death.
50:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And, and I remember that there were several people who are looking into making a movie about the life of Madam U.
50:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember, I recall some of my friends dealing with her estate.
50:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think whoever's controlling her estate would probably be her children or grandchildren.
50:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So how many children did she have?
50:40
[SPEAKER_02]: She had four.
50:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Four.
50:42
[SPEAKER_02]: One died in a tragic car accident.
50:44
[SPEAKER_02]: 90s.
50:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that was.
50:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the eldest son, Nodin Jack, Nodin Quing, and Nodin Lake Quing, three of the surviving, but there's limited public information, but I think there are surviving members of the family, because I remember some of my contacts dealing with this state of Madam U as they were working on
51:09
[SPEAKER_02]: biopic or film about.
51:12
[SPEAKER_02]: But if anybody knows anybody who's connected to these folks, we would love to talk Kevin, I think there would be a cool, if there was a world where you and I were able to sit with one of the descendants of not a new that would be, that would be very interesting to do.
51:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so as we wrap up this episode, one of the questions that we had and it was a potential title or it might be the title of this episode, which was, did patriarchy give birth to Metamu, right?
51:50
[SPEAKER_00]: That was one of the questions we had.
51:52
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was thinking about that and I was also thinking, well, what about the other way?
51:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So did matriarchy give birth to Metamu?
51:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Because she's talking about matriarchy all the time,
52:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I can imagine one thing that made me feel more sympathetic to her is that if she grows up learning about Vietnamese matriarchy, and she has all these examples in Vietnamese history, then she has an idea of the alternative to the patriarchy, and that just that must infuriate her, knowing that there's another way.
52:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that when we, and you know, I'm just going to share it with the audience right now when we think about titles, they're very important because they guide our conversation.
52:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I think about a title like did the patriarchy give birth to Madam New, it gives this ironic irony, which is patriarchy being sort of like what was, you know, the model that that that.
53:02
[SPEAKER_02]: she came from.
53:04
[SPEAKER_02]: The power grid that met a new comes from his patriarchy and it actually giving birth to patriarchy or met a new.
53:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's because there was no patriarchy that was in existence officially as she was coming up.
53:21
[SPEAKER_02]: It was more patriarchy that she was rebelling against for
53:24
[SPEAKER_02]: hundreds of years of this patriarchy and then it gave birth to this form of patriarchy or this form of thinking, which is sort of that the tip of the patriarchy, patriarchy spear is not a move.
53:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
53:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And if listeners are interested in questions of gender in Vietnam, there's a great book that just came out.
53:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It's by Richard Chen.
53:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's called Queer of Vietnam.
53:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, Ian and I review it in an episode of non-following dialogues.
53:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to come out soon.
53:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But the basic argument of that book is that ideas of gender and sex,
54:04
[SPEAKER_00]: were actually much, much more fluid in the 1920s and 1940s.
54:10
[SPEAKER_00]: than European ideas of gender.
54:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the European, like the binary of man and woman, gay, and straight, that was kind of a European theory in the 19th century called sexology.
54:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's where we get notions of diversity and so on.
54:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But in Vietnam, Vietnamese people, they came from Chinese and Southeast Asian traditions where there was a lot more fluidity between gender.
54:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and gender expectations and roles and things.
54:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And so yeah, that's that's quite interesting.
54:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, because when I think about Thailand or other countries, I don't think about the
54:49
[SPEAKER_02]: the significance of being entirely man, entirely woman.
54:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's a lot of fluidity and there's a lot of gray areas that, especially Thailand, and I wonder how that got to be.
55:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think when it came to gay rights, I think Taiwan was one of the leaders in Asia that,
55:08
[SPEAKER_02]: allowed gay marriages very, very early on.
55:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So it makes you think, you know, where did this, these lines in the sand get drawn, you know, in the history?
55:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's very interesting because I think some Vietnamese, just like when there was a debate in Vietnam about whether to legalize gay marriage, some were arguing that, oh, the whole gay lesbian thing, that's a Western imposition.
55:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but Richard's book is showing it that it's the opposite, like there's much more fluidity that was native to Vietnam and then it took a while for this vocabulary of heterosexuality or gay to finally catch up.
55:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So that is actually a cluster in position.
55:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Kevin, thank you so much for today.
55:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I know there's been a lot of technical issues surrounding this particular episode with Madam New.
56:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Hopefully we can get this all cleaned up and we'll put it up right away.
56:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Sounds good.
56:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks Kevin.
56:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
56:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynne.
56:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynne, Catherine Wynne, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
56:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.