by Denise Chong
Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
Praise for The Girl in the Picture
“An extraordinary piece of journalism . . . brilliantly portrayed.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Chong deserves praise for achieving something few journalists have attempted: In telling Phuc’s tale, she has created a dramatic tableau of daily village life during the war and after the war. We can smell the noodle soups Phuc’s mother makes and sells; we can see the holes that civilians dug to use as bomb shelters. And we sense the nobility and humanity of a people doing their best to survive a hell not of their making.”
—Biography
“Simply told, with a delicate political balance for the most part carefully managed, the story of the girl in the photograph is one of horror, survival, and hope—a primer if not the definitive text for those trying to understand the Vietnam war.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Denise Chong’s new biography . . . goes beyond symbols to bring that girl and her world to life. With vivid detail and drama, the book offers a harrowing account of the napalm strike itself, a similarly disturbing chronicle of Kim Phuc’s excruciating and incomplete recovery . . . and an incriminating picture of the postwar Communist government’s attempts to use the country’s most famous innocent victim as a tool for international propaganda. Chong is an accomplished storyteller, moving easily between the intimate tale of Kim Phuc’s life and a comprehensive, richly textured portrait of Vietnamese society both during and after the war.”
—The Boston Globe
“Chong’s portrayal of postwar Vietnam is powerful and sobering, with good guys and bad on all sides.”—New York Daily News
“Her struggles as well as those of her parents to rebuild their lives after the war are well chronicled here. The Girl in the Picture is a must read, if only to rediscover the effect images have on history. Yet it is ultimately a story of a remarkable young woman who triumphed over tragedy and refused to let it break her spirit.”—Booklist (starred review)
“An important story vividly retold.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“Denise Chong . . . has taken a remarkable life story and rendered it with the breadth of Dickens and the depth of Tolstoy.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE GIRL IN THE PICTURE
Denise Chong is the author of the award-winning The Concubine’s Children. She lives in Ottawa with her husband and two children.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
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Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
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Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001
Copyright © Denise Chong, 1999
All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED
eISBN : 978-1-440-68412-8
1. Kim Phuc. 2. Vietnamese conflict, 1961-1975—Children.
3. Vietnamese conflict, 1961-1975—Aerial operations, American.
I. Title.
DS559.8.C53 C47 1999
959.704’3’083—dc21 99-053415
http://us.penguingroup.com
For my mother, who understands
FAMILY TREE
FOREWORD
THE PICTURE OF KIM PHUC REMAINS among the indelible images from the Vietnam war. Taken on June 8, 1972, it appeared on front pages of newspapers all over the world that year, and it has been reproduced innumerable times since. George Esper, the Associated Press’s last bureau chief in Saigon, who stayed until the Communists ordered all remaining foreign journalists out, spoke with me about the power of the picture and its impact on the Vietnam war: “It captures not just one evil of one war, but an evil of every war,” he said. “There were many casualty pictures, but this one was haunting. . . . In her expression was fear and horror, which was how people felt about war. This picture showed the effects of war, and how wrong and destructive it was. People looked at it and said, ‘This war has got to end.’”
As cameras do, this click of the shutter froze a moment in history, so that the girl in it was forever a girl. But time did not stand still for the Vietnam war. It would continue for Americans for another year, for the Vietnamese, three. Its end is documented in the annals of history—the signing of the Paris ceasefire accord; the last evacuation helicopter lifting off the rooftop of the American embassy in Saigon; South Vietnam’s broadcast of surrender on Radio Saigon; the first North Vietnamese tank crashing through the gates of the Presidential Palace. However, the torment of war does not end so easily. And, as many struggle still with why the Vietnam war happened and why it ended the way it did, that chapter of America’s history will remain unfinished.
The girl in the picture was anonymous when the image of her moved on the AP wire service, but within two days, a reporter had put a name to her. Kim Phuc recovered from her burns, and passed from childhood into adulthood. And so came a chance, by way of this book, and with the added clarity of time, to revisit through the lens of her life what the war was for an ordinary peasant in South Vietnam and what the end of it wrought, and to examine the impact of the picture on her life. Refocusing my sights beyond the frame of the famous picture was easier upon discovering, literally, the next recorded frame of her life. Taken by David Burnett, who missed the famous shot because he was reloading film as she ran by, it shows her from behind, continuing down the road. A journalist—perhaps Alexander Shimkin, who was killed in the war one month later—runs alongside, his arm outstretched behind her. The humanity of his gesture seems to mute the horror of her charred skin.
Kim’s life was shaped by others wanting to pull her back into focus. Once the Communist regime “rediscovered” her as the subject of a photograph famous in the West, the photograph itself became the commanding, organizing presence in her life. She was used for propaganda, but at the same time, she was an acceptable living symbol of wartime suffering. For one thing, the splash of the napalm missed her face and her hands, so that her scars could be hidden under clothing. The horror of injuries inflicted by napalm—a weapon manufactured in the United States and first put to widespread use in the Vietnam war—is more powerful and, perversely, more palatable to contemplate when left to the imagination. For another, she was South Vietnamese, injured by her own side, and so she served as a reminder that the accidents of war can also be its atrocities.
In being interviewed for this book, Kim was a willing, if not always comfortable subject. She grew up in a climate of war. Except for the Ame
ricans, friend and foe looked alike, so the less one talked and knew, the safer one would be. The war was confusing—all the more so for a child. Kim was born into war, was nine when injured in the napalm strike and only twelve when the war ended. From then until she was twenty-nine, when she defected to the West in 1992, she lived under a Communist regime and in a political culture where all information is regarded as sensitive.
Kim’s defection allowed her to talk openly, but it also presented a difficulty when it came to my research. Early word on the grapevine after her defection was that she was persona non grata in Vietnam. Consequently, when I went to Vietnam in 1996, I neither interviewed nor asked to interview Communist authorities (not only would the regime likely have refused my requests, but it might well have denied me a visa into the country). Instead, I entered Vietnam on a tourist visa and, making do for interpreters by using those who had once worked with Americans in South Vietnam but who hadn’t spoken English since, I quietly interviewed Kim’s family, friends and former neighbors there. Thus, the Communist officials in the pages of this book are voices reconstructed from memories of others; until Vietnam is a more open society, that is the best that can be done. I also went to Cuba, where the Vietnamese regime sent Kim to university. Again, I traveled on a tourist visa, and did similar research there.
The reader might find it helpful to have Vietnamese names explained. Because of their few and common surnames, the Vietnamese use as the identifying name the proper name rather than the surname. The latter is rarely used and often known only to immediate family. By way of example, Pham Van Dong, at one time Vietnam’s prime minister, after the first reference in the text, is referred to by his proper name, Dong. Western practice, in contrast, would be to refer to him by his surname, Pham. Finally, two comments on the written Vietnamese in the text. For simplicity, I have omitted the diacritical marks that indicate a word’s pronunciation and, therefore, particular meaning. And I have often combined syllables into one word, though in Vietnamese, each syllable is a separate word. Thus, though Vietnam is actually two words, it is combined here as one.
CHAPTER ONE
KIM EASED BACK A CORNER OF THE bedroom window curtains. Only from there could she see signs of life outside. The windows of the living room looked at the brick wall of the house next door. Though a skylight in that room made the concession to light, the feeling in the second-floor apartment of the duplex was one of claustrophobia, echoing that of the one-way, one-lane street on which the Bui family lived, in a poor, congested neighborhood tucked in behind the smaller of Toronto’s two original China-towns. However, from the bedroom window, if one lifted one’s eyes over the unbroken line of parked cars and the jumble of flat and peaked roofs opposite, one could take in a view of Toronto’s modern downtown skyline.
Kim’s eyes swept the sidewalk for anybody watching the duplex. Then the uncovered porch below. Nobody. But the evidence remained: a crushed pop can and the telltale red-and-white carton of a Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch from the outlet at the top of the street. Yesterday evening at dusk, she and Toan, believing they had entered their apartment unseen by coming up the back stairs, had looked from this window, and noticing the pop can and carton left behind, had come to the same conclusion—the two women they had just met on the sidewalk had been staking out their address for some time that day, at least long enough to get hungry. One of them had a camera. Kim had cautioned her husband against opening the front door to remove the refuse. This much she knew: the long lens of a camera can see a lot.
The night before, Kim had gone to bed in an agitated state. She had called Michael Levine, the lawyer acting as her agent, who was handling her publicity, including requests from the media. “If those women try to get into your house,” he’d said, “call the police.” The image of men in uniform made Kim anxious, and that night, she had one of her recurring war nightmares. Sometimes they involved bombs, sometimes mortar fire or gunfire. But always she is a child. That night it began with her standing amidst a group of chatting soldiers. An argument broke out among them. Gunfire erupts. “We have to get out!” Kim screams. She runs, terrified of being killed. But as she runs, she tires, and she doesn’t know how she will keep going.
As usual, she woke to escape death. Feeling stone cold, she did as always: she shook Toan awake. “Hold me,” she whispered. When her tears stopped, as usual, she found she was consoling him: “It’s okay. I have to suffer like that.”
Toan left to go job hunting, picking up the pop can and carton on his way out. Kim turned her mind to how the day would unfold: the colleague of the photographer, or rather, the one without a camera, had agreed, as Kim had asked, to call Kim’s lawyer. “After you call him, after that I can work with you,” Kim had told her. All that day, Kim found herself waiting for the telephone to ring, expecting Levine to call to say that the two women had requested an interview. Not even her usual hour of Spanish-language daytime TV soaps could distract her from the questions that paced back and forth across her mind. How did the two women know her address? Why had they been waiting all day on the sidewalk? The day came to an end, marking the beginning of the weekend, when Levine’s law office would be closed.
By Sunday, Kim was relieved to have church to occupy her mind. The word of God made her forget all her worries. The family’s church was in Ajax, an hour away from Toronto by the church van service, and no one there but the pastor knew of Kim’s history. Since she and Toan were the only Vietnamese in the congregation, it seemed unlikely that her past would even come up. On Sundays, they attended both the morning and evening services, spending the interval at the home of a friend from the congregation.
After the first service, she and Toan went to collect their eleven-month-old son, Thomas, from the church daycare.
Kim felt an urgent tap on her shoulder. It was another father. “Your picture is in the newspaper!” he exclaimed.
The man, who was responsible for buying newspapers for the church’s reading room, held up a Toronto tabloid, The Sunday Sun. It was that day’s edition, March 19, 1995. “The photograph that shocked the world” shouted the front page, above a picture of a young girl, naked and running in terror. There was another headline, “Child of war is a woman living in Metro,” alongside another picture, one of Kim, wearing the coat she’d been wearing all week.
Kim lifted her eyes from the newspaper. Clearly, the two women had got the photo they’d come looking for. “Yes,” she said. “I am the girl in the picture.”
THE NEWSPAPER THAT BROKE THE NEWS—that the subject of one of the famous pictures from the Vietnam war now lived in the West—was The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid. It syndicated the story to, among others, Toronto’s Sunday Sun, which played it across pages two and three. Accompanying the article were photographs of Kim and Toan pushing their baby in a stroller on a Toronto street, and of Kim’s parents in front of their mud hut in Trang Bang, Vietnam. The article began:
To her neighbors in a working-class area of Toronto, she is just another young mother, anonymous and hesitant. But to the world, she will remain forever the human symbol of the pointless brutality and savage cost of the Vietnam war. Next month it will be 20 years since the futile American military campaign finally ended . . .
Of all the countless photographs and films which captured that terrifying and bloody war, one potent and compelling image remains: of a young girl, naked and terrified, screaming in pain as she flees a napalm attack on her family’s village, Trang Bang, 40 miles from Saigon.
Today Phan Thi Kim Phuc is a woman of 32. Once exploited by the Vietnamese for anti-capitalist propaganda, wheeled out by the Marxist regime as painful proof of American colonialism, she is now living in hiding in the West, a defector from the Communists who have manipulated her almost all her life . . .
The breaking story was picked up by international wire services. Within a couple of days, Kim’s telephone began to ring, and didn’t stop. In short order, she tired of hearing callers, complete strangers all, asking to s
peak to Kim Phuc. She took to letting the telephone ring, leaving Toan—if he was home—to answer and give out the telephone number of Kim’s agent. Upon the insistent ringing of the door buzzer, the couple would go to the front window to spy on the person below. Invariably, it was a journalist—or so Kim assumed, judging by the camera bag over a shoulder or the notebook in hand. Often there was a waiting taxi. Eventually, getting no answer, the journalist would leave.
Night and day, the couple kept the curtains drawn on the front window. Kim grew afraid to leave the house for fear that it was being watched, or that someone lay concealed, waiting for an opportunity to take her picture. Whenever the buzzer sounded, she tried to keep the baby quiet, and to avoid stepping where the wooden floor would creak. Sleep did not release Kim from her anxiety but rather plunged her into the darkness of her recurring nightmares. Exhausted, she spent entire days in her turquoise dressing gown.
This was not the scenario she had contemplated when, a few months earlier, she had made the decision that, in order to help support the family, she would reemerge from her private life and sell her story; it would be her “work.” She had gone for advice to Nancy Pocock, a lifelong social activist well into her eighties. Kim and Toan, like many Vietnamese and Salvadoran refugees in Canada, called her “Mother Nancy.”
“Mom, I want to stop being quiet. Please, how can I do that?” Kim had asked her.
Nancy had a family friend who knew a prominent Toronto entertainment lawyer, but before making the introduction, she had first wanted to make certain that Kim understood something: once she invited publicity, there would be no going back.