The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  By any comparison with the north, the south still fared well. But what was grievously painful for southerners was to remember days of plenty during the American presence. Tung and his family could remember when the ham in their house once stored one-hundred-kilogram sacks of the whitest rice and they had fish and meat at every meal, every day. Now, some meals were only vegetables and poor-quality rice. They once wore silks and fine printed cottons; now Nu queued at state stores for coarse cotton. Western medicines were once readily available; after the war’s end, even Vietnamese-made medicines were scarce. It could take three days to get to the front of the line at a state pharmacy, only to come away empty-handed. As painful as this abrupt deprivation was the humiliation of joining lineups for inferior goods, and of having to spend so much time scrounging for basics. Each family needed at least one person full time for shopping alone, time once spent socializing, going to the temple, enjoying oneself.

  Even years later, tears would well in Nu’s eyes when she remembered that she had been unable to get a cadre’s approval to buy the food offerings necessary for the onward journey of Grandfather Kiem’s soul; that because of the expense she procrastinated too long in taking her feverish infant son to a private doctor; that she had been able to mark the marriage of twenty-year-old Ngoc to a girl named Tho with only an exchange visit of the in-laws over tea and biscuits.

  “WHO LOVES CHILDREN MORE THAN UNCLE Ho?” Like every child, Phuc had been taught the words and tune of the best known of the propaganda songs that paid homage to the dead patriot Ho Chi Minh. A version sung by a children’s choir played on television, on radio, on neighborhood loudspeakers. It did not take long for an unofficial version to circulate. The original went:

  Last night I dreamed of Uncle Ho

  His beard was long, his hair was gray

  I kissed him tenderly on both cheeks . . .

  while the words sung under one’s breath went:

  Last night I dreamed of finding a lost wallet

  In the wallet I found 4,400 dong

  I was so happy I ran and showed it to Uncle Ho

  He smiled at me. “Let’s split it,” he said.

  And so under the Communist regime the charade of presenting one thing publicly and believing something else privately was enacted even by the children.

  In the new social order, the state was, in theory, supposed to replace all other emotional attachments: family, school, work and play, religion and traditions. The state even woke people up: at half past four every morning, the loudspeakers outside Ngoc’s house burst to life with staticky martial music, while a metallic voice exhorted young and old to exercise: “4-3-2-1! 4-3-2-1!” Nightfall finally brought an end to the earsplitting din of socialist slogans, Party directives and revolutionary music. The only acceptable culture was revolutionary. Banned were books and music deemed “socially evil and poisonous” and “unconstructive works” that made people “weak”—children’s fairy tales, romantic novels, mysteries and histories of French and American involvement in Vietnam. Afraid to be seen with incriminating evidence, Tung built a bonfire of the classics and romances that he’d saved from destruction in Trang Bang. The terrified turned in more than was asked for—typewriters, dictionaries, even eyeglasses.

  Phuc’s was the first generation in the south to be schooled by the Communists. School was dramatically different in purpose and practice: all textbooks came from the north; political studies were about the life of Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party and its “final great patriotic victory.” The war was taught just as it had been and still was being taught in the north. The aggressor was America; they had set up a command in the south, brought in soldiers, airplanes, warships and weapons like toxic chemicals and napalm. The heroes were northerners; they had endured the American bombings. Examples abounded of their patriotism and love for the Communist Party: youths had offered their own bodies as machine-gun mounts, climbed on exposed places to better shoot at enemy planes; women and children had brought hot rice and soup to those manning anti-aircraft gun emplacements. The shorthand of these lessons? Everything the Party did was correct and good; everything the Americans and the puppet regime did was wrong and bad.

  The biggest change came with the “working for socialism” days outside the classroom. At the elementary school level, it was one day a week; at the high school level, two weeks out of four. Younger students came home with instructions to bring in a rake to collect leaves in the schoolyard, cleaning supplies to wash the school’s walls, desks and latrines, tools to dig garden plots on school lands and plant vegetables. Older students were sent to work at various cooperatives: making chalk, repairing furniture, cutting shoes out of plastic, raising chickens, slopping out pigs.

  The “working for socialism” days were the only times Phuc let it be known that she’d been injured in the war. No one knew, except perhaps the local tailor, who might have pondered the difference in measurement between her left and right sleeves. When the work was heavy and consequently, for Phuc, too tiring, or would have required her to be under the hot sun for too long, she approached her teacher. “I am wounded from the war,” she’d say. “I cannot do that.” The first time, by way of explanation, she’d had to raise her long sleeve to reveal her burn scar from the napalm attack; war victims were rare in Tay Ninh.

  Only Phuc and her younger siblings kept any enthusiasm for school. Her older sister, Dung, soon quit. Where once high school had been a place to meet friends, it had become another arena for public scrutiny, criticism, denunciation and bullying. She dreaded her turn as class leader, when she was expected to single out classmates for bourgeois behavior: girls with long or painted nails; girls and boys engaging in frivolities like strolling about, enjoying tea or coffee, or listening to the wrong music. She was bored by the endless political studies, put off by being used as an unpaid laborer. Some parents took their children out of school. “You are learning nothing,” they said. “You can work for the family instead.” Dung moved to Trang Bang, where she worked in her mother’s noodle shop until she married a village boy and rice farmer.

  Phuc had none of her two older sisters’ penchant for many, or lively, friends. The single influence she sought in her life was religion. Ngoc’s new wife, a sensitive and thoughtful girl, was devoutly Caodai. Tho and Ngoc provided Phuc with a virtuous example to emulate. Ngoc’s distrust of the Communists hardened at the same time as his adherence to his religion deepened. With his hotheaded temperament and penchant for speaking his mind, he sought to impart his religious devotion to Phuc. At fourteen, she made a decision to become a more devout Caodaist, and, like Grandmother Tao, eschew meat completely.

  Especially when in Trang Bang, Phuc was policed by fear. She had learned the dangers of a loose tongue. My mother said something stupid, she told herself, after the family had lost their land to the greedy official, and the man from the government took advantage . She visited no one, staying only in the shop, minding the cash. She knew her mother appreciated and trusted her at that job; whenever Tung or her siblings worked the cash, Nu’s tallies at day’s end were always short, because they helped themselves without telling her. Phuc was of no help cooking. Her mother had always forbidden her from the stove, and besides, Phuc would always be terrified of being burned. The sound of oil popping from a pan was enough to unnerve her; after a traumatic experience, the mind goes on permanent alert.

  When Phuc tired, which was easily and often, she retreated to a stool in the corner. She waited for those moments when her mother would come over and take a stool beside her. Resting her head on her daughter’s shoulder, Nu would let out a long sigh. Neither would speak. Only my mother suffers more than me, Phuc would tell herself.

  IN THE SECOND YEAR OF THE TAKEOVER, THE noodle shop, which kept the family afloat in the sea of deprivation, was snatched away. One day, authorities removed the sign hanging above Nu’s shop. In its place, they put up one that said: “Government Eat and Drink Shop.” The identical sign hung at seven other establishme
nts on the strip. “You are an employee of the state,” authorities told Nu. “Your job is to cook.” The wage the state paid her was low, less than one-tenth what she had taken home when the shop was hers.

  The local government sent in a manager and ten other workers. The manager took over Nu’s former responsibilities for buying and ordering supplies. No longer could customers be served; the state considered that bourgeois. Customers were now required to line up, give their order and pay at the cash. The orders were passed to the cook. When the food was ready, the cook yelled out the number on the receipt and the workers carried the food to the customer with the corresponding ticket. At closing time, all but Nu would drop everything and go, leaving her to clear the last tables, upend the stools and sweep the floors. Nu asked the manager if the state could hire her mother and daughters. “They are not qualified,” he replied.

  They no longer look as poor as when they arrived, Nu thought to herself of the new workers, recognizing them to be among those who had arrived in Trang Bang at war’s end and moved into the houses of those who had fled. She exchanged not a word with them, did not even know their names. She did not know what they were paid. She did not introduce Tung to them, and felt their cold looks whenever he visited. Husband and wife consequently felt compelled to keep their visits short, and talk to a minimum. After taking a bowl of soup—deducted, of course, from Nu’s wages—Tung would leave.

  Though Nu did her part as the cook, the workers seemed not to care whether customers ever got their orders. Nu fumed as steam disappeared from the bowls of broth, while workers sat around, doing nothing except maybe cleaning their fingernails, and customers sat fidgeting at tables uncleared of dirty dishes, too nervous to complain. One day, Nu could not restrain herself. “The soup must be eaten piping hot!” she told the manager. He barked back: “You are to concentrate on cooking!” She was the shop’s only steady worker; it was a revolving door of ever-changing managers and workers, with ever fewer customers.

  UPON NU’S SALARY CUT, THE FAMILY SHE supported sank to depths of poverty they had not known existed. Meat and fish immediately vanished from the table. When the vegetables had to go, each meal was only rice, flavored with soya sauce or a dipping salt mixed with chilies. Under these conditions, Great Uncle fell gravely ill and took to bed. Tung nursed the old man, and when the end came, Nu cried harder than when her own father had died. The local Caodai temple that served Gate Seven stepped in to assist with funerals of the poor. It sent some young women to sing prayers, and young men to pull a dragon-shaped catafalque bearing his coffin to the burial land.

  Phuc suffered from a persistent soreness in her left forearm, and knowing that the family could not afford a prescription should it be prescribed, Tung himself tried to treat it by daily rewrapping it in bandages of banana leaves. However, her arm became increasingly painful and after a week had turned an angry dark red and swelled to twice its normal size. Phuc was frantic, the pain as excruciating as any she could remember. A frightened Tung registered a request for her to see a doctor. It turned out she had an ingrown hair that had become entangled and infected beneath scar tissue. The doctor who removed it told Phuc that she needed an antibiotic. “Unfortunately,” he added, “we cannot give them out for your case.” It did not need to be said that such medicines were reserved for Communist cadres, who also enjoyed the privilege of quick medical attention. At the doctor’s suggestion, Tung collected and crushed the leaves of a wild plant common to Tay Ninh, mixed them with salt for use as a poultice and boiled them to make an effective, if almost unbearably bitter, potion.

  The family’s worsening situation forced Phuc to rely solely on ice for pain relief. “I’m worried that Phuc will go crazy in the head from pain,” Tung told Nu. Ice itself became a burdensome expense, which Tung insisted came before food for the family. Eventually he was forced to begin selling off some of the family’s possessions for food. The first to go was the clock; he told the family if they needed to know the time, they could go ask the neighbors.

  When the cupboard at Ngoc’s house was at its barest, the household of seven, with Tho pregnant, was down to cooking one cup of rice once a day; in normal times, the household consumed four cups twice a day. To that one cup, Tho added four cups of bo-bo—normally animal feed—and several times the normal quantity of water. No one asked for a second helping; a stomach partially empty was preferable to one full on bo-bo.

  Tung dared to risk asking for help from the neighbor living in the two-story white villa behind the high walls. Knowing the old man to have recently returned from reeducation, Tung gambled that he would not betray him to authorities. During the war, the neighbor had worked on a program to persuade Viet Cong deserters to come to the side of the South Vietnamese, and before that, on the American-funded program of compensation for war damage to property owners, a program Tung had once benefited from.

  The old man looked at the album Tung brought over, at the news picture of a girl running from a napalm attack, the yellowed clippings and the medical file from the Barsky hospital. He wasn’t sure if he’d seen the picture before, although while working for the Americans he had read foreign newspapers. He heard Tung out, about how the American firemen’s donation of three thousand dollars to the family was to have been held in a Saigon bank until the war was over. The old man said he could ask his connections in the international agencies still in Ho Chi Minh City. Or he thought his daughter, married to a South Vietnamese air force pilot, could help. The couple had left for the United States as the end came and were now living in Canada. When the neighbor summoned Phuc to come meet him, she had no inkling why. It was some weeks later that the two men quietly met again. Far too dangerous, said the neighbor, to make any inquiries from within Vietnam. The two never spoke of it again.

  FORTUNATELY, A NEW MANAGER AT THE noodle shop, a reasonable man, saw that customers were staying away, and that the only tables filled were occupied by workers sitting around. He arranged to have the shop returned to Nu. To pay the new license fee, she signed over a last plot of land the family still owned in Trang Bang. Contaminated by the debris of war and hardly large enough for a vegetable plot, it was adjacent to the family’s old property and had been overlooked by the military official who’d swindled her. Nu restored her husband’s name to the shop, and the customers began to return.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SINCE THE WAR’S END, NGOC’S HOUSEHOLD had welcomed the annual holiday of Tet with special anticipation. Tung and the children looked forward to Nu coming home; she stayed the three days of the holiday and sometimes longer, depending on whether she judged the fourth or fifth day of the new year to be the more auspicious for the shop’s first day of business. But this holiday had the added excitement of Ngoc and Tho’s newborn twins. Born prematurely, the girls’ survival had not been assured for several weeks, but now they were thriving.

  As the lunar new year of 1978 approached, Ngoc’s household was a hive of activity. Phuc was washing banana leaves to be used to wrap and steam ceremonial glutinous rice cakes. One of Phuc’s siblings was rolling sugary rice-flour balls, another sweeping the floor. Two younger brothers were out back, showering by pouring water over each other. The twins lay swaddled on the floor.

  A high-pitched whistle fractured the calm. An explosion tore the air as if into pieces, followed by sounds of spraying brick and splintering wood. Screams came from inside the house and from the garden. Two nearby houses and a school had been struck; the family’s house was untouched. “Phao kick!” someone yelled. Phuc found herself under a bed with one of her younger brothers who remembered the routine upon hearing mortar fire. Minutes later, the distant wail of ambulance sirens could be heard in the town.

  Never had the residents of Tay Ninh expected the escalation of the war that had begun with cross-border raids by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge to reach into their town, ten miles away. The mortar bombardment had come just as Hanoi had proposed terms for a cease-fire and negotiation with Cambodia. Ngoc’s household stopped
all preparations for Tet and went for their digging tools. Tung chose a spot for a ham several steps out the back door under one of the soursop trees, in the hope that its branches could offer added protection from incoming mortar rounds.

  Throughout the town and its outlying hamlets, people went into a frenzy of digging. Few had experience of the firepower of war. In the war with the Americans, the town had only twice been attacked by Viet Cong or Communist forces: the first time was during the Tet Offensive; the second time, the following year, when the Viet Cong occupied a section of the town for a couple of days. Then, no one in the town had built a shelter. This time they did. In the next days, the authorities organized adults and children into digging brigades. People dug trenches, filled and hefted out bags of earth, lay timbers as a ceiling, then repacked earth over top. Throughout the town, gardens were dug open beside private homes, government offices, schools and hospitals, and pavement was ripped open at regular intervals along city roads.

  Except for a few families like Tung’s, most in the town were so unfamiliar with war that they did not recognize the language of shells and rockets. Some were confused: should they run away from or towards the sound? How should they pray: that it fall on them, or away from them? Few in the town had ever seen or used a shelter. Those in charge at public buildings had no idea how to organize mass evacuations: in drills, never mind when the real bombardment came, they were the first to panic.