Word: xa
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...Xa and her husband fled south to Saigon in 1954, and she soon became known in the refugee-swollen quarter of Gia Dinh as a woman who got things done. She organized a neighborhood school, founded a Catholic Mothers' Association, arranged housing and relief allotments for widows...
...hence is the only female among the 117 South Vietnamese now shaping their nation's constitutional future. Her campaign symbol was a picture of a mother with her child in arms, the mother representing the nation and the child its people, and it helped Mme. Xa come in as the Assembly's third highest vote getter. So did her calculated demeanor. "A woman must al ways be more careful than a man because she is being judged closer than he is," she explains. 'That doesn't mean you can't be Machiavellian. But be modest...
Deputy Will Do. Mme. Xa's brand of modest Machiavellianism has already made her one of the more powerful Deputies in the Assembly. She is speaker of the credentials committee and a member of the one on flood relief-the only two committees formed so far. When she demanded that all pregnant women be released from prison, the measure passed easily. When, in a burst of patriotic pontificating common to assemblies the world over, a draft resolution supporting the Vietnamese army at home and abroad was proposed, Mme. Xa raised her delicate eyebrows. '"Abroad?" she asked...
...Xa estimates that "I could wind up with enough strength to elect myself chairman" of the Assembly. But that, she says, would be "immodest," a repetition of the mistake of Mme. Nhu, who "forgot she was a woman and tried to play like a man." Instead she will settle for deputy chairman, she says, "and a hand in writing the social-justice planks in the constitution...
...Fresh Egg. The only daughter of a wealthy rice broker in North Viet Nam and the wife of a civil servant, Mme. Xa grew up "studying like a man" in a house filled with rosewood and mother-of-pearl paneling and glass windows "as blue as the sky." Strictly chaperoned, she learned social work, painted landscapes, wrote poems to the Virgin Mary-and, at age 14, snatched away the billy club of a policeman beating a street peddler. Her family supported the Viet Minh war for independence, then was turned out of house and home by the victorious Communists...