Front cover of the American edition
© 2004 by EMQUAD International, Ltd.
ISBN 0-9718406-2-8

"The wide, stone steps that make their way down to the river between clusters of bamboo lead to the Eo Bau ferry, which crosses to the opposite bank and continues on to Huê. At five o’clock in the afternoon, it is already cold along the water’s edge.

"March 10th, 1946. I am 16 years old.

"That very morning, when I announced my intention of leaving home, my mother’s strong opposition to my plans only served further to reinforce them in my mind. Nhan, my little sister, begged me to stay. My brother sobbed. My father’s reaction would have been even more violent, but he was in Phan Thiet, eight hundred kilometers from Hue, and in those times of war we had no means of communication. My heart was heavy as I folded some clothing into a bag.

"My comrades of the Resistance were waiting for me on the other side of the river. I climbed aboard the ferry, shivering, clad in the purple ao dai that I wore to school, my white pants and equally white sandals. My long hair was pulled up into a bun, and I was without a coin in my pocket. I turned around and saw Xuan Ba, my third brother, who was waving his hand, but my thoughts were already far away. I would never see my father again ..."

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Xuan Phuong and Danièle Mazingarbe's Ao Dai is the extraordinary autobiography of Dr. Xuan Phuong, descendant of mandarins on both her parents' sides, who leaves her family as a teenager to help the Vietminh fight first the Japanese, and then the French. During the American phase of the war, she worked as a propagandist for the North and, dressed as a Vietcong, entered Saigon with their army. Throughout her time with the Resistance Phuong declared herself to be non-communist and--against her own best interest--refused to join the Party. In 1975, as she was witnessing the fall of Saigon, her parents and siblings were escaping to America on one of the last flights out. Twenty-five years later Phuong was at last reunited with her brothers and sisters and gravely ill mother on a visit to California, where she got to experience the good life in the land of a former "enemy."

Ao Dai traces how this young lady of privilege adjusted to the rigors of the Resistance and survived. She married in the jungle and bore children. There she met Ho Chi Minh and, later, in Hanoi, Joan Baez. She worked as a chemist, a physician, and a filmmaker. After the war Dr. Phuong opened an art gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, where she lives to this day.

Xuan Phuong was born 1929 in Eo Bau, near Hue, and raised in Dalat, where she attended the privileged French boarding school Le couvent des Oiseaux (The Convent of the Birds) before joining the Vietminh in 1946.

Danièle Mazingarbe is a French magazine editor and journalist based in Paris.

Frederick Z. Brown (Foreword) is Associate Director of the Southeast Asia Studies Program in SAIS/The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Lynn Bensimon (translator) is an English teacher in the French public school system.