The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  THE CAMBODIANS AND VIETNAMESE HARBORED a centuries-old racial antagonism dating back to the emergence of the Viet people as a nation. Much of what is southern Vietnam was chipped and ceded from the ancient Khmer kingdom; Vietnamese expansion southward came at the price of a shrinking modern-day Cambodia. America’s overt extension of the Vietnam war into Cambodia and Laos—in bombing campaigns over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and ground incursions from South Vietnam—united two hereditary enemies on the same warring side: the Viet and Khmer peoples, their patriotic interests represented by the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge, both of which were communistic, the latter led by the mysterious Pol Pot.

  A serious rift opened between the two when the Viet Cong signed the Paris accord in 1973. The Khmer Rouge felt their Vietnamese counterparts had betrayed their cause in Cambodia. The accord silenced the skies over Vietnam, but for the next seven months (until Congress barred American military involvement in Indochina) the Americans redirected their planes over Cambodia, in a last, fierce bombing campaign against supply routes into South Vietnam. In retaliation, the Khmer Rouge struck at the Vietnamese Communists’ arms depots, hospitals and base camps inside Cambodia.

  Events in Cambodia outraced those in Saigon. China, seeing Hanoi’s advance on Saigon, maneuvered for control and influence by injecting military aid to help the Khmer Rouge push to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. They entered the city on April 15, 1975, and two days later it fell. Saigon would fall two weeks after that, but there the similarities ended. In Vietnam, Hanoi sought to bring the south in line with the socialist north. In neighboring Cambodia, Pol Pot, governing what he called Democratic Kampuchea, was singularly radical, conducting purges of opponents and committing atrocities in the name of reshaping a new Khmer society from “year zero.” He turned the Khmer Rouge into an efficient, ruthless machine of murder, and Cambodia into the “killing fields.”

  Pol Pot’s genocidal plans included killing or driving out of Cambodia all the ethnic Vietnamese. Beginning in the spring of 1977, Khmer Rouge soldiers conducted murderous raids on Vietnamese villages at and over the border with Tay Ninh province. While ethnic minorities always tend to live in border areas, the shifting of Indochinese borders over the centuries rendered these boundaries meaningless to locals. Fleeing survivors brought harrowing tales of medieval barbarity by Khmer Rouge attackers. That fall, a Hungarian journalist saw charred bamboo huts, decapitated bodies and mass graves, though Vietnamese authorities prevented him from filing a story. The state-controlled Vietnamese media maintained a façade of normal neighborly relations, partly to mask Hanoi’s retaliatory strikes and defensive actions inside Cambodia’s borders. In December, an elite Vietnamese army attacked from a half dozen points along the border. Six days later, on December 31, 1977, on Radio Phnom Penh, Pol Pot’s government denounced Vietnam as an “aggressor” and announced that it was severing diplomatic relations. Tension opened immediately on another front in Indochina; China declared its support, backed with arms shipments, for Cambodia in its war with Vietnam.

  PHUC FOUND THIS WAR HARDER ON HER nerves than the one that had marred her childhood. Because bombardments let up only for a day or two here and there, the town had to maintain a constant defensiveness. In contrast, though the war with the Viet Cong was protracted, its guerrilla nature allowed, even required, peasants to adhere to time-honored daily rhythms. They stayed within delineated “safe” areas, knew areas to be either in control of one side or another or contested, and could count on any occupying Viet Cong to stay but a few days, then melt away. Phuc had known weapons with enormous destructive power—not only mortar fire, but planes dropping bombs and napalm. She recognized that the damage inflicted on Tay Ninh was by comparison limited, light and even superficial. But what made its townspeople jittery was fear of the unknown: being struck dead by mortar fire, or becoming a victim of the brutal Pol Pot—equally unfathomable ends.

  In her own reaction to war, Phuc recognized a deepening sadness. She saw herself watching, innocently, at the age of nine, the canisters of napalm tumble end over end from the airplane, not realizing danger until fire enveloped her. At fifteen, she saw herself changed by the knowledge of physical pain and the grief of loss. Those who survive war know it has in store more cruelties than death alone.

  The shelling and mortar fire came in the afternoons. Students at Phuc’s high school had dug shelters in the central courtyard outside the door of their classrooms. Though mortar rounds never struck the school, injuries of sprained ankles and bruises, even broken bones, were inevitable as thirty to forty students pushed through the bottleneck of the door and fell in a pile inside the ham. Phuc was as frightened at being caught in the crush as being left out. Riding home after school was also nerve-racking; one had to ride quickly, yet be ready to throw down the bicycle and make for a roadside shelter.

  Phuc felt safest at home, where running for the ham was less panicky. Her father, having curtailed his visits to Trang Bang, was also there to help. It took several sets of hands to ready the twins for the ham: one to fetch their milk and bottled hot water to keep them warm, one to hand them off, another to receive them. Once inside, attention turned to more immediate dangers: rats and snakes. One student at Phuc’s school died after being bitten by a snake in a shelter. Her brothers were charged with checking the ham several times a day, and more often during the rainy season, when it was filled with several inches of water.

  Days became weeks, weeks turned into months.

  The face of Tay Ninh changed. The town swelled with Vietnamese refugees from the border areas. Camps were set up for Khmer people fleeing Cambodia. The town’s clinics overflowed; unemployed southern doctors and nurses were recalled. Death visited, not always leaving a body behind to bury. One of Ngoc’s neighbors, a teacher working in a border village, returned after a weekend in Tay Ninh minding a sick relative and made the grisly discovery of a pile of burnt skulls, among which was most certainly that of her sister, another teacher there. Shudders went through Tay Ninh at gossip of decapitated bodies clogging tributaries of the Mekong River near the border. Immediately, Tho threw out Cambodian-caught fish, once a local mainstay and now shunned. The Vietnamese military intensified its census, mostly in Saigon, but ever more families in Tay Ninh also gave up sons to fight the war. That Hanoi’s motives were more than retaliation was apparent to those who knew of the secret camps set up nearby to train a Vietnamese-led Khmer resistance army to fight Pol Pot.

  LITTLE NEWS CAME TO THE WEST OUT OF Communist-ruled Indochina, and the news on Radio Phnom Penh evoked little more than remark at the oddity of Communist brethren at war with each other. However, the jostling for domination between two Communist capitals, Hanoi and Beijing, is what partly drove Vietnam that summer to join the Soviet Union’s trading bloc, COMECON (the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, which included as well East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria). Vietnam became the only member country, other than Cuba, outside Eastern Europe. However, in a balancing act between the superpowers, Vietnam also pursued the normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States. On that front, negotiations that fall in New York achieved a breakthrough. Unexpectedly, the Vietnamese representative renounced Hanoi’s demand that America honor a secret promise made by Richard Nixon at the time of the signing of the Paris cease-fire accord in 1973. Nixon had pledged to North Vietnam that, were it to sign the accord, America would pay $4.5 billion in war reparations. The dropping of the demand by Hanoi so advanced talks on normalization that American officials, led by Richard Holbrooke, began studying the floor plans of the villa that had been the American consulate in Hanoi during the French colonial government as a possible location for a new embassy there.

  Then, American President Jimmy Carter abruptly shelved normalization with Vietnam. What Vietnam did not know was that secret normalization talks had begun that summer between Washington and Beijing, and in those talks, China had made known its hostility to Vietnam. Success with China was annou
nced in mid-December. The American public expressed no disappointment in failure on the Vietnamese front: since summer, American television networks had been airing disturbing scenes of fleeing “boat people.” Such images evoked abhorrence among many Americans for the Vietnamese regime, serving as a reminder, yet again, that Vietnam was best left behind.

  BY EARLY 1978, AN ATMOSPHERE OF CRISIS hung heavily over Vietnam. Hanoi was disappointed at what it perceived as resistance on the part of southerners to the move to socialism: rationed goods were leaking to the free markets; collectives were breaking down; speculators were hoarding, particularly rice. Instead of faulting its socialist policies, Hanoi decided that tighter measures were needed. It stepped up collectivization and extended it to the agricultural sector. Then it struck what it hoped would be the body blow to remaining capitalists. One evening in late March, police raided homes and businesses in Cholon, the Chinese business district of Ho Chi Minh City, where the regime estimated half the money in circulation and most of the gold holdings in the south resided. They seized businesses, gold and securities belonging to ethnic Chinese. To gut cash holdings, the regime followed up with currency recalls. Then, it tried to force the newly dispossessed Chinese to move to the new economic zones.

  Meanwhile, fear of impending war with China had sent ethnic Chinese flocking to Vietnam’s border with China; even more rushed to leave when China temporarily opened it. Angry at China for backing Cambodia, Hanoi was also paranoid about the power of ethnic Chinese within Vietnam, and wanted rid of them. It decided to allow them to leave officially, but at a price: ten taels of gold for an adult, five for a child.

  On a low-level cadre’s state salary, the rate of which was set according to those in the north, one tael of gold was equivalent to three to five years’ earnings. Corrupt cadres saw an opportunity to profit by exacting bribes. The official procedure was that those wishing to go had to register at a southern coastal public security bureau, provide the correct papers, pay the official fee, then wait in a containment camp for a departure date and a seat on a state-sanctioned boat. The boat, with a security official onboard, would be bound for a coastal containment camp but ultimately for an island off the country’s southern tip. Once a boat arrived there, the occupants were left on their own to push off onto the high seas.

  The effect of registration was to single out families for surveillance and as targets of vengeance. It gave vindictive authorities time to deny them higher education, to strip them of their livelihoods, homes and possessions. Leaving unofficially at least gave one a chance to hide gold or smuggle it out of the country.

  Thus began the ordeal of the boat people. Over the next two years, some 400,000 ethnic Chinese and, as well, Vietnamese, using fake Chinese identity papers, pushed off in all manner of unseaworthy boats from Vietnam’s shores into the perilous South China Sea, hoping either to reach international waters and be rescued there, or land in Thailand, Malaysia or anywhere between Hong Kong and Australia. More than 40,000 would perish at sea. The total escaping Vietnam by boat would exceed 1 million before the exodus all but ended in the late 1980s.

  The two years of the peak from 1978 to 1980 coincided with grim shortages in both the north and south. Annual rice harvests since the takeover had been poor, the result of bitter cold in the north, and heavy rains, floods and typhoons in the south. Since war’s end, the state rice-purchasing agency in the south had fallen far short of its target, meeting only half of it the first year. It would worsen year by year, so that in 1978, when the black market price was thirteen times that of the state price, the agency met only 12 percent of its target. Farmers continued to hoard supplies for their own families and for the black market. The economy was grinding to a standstill. The state had little hard currency—imports were four to five times the value of the country’s exports—to buy fuel, machine parts or raw materials for its factories. Life stretched thinner as food, medicines and medical equipment and funds were reserved for Vietnamese soldiers fighting in Cambodia and others guarding the country’s 797-mile northern border with China.

  By the fall of 1978, several army divisions moved through Tay Ninh, amassing for a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. Knowing that the loathsome Pol Pot quashed any resistance within Cambodia, Hanoi had concluded that its own troops would have to oust him. In late December, the start of Cambodia’s dry season, Vietnamese forces attacked. Within two weeks, they were sitting outside Phnom Penh. Pol Pot and some of his Khmer Rouge soldiers, along with several hundred thousand Cambodians whom they forced to join them, retreated to jungle enclaves on the western border with Thailand, where they would wage guerrilla war. (Pol Pot led them until his death in 1998.) Hanoi gave the command to take the capital, then sent in soldiers to occupy the country.

  China’s retaliation came two months after the Vietnamese had overrun Phnom Penh. Having achieved normalization with the United States, it attacked without condemnation across the border with Vietnam. Announcing that their purpose was “to teach the Vietnamese a lesson,” for sixteen days in February 1979 Chinese troops cut a vicious swath along the border, leveling several Vietnamese villages, factories and coal mines. Ultimately, China’s actions would send Vietnam decisively into the Soviet orbit of Sino-Soviet rivalry. Its military occupation of Cambodia, where it installed a regime sympathetic to Hanoi, and its fight against the guerrilla Khmer Rouge would stretch into a decade, further straining Vietnam’s already bare treasury and turning into its own “Vietnam,” a term that has come to mean a protracted and futile military struggle.

  VIETNAMESE PEASANTS LOOKING FOR SOLACE in what they saw as the baldness of their poverty had a saying: “The Communists control you only if you have hair on your head.” Security cadres had become more zealous and menacing in their unannounced rounds from house to house. Possession of an electric fan was evidence enough for authorities to raise taxes or assess household duties. Impostors at the door became a problem, as security uniforms could be had on the black market: no one dared confront someone who might have legitimate authority.

  No security cadre suspected hidden wealth at Ngoc’s household. When he and Tho had a second set of twin girls, yet more of the household was relegated to sleeping on the floor. That did not mean that the neighborhood cell leader did not visit and linger. And he could more often than not be counted on to show up just as the household was sitting down for a meal. It was essential to greet one’s cell leader with not just any smile, but an ardent one, to show one’s enthusiasm for building socialism.

  “Have you eaten?” Tung would ask. “Please join us.”

  “Oh,” the cell leader would say, adjusting the face-saving toothpick stuck between his teeth, “I’ve had my meal—but, sure.”

  Worst off was the low-level cadre on the state payroll, who was paid as little as thirty to forty dong a month. On the open market in the south, a pound of sugar was twelve dong, a pound of rice eighteen. His household ration booklet did give him some privilege. However, because of more severe rice shortages in the south, Hanoi had cut the monthly rice ration there to one-half the level set in the north, itself set at a near-famine level, only one-fifth the international standard of grain consumption for individual subsistence (four to six kilograms of rice, compared to the international standard of thirteen to fourteen).

  Nu’s profits at the noodle shop, about one tael of gold every one or two months, was some twenty times what a low-level cadre made. But on that income she fed ten adults and children plus Tho’s four babies. As well, she did what she could to help the two widows, Grandmother Tao and Loan. The war with Cambodia had brought some opportunities: Tung and Ngoc sometimes dealt in imported cigarettes smuggled from Cambodia. Despite Nu’s entreaties, Tam, the second son, dropped out of high school and did not go on to technical school. Instead he tried to cash in on Tay Ninh’s swelling refugee population with a business of transporting goods with his bicycle. A collision he had with a truck damaged the sight in one eye; Tam’s impairment was not, as Western reporters would
later report, from the napalm attack that injured Phuc.

  Phuc looked with envy at families able to live in more comfort. As she saw it, they were the ones who lived in decent houses with decent furniture, regularly had enough to eat and could keep their children in school. She assumed that they were able to save and hide gold. Or that they were lucky enough to have a relative who’d made it out to the United States at the end of the war in the south and was sending either money or items that the family could resell.

  ON THE EVE OF A FEAST HONORING AN anniversary of the death of Great Uncle, Phuc and Tam took a late-afternoon bus to Trang Bang to bring back what Nu had prepared. She herself planned to arrive the next day. It was late evening by the time they returned to Tay Ninh with hampers of rice, cooked dishes, fruit, fruit-peel wine and cigarettes. And it was long after midnight when Tung and Tho laid out the family’s finery reserved for such festivities and, exhausted, joined the rest of the sleeping household.

  “Phuc! Wake up!” It was a younger brother. “Thieves came in the night! They stole everything!”

  The ancestral altar was bare; gone were the dishes for the feast, their best clothes. The thieves had cleared the broken armoire by Tung’s bedside, taking his radio, his watch, all his dong. They had made off with every item of daily use: every last dish and utensil, every jute bag of clothing, everything but furniture. The family dog lay outside as if drugged; the most underfed of the household, it had undoubtedly been thrown laced meat. Phuc’s youngest brother recalled that at about nine o’clock the previous evening he had dismissed a noise under the bed as the scratching of the dog; in hindsight, it must have been the thief waiting for the family to go to sleep.