The Dragon Lady (or Her Mother)

I finished Kuusinen’s “Before and After Stalin” two nights ago and am half way through “Finding the Dragon Lady” by Demery. Both stories (and “Stalin’s Spy”) are fascinating.

One afternoon in the autumn of 1942 I was doing my round of the barracks with a medical orderly when a group of prisoners came in: they had been working all day in pouring rain and were soaked to the skin. They threw their padded jackets on to the floor of the drying-room, and many also left their wet boots there. I opened the door and was met by a revolting smell from the damp, sweaty garments. Then I saw something move under the heap, and the orderly pulled out a man, evidently a Japanese, still wearing his sodden jacket. He tried to stand up, but failed, and was obviously very ill. We took him to the clinic en route for the hospital. He answered my questions in a faint voice, smiling in the Japanese manner. He told me his name and said he had been the chief delegate of the Japanese Communist Party to Moscow and a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Next day I heard that he had died in hospital. So, although he had not been shot like so many Comintern officials, he had met his end no less surely through years of hardship in prison and labour camps. (PP. 168-169, Before and After Stalin, Aino Kuusinen)

米原万里の『打ちのめされるほどすごい本』は、この日本人が、「自分と妻を救うために」（和田春樹『歴史としての野坂参三』）野坂参三が告発した山本懸蔵ではないかと加藤哲郎の著書『国民国家のエルゴロジー』で推測しているとおしえてくれる（101ページ）。

French reports tallied [Madame Chuong’s] lovers, including the most important – and most threatening – one. Sometime after his arrival in 1939, the Japanese diplomat Yokoyama Masayuki betrayed his French wife for Madame Chuong; in return, she was described as more than his mistress. Madame Chuong became the Japanese consul’s “right arm” in Hanoi. To the French, it was an ominous sign that a woman as smart and ambitious as Madame Chuong would choose the Japanese over the French. She was doing what she could to help secure her family’s good position in quickly shifting political sands.

The allegations were transmitted to Paris on faded onionskin sheets and archived, preserving the tittle-tattle of diplomats for posterity. According to one rumor that gained traction many years later as café gossip, among Madame Chuong’s many lovers in Hanoi was a man by the name of Ngo Dinh Nhu. (p. 35, Finding the Dragon Lady, Monique Brinson Demery)

Madame Chuong: mother of Tran Thi Le Xuan (Madame Nhu, “the Dragon Lady”), wife of Ngo Dinh Nhu, chief political advisor of Ngo Dinh Diem, his older brother and President of the Republic of Vietnam

横山正幸：元駐カイロ公使で、ハノイでは日本文化会館館長

Shame on you, Lessie!!