Word: dai
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Died. Nam Phuong, 49, last Empress of Viet Nam, convent-bred Cochin Chinese bride (in 1934) of Puppet Emperor Bao Dai, who used her imperial influence to further Roman Catholicism, lived apart from her playboy husband after his 1955 exile; of a heart attack; in Chabrignac, France...
Today the most formidable and in some ways the bravest woman in South Viet Nam wears tapered satin trousers and a torso-hugging ao-dai, split from ankle to waist, and rides to meet her foes in a chauffeur-driven black Mer cedes. Instead of swords, her weapons are bottomless energy, a devastating charm, a tough, relentless mind, an acid tongue, a militant Roman Catholi cism ? and, most important, the power of the family into which she married. She is Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu, wife of President Ngo Dinh Diem's younger brother and closest brain-truster...
...surrounding central Viet Nam. Although, unlike his brothers, Can has never been abroad, did not go to a university, and runs his fiefdom like an old warlord, the war in the central highlands is going far bet ter than anywhere else in South Viet Nam. An inveterate ao-dai chaser, Can has incurred Mme. Nhu's wrath: "He is stubborn and touchy, and unbearably obsolete concerning women." But, she concedes, "we all feel safer to have him in Hu?...
...side by side with his peasant neighbors. Diem himself left politics before World War II rather than work with the French. In that tradition, Nhu, his wife and family were opposed both to the Red Viet Minh "army of liberation" and to the French with their puppet Emperor, Bao Dai. When the Viet Minh overran Hué, they shot Diem's oldest brother and the brother's only son, for months held Diem himself captive before turning him loose. Nhu and Can both escaped from the Reds, but Mme. Nhu, her infant daughter and her aged mother-in-law were taken...
...administrative machinery to run the government. The army was run by a French puppet, General Nguyen Van Hinh, who was constantly plotting against Diem, and the police and security forces were controlled by the notorious Binh Xuyen river pirates, who had bought the "concession" from puppet Emperor Bao Dai for $1,000,000. In the countryside, two religious sects with well-armed private armies, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, ran two virtually independent fiefs...