Madame Quối is Done With Politics

By Grace Phan Bellafiore

Many children of immigrants are familiar with living in a cultural limbo. Finding a comfortable place to rest between the desire to assimilate to mainstream American culture — to embrace belonging in one’s immediate home — and the desire to remember the ways of one’s inheritance — to embody the traditions of other lands — can be a challenge. This challenge is likely familiar to many Chicagoans who live in a city that, since its inception, has been home to manifold ethnic groups arriving in the United States. From 1975 through to the early 2000s, waves of Vietnamese immigrants came to the city as they managed to escape Vietnam following the communist takeover of the country, known as the Fall of Saigon.

My maternal family’s path from Saigon to Chicago was not linear but they, like many others, eventually found their way to the neighborhood of Uptown and its environs, where I was born. My mother spent the decades following her arrival putting her gifts of cultural and linguistic fluency to use as an informal social worker. She helped new members of the community study the English language and American history to pass citizenship tests, acting as a liaison between former prisoners of war and mental health counselors, and translating legal documents for incoming refugees to obtain permanent housing.

My mother’s work brought many haggard people into our house. As a child, I was frightened by their far-off looks and their ways that felt both foreign and familiar. My father, an American who served as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam, also partook in this “refugee culture” insofar as his time in the service had alienated him from Americans who experienced the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s stateside. So, I grew up in limbo between the new world of all that Chicago had to offer our family and the old world of coaxing our friends and neighbors to heal from the war, sometimes by helping them to forget and, at other times, helping them to remember.

In 2025, as we enter the fiftieth year since the Fall of Saigon, I am expecting my first child. I wonder if she will feel all-American or if she will live in limbo, too. I think it’s possible to be both: to be “fully” American and to find comfort in the discomfort of Amercan-ness itself being the outcome of mixed lineages and histories. 

But, in case it’s too easy for my daughter to feel comfortable with the present, I’ve been recording stories of the Vietnam from the past. I dive into the sea of friends my mother made throughout her time helping the community and I emerge with memories otherwise lost in time. Some of the stories are grisly but many are sweet, like the love story of Madame Quối and her husband Đình, who encountered my mother in their search for permanent housing upon arriving in Chicago in the mid-1990s.

***

April 30, 2025, marks fifty years since the Fall of Saigon, and Madame Quối Nguyễn is done thinking about politics. Given the choice, she prefers pragmatism. When the North Vietnamese army toppled the capital of the Republic of Vietnam in the spring of 1975, Quối was married to Đình Như Gia Lai, a major in the Republican army, a major who shared lineage with the last Emperor, Bảo Đại. With the end of the old regime, leaders of the new sent Đình to a communist reeducation camp, leaving his young bride and their three children to fend for themselves. For the first time, Madame Quối became acquainted with realpolitik and real scarcity. Today, reunited, Quối and Đình nurture that same passion which they found half a century ago and half a world away. Now—living peacefully in modest housing in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood within the enclave known colloquially as “Asia on Argyle”—at almost eighty years old, the couple is eager to leave the conduct of global and domestic affairs to the next generation. However, this reticence to weigh in on the future does not inhibit Madame Quối from sharing her story of the past with me on a recent spring day in Chicago. We met on the ground floor of her building’s common area while Đình, wheelchair-bound from recent bouts of illness, declined to convene for the interview. 

Quối and Đình circa 1968.

“Once we were married, we made love four nights in a row. He was beautiful.”

The elderly woman before me does not blush. “Eventually, I asked my husband why he’d never taken advantage of me before, although he’d had the opportunity.”

In the early days of their courtship, Đình rented a hotel room where he and Quối could be alone, away from the military base in Bến Tre, a southern town located firmly in republican territory, where Đình was stationed. “I’ll make sure no mosquitoes bite you,” Đình reassured the girl.

Eighteen years old and anxious but intrigued, Quối went to Đình, ready to risk her safety on the off chance that this military man with shiny boots and a shiny gun was the gentleman she hoped he’d be. “He said that he respected me. He hoped his daughters would receive the same treatment. We never kissed until marriage.”

I give Madame Quối a dubious stare. “You’d never kissed?”

Nonplussed, Madame Quối gazed softly from beneath the dome of her gray felt hat and fondled the long-stemmed yellow daffodils on the table before her. “He only caressed my hair. My long, straight, black hair.”

The young couple-to-be first met at a military soccer game, where Đình played on the winning team. Quối had taken a bus and then a water taxi to Bến Tre, where she visited with relatives prior to arriving at the stadium. When Quối was five years old, her father—who worked as a civil engineer during the first presidential administration of Ngô Đình Diệm—divorced her mother and remarried an abusive spouse. Quối left home and became the ward of an aunt and uncle, who were wealthy merchants. Teenage Quối traveled with the couple to trade conventions throughout Taiwan and Singapore, sampling fine foods and purchasing fine clothing. By the time Quối arrived at the soccer game, she was sporting a modern take on a traditional Vietnamese dress: a silk áo dài with an open back and boat neckline. Beneath, a custom-made brassiere hugged her figure.

“I looked like a model,” Quối remarked. “God made me this way.”

The young woman found herself invited to lunch with the soccer team following the match. Before a long table, Đình pulled out a chair for Mademoiselle Quối. The bachelor used his handkerchief to wipe the table before his elegant guest. “I fell for him then and there,” Quối reminisced. 

Long like her black hair were Quối’s silver lacquered fingernails. To protect her manicure, when the company ordered a lavish lunch spread of shrimp and crab, Đình peeled the crustaceans for Mademoiselle. “Forever, forever, he is mine,” murmured Quối.

Long like her black hair were Quối’s silver lacquered fingernails.

With Đình’s stature, with Quối’s eligibility, and in the absence of parental oversight, none objected to their union: the couple married in 1968. Đình’s immediate family structure mirrored Quối’s, his parents having divorced during his childhood, then remarried. While Quối had found shelter with her aunt’s family in well-to-do circles of the business world, the military became Đình’s adoptive home. In addition to his work in the service, Đình sang on the radio, dedicating ballads to members of the royal family, to which Đình himself belonged as first cousin of Bảo Đại, the last emperor of Vietnam. Quối recalls hearing Đình’s serenades over the transistor radio before ever meeting him at the soccer game. She claims that she had listened and fantasized of marrying into the royal family. The combination of Đình’s illustrious bloodline and his industrious work ethic catapulted the young man to early success in the service.

Duty bound to Bến Tre, Đình rented an apartment near the base for his bride, settling her just before the Việt Cộng’s 1968 Tet Offensive. Cutting roads and bridges the length of Vietnam, this was the event that first revealed the power of Saigon’s enemies to bring the nation to its knees.

“There was bloodshed all around, but we didn’t care. We were deep in love, and as mines were triggered and bombs exploded around us, we focused on being together,” recalled Quối.

But as the war intensified, Đình’s responsibilities grew. Eventually, he was recommended for a promotion to major. In 1975, ten days before the Fall of Saigon, Đình was scheduled to receive a medal recognizing this promotion. Had he been decorated before this date (which the North viewed not as a fall but a liberation) Đình would have received a much longer prison sentence. Đình was soon arrested and taken to a communist reeducation camp under the pretense that he and other ranking members of the toppled regime would be guests at a special retreat. “Pack supplies for ten days,” he was instructed. Đình was assigned forced labor for the next two years.

“I had never spent a day without my husband since our wedding,” mourned Madame Quối. Overnight he was gone, and I was alone with our three children. Once I put them to bed, I would stay awake and sob.”

As we spoke, periodically, Madame Quối paused her account, murmuring prayers in which she would ask some unnamed dead for their blessing to continue sharing memories of the past. She and I communicated quietly, seated in the library on the first floor of the housing complex where she resides. The reading room, seldom occupied, was stocked with paperback references on divergent topics such as accounting and spirituality. The floor-to-ceiling window behind Madame Quối revealed a courtyard of maples still barren from the winter. As she murmured, Quối’s gaze remained fixed on the vase of yellow flowers before her, the color a symbol of spring and of Buddhist enlightenment. 

Yellow flowers are a symbol of spring and of Buddhist enlightenment.

When she spoke again audibly, Quối shared, “My philosophy was: take care of my family without getting involved in politics. At the time of the Fall, I owned one hundred custom áo dài (traditional dresses) I sold them to the wives of the new communist leaders in order to feed my children. I sold my jades. Sold my diamonds.”

“How did this make you feel?” I probed, unnecessarily.

“Sad. Very sad,” she said succinctly.

I wondered aloud whether it was challenging for Madame Quối to accept the new regime, not only because of the volatility and violence inherent in the social upheaval, but especially due to the ties of her family’s lifestyle to the old ways of the republican military and government, and, before that, to the riches of the empire.

But Quối has little patience for theory; for her, the political transition was a matter of practical experience. “I was ignorant then. I tell you, I was only interested in having long hair, long nails, nice clothes, big breasts, and a shapely rear end.”

Yet, for the next two years, Quối worked on the black market, selling food scraps and contraband meat. Once, chased by the police, she fell and broke her wrist. She traces her scars. Meanwhile, prisoners were being shuffled around to different camps. Quối caught word that Đình might be found in a camp a few hours away. She took the bus deep into the countryside along with others seeking their family members. Though Quối had been suffering, she primped and pulled herself together on the off chance she found Đình alive.

Quối was the last to dismount the bus. The landscape was barren and unpopulated save for a frail farmer tending a herd of water buffalo. He wore a conical wicker hat and wielded a bamboo switch. 

Using the honorific reserved for the elderly, Quối said, “Grandfather, I’m looking for my husband. Can you point me to the camp?”

The farmer gestured toward the distant hills.

As Quối walked away, she kept seeing the farmer’s face. That face seemed familiar. She ran back to the grandfather and saw that the man tending buffalo was Đình. The robust military major and sportsman of before had dwindled to half his previous stature. While Đình had recognized his wife at first sight, shame at his altered condition had made him hesitate to reveal himself to her. They shared a meager meal which Quối had brought wrapped in her handkerchief, before she had to depart.

Đình continued to be transferred between prisons but the couple maintained contact and Quối visited her husband once a month. Promoted on good behavior from farmer to cook, eventually, Đình was deemed successfully “reeducated” and was ultimately released.

“He said whatever he had to say to get out,” noted Quối.

Yet, after two years inside a reeducation camp, how can one be certain that even the strongest dissident has not internalized the party line he has been forced to repeat?

Quối insists that Đình other members of his social class were able to resist the reeducation precisely because of their high level of formal education prior to imprisonment. The military and political leaders of the old regime who resisted the new, before their fall, had been educated in that Vietnamese strain of thought, which is a blend of autochthonous folk sense, Chinese Confucian sagacity, and French Jesuit rigor.

Quối and Đình at Bến Tre military base.

Reunited after his release, Quối and Đình found ways to survive, and even to flourish, under the new regime. Quối was running her own business making curry and serving government contracts. Although the regime was constantly auditing her files and keeping watch on her home, she was able to be with Đình and to feed their children. Occasionally, letters from the United States detailing programs with opportunities for immigration would circulate among the neighbors but, penned in English, Quối left them unread. While Quối knew of others who had escaped Vietnam to go west, as long as her maxim to take care of her family without getting involved in politics was fulfilled, she saw no reason to leave the country. She stayed in Vietnam until the mid-1990s.

Then one day at a meeting with her curry contractors, something fell from beneath the table. Đình bent down to retrieve it and the party members present snickered. “Do you think it’s a recording device? Are you worried about being listened to?” they jeered.

“This is no way to live,” Quối and Đình concluded. Quối sought sponsorship to the United States through her sister who had moved before her. Quối now feels confident that life in U.S. is more free than what she endured in Vietnam.

When she first arrived in Chicago, Quối knew nothing of winter. Upon seeing the barren trees, she was perplexed. How can a country be so prosperous, yet unaware of how to upkeep its landscaping? 

Today, in the library of her humble dwelling, Madame Quối’s dress still reflects fine sensibilities. Her garments suggest an awareness of the cold, but a desire for perpetual warmth. A felt hat with a low brim shades her gaze, and a sheer black housecoat rustles around her graceful figure. Her long nails are painted the same silver she wore on the day she met Đình.

Grace Phan Bellafiore writes on art, culture, and politics from Washington, D.C. Grace was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago.