Editing Trần Lệ Xuân (section)

== Early years ==
Trần Lệ Xuân was born into a wealthy aristocratic family in Hanoi, French Indochina, then part of the French colonial empire. Her given name means "Beautiful Spring". Her paternal grandfather was close to the French colonial administration, while her father, Trần Văn Chương, studied law in France, before marrying into the ruling imperial dynasty. Her mother, Thân Thị Nam Trân, was a granddaughter of Emperor Đồng Khánh and a cousin of Emperor [[Bảo Đại]]. Madame Nhu's mother was widely reputed to have had a series of lovers, among them her future son-in-law, Ngô Ðình Nhu.

A mediocre student, Madame Nhu dropped out of Lycée Albert Sarraut, a prestigious French school in Hanoi. She spoke French at home and could not write in Vietnamese; as an adult, she drafted her speeches in French and had them translated into Vietnamese. She gained a reputation in her youth as a tomboy who loved ballet and piano, once dancing solo at Hanoi's National Theatre. She had an older sister and a younger brother, Trần Văn Khiêm, and was known for beating him up in their childhood.

When she became an adult, her mother introduced her to a series of eligible young men, but she insisted on Nhu. He was twice her age and referred to her as "little niece" in accordance with Vietnamese custom. In 1943, at the age of 18, she married Nhu and converted from Mahayana Buddhism to Roman Catholicism, her husband's religion. After an uprising by the Viet Minh in August 1945, her brother-in-law, Ngô Ðình Khôi, the eldest of the Ngô brothers, was buried alive, and Nhu and another brother, Ngô Đình Cẩn, were forced to flee. Madame Nhu, her mother-in-law and her eldest daughter, at the time a baby, were captured. Thinking that her piano was a radio for communicating with French colonialists, the Viet Minh blew it up and then exiled her to a remote village for four months, where she was forced to live on two bowls of rice a day. The French dismissed Nhu from his post at the National Library due to Diệm’s nationalist activities, and he moved to Đà Lạt and lived comfortably, editing a newspaper, where his wife bore three more children.