The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Nu arrived to find the house filled with tears and misery. Replacing even the basics would take weeks of effort, scouring the markets and chasing down peddlers. For one month none of the family had anything more to wear than what they had slept in the night of the robbery. Finally, Nu sent two bolts of material—the printed one was for the girls, the plain for the boys—and extra money to give the tailor to “put wings” on his sewing machine.

  Tung was distraught that the thieves had also taken the suitcase containing mementos of Phuc’s injury, knowing that its contents—the album with the picture and clippings, the medical records—would fetch nothing on the street. Everything about me is gone, Phuc thought, feeling nevertheless unaffected. However, the loss of her bicycle was painful to her; the thieves had taken all three. She would not own another while she lived in Tay Ninh. To cut her walking time under the sun to and from school, she now took a shortcut through the fields, though she fretted the whole time about running into “bad people” out to mug those alone. Despondent, she wept bitterly to Tho. “We are back to having nothing,” she said. Her sister-in-law lectured her with words that Phuc would take strength from in the years ahead whenever she felt defeated: “If you kneel down, life is a mountain; if you stand up, life is at your feet.”

  SAVE FOR THE ELDERLY, IT WAS A SAFE GUESS that any and all—even perhaps Communists—who were unhappy contemplated escape by boat. The preparations were complicated. A cover had to be found for activities such as selling off possessions to raise money to buy gold to pay for a seat on a boat, arranging false Chinese papers, preparing lemon-juice-soaked sugar cubes as sea rations, sewing makeshift life jackets. One also had to leave a relative with enough gold, in the event the attempt failed, to pay a bribe to secure release from jail or ensure less harsh treatment. Security cadres lectured against attempting escape. They warned that one could have all one’s property seized if caught. They spoke of what awaited those who got beyond the rifle range of seaside patrols: death by starvation and thirst at sea, rape, kidnapping and murder at the hands of Thai pirates, cruelty in refugee camps. This did not come as a surprise; those with shortwave radios had heard survivors’ accounts on the BBC World News. What mattered was that some made it. And those without a future in Vietnam preferred to risk death at sea rather than remain behind.

  Because the state had means of overseeing young people, either through school or registration in the military, they found it harder to attempt or carry out escape. Nonetheless, there were telltale absences at Phuc’s high school. Following a discreet exchange of looks between classmates, one would ride his bicycle by an absent student’s house. If somebody unfamiliar occupied it, word spread furtively: “They are gone out.” Once, police promptly arrested a student who had returned after a brief absence. Someone had reported his tan, which aroused suspicions that he had got it from being out on the open sea.

  Phuc kept private her wish: It is my dream to escape. Outwardly, one’s only ambition was to live happily under the Communist regime. She saw no use in saying anything to her family; even if they had the money to gamble their hopes of escape on one member, there was none among the family who was a good swimmer or who had experience on the water. Partly on a whim, but only with the certainty that she was not addressing someone likely to be an informant, she once raised escape as a question. Phuc was away with her father attending the anniversary of the death of someone on his side of the family, and after a shaman conducted a séance, she later visited the old lady in her home.

  “I want to know about my future,” Phuc said.

  “What do you want me to look for?”

  It was not the first time Phuc had dabbled so. As children, she and her siblings would be given a few coins by their parents to ask a fortune. As teenagers, she and friends would enjoy it as an entertainment. Phuc didn’t take these consultations seriously, never using them, as Auntie Anh or her parents did, as a means of keeping in contact with the dead.

  Phuc was clear in her reply: “I want to go to another country.”

  The old lady tied a red scarf over her head, knelt and began to pray aloud.

  Finally, she turned back to Phuc.

  “Two old people will appear in your life to help you,” she said.

  “Will they help me to go out?”

  “Yes, yes, you will go out—but, you will come back.”

  Phuc wanted to understand: “I will not go out for the rest of my life?”

  The shaman smiled. The consultation was over. “Your destiny is that there will always be good people to help you,” she said.

  Phuc pressed some money into the old lady’s hand. What she said was good news, she told herself. Then, shaking off the burden of false hope, she added as an afterthought: I don’t believe in fortune-telling, so I won’t be waiting for those two people.

  BY THE FALL OF 1979, VIETNAM FACED A mounting national economic crisis and near-famine conditions in both the north and south. In the south, supplies bought by the state rice purchasing agency fell for the fifth consecutive year; in that fifth year, farmers sold only 10 percent of the agency’s target. Hanoi had little choice but to reintroduce some free market capitalism back into the south and relax its doctrinaire approach there. It introduced cautious liberal economic reforms: it raised state agricultural prices and permitted limited free markets for producers outside the state plan; it allowed handicraft cooperatives and family businesses such as hog farming, which like other businesses had been forced to buy supplies from the state, to both buy directly and sell surpluses on the open market; and it closed down highway checkpoints that regulated the commercial movement of goods. Over the next two and a half years, these reforms would be gradually extended and would be enough to begin to turn around the rice shortages and stave off economic collapse.

  In her final three years of high school, Phuc experienced her own rejuvenation. Not since before she had been wounded had she felt as healthy or strong. Headaches still troubled her, but less frequently. She examined her changing teenager’s body and saw that as her breasts grew, the burn scars that once reached from her back round to her front seemed to be shrinking. Her shoulder-length hair and long sleeves covered any scarring. The singeing on one cheek had long ago faded from a blackened spot to a blemish and, finally, had disappeared. She had perfected mannerisms to hide any sign of deformity: to disguise the shortness of her left arm compared to her right, when standing, she hung her right arm naturally, but rested her left on her hip. And when writing, she adopted an angular posture, resting her right arm far enough ahead on the tabletop to hide the stiffness from her neck to right shoulder.

  She looked to enliven her life outside the home. On Saturday evenings, a neighbor who owned a television would open his doors to the neighborhood, and often Phuc would wander over. If it was the usual Soviet revolutionary programming, a showing of a Stalinist film classic such as How the Steel was Tempered, the crowd evaporated. If it was Vietnamese traditional music or opera, Phuc stayed around, along with the mostly older crowd. Like the majority of her classmates at school, she resisted entreaties from the leader of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth League to join, or at least participate in its discussion groups, social events and volunteer work in the community. Finally, afraid of repercussions from repeated excuses, she accepted an invitation to a gathering at his house. His parents were there, hosting ten of her classmates to tea and fruit. She was the lone one among them who was not a League member. Noticing the boy being attentive only to her, Phuc was ashamed that he would behave so in front of his parents. That decided her; she would not join the League.

  Though pleased that boys were paying attention to her, Phuc constantly checked herself with a reminder that, because of her wound, she would never be able to compete on the basis of either beauty or strength. She would never have either. One way that I can make myself feel better and stronger, she told herself, is to become a deeper believer in Caodai. Of her siblings, she was the only one to join Tung, Ngoc and Tho at the four dai
ly rituals at the temple in Gate Seven hamlet. Only on the three or four major annual religious holidays would Tung insist that the entire family go to the Holy See. It was an ever-smaller pilgrimage; never was there any overflow into the great temple’s upper balconies. Other adherents were deterred by heavy police presence, the strength of their belief losing out to their fear of the Communists’ disdain for religion. The interior of the temple mirrored the sad state of the religion; police had early on smashed the standing gong, along with other decorative accoutrements: vases, figurines, cranes, phoenixes and dragons. Vandalism and theft were constant problems. There was no money for upkeep; the tiles in the marble floor defining each of the nine ascending levels to the altar were badly chipped, as were the eight plaster columns entwined with dragons supporting the dome at the far end. Ever since the Communists had dismantled the Caodai administration, each temple relied solely on volunteers to fill all positions, from priests to caretakers.

  Phuc signed up for the all-female choir at the local temple. One of its members became her closest friend in Tay Ninh. For the first time since the end of the war, Phuc allowed herself to share confidences, though only within the security of her home or her friend’s. Ten years older, Lien was the oldest of six children from a family who lived in a house behind Ngoc’s. Because their father had not returned from reeducation, the girls had had to quit school to keep the family going. Mother and daughters did piecework, sewing buttonholes and cuffs by hand. Both Nu and Lien’s mother were volunteer heads of females of their respective parishes. The position, which carried the rank of a ritual servant, required them, once a month, to preach at their local temple and to visit and pray with the females of every household. Lien and Phuc did their mothers proud: they donned their white ao dais and chanted prayers with the choir once daily, and, depending on when Phuc finished her homework, together attended the evening service at six or at midnight. On weekends, they attended all four daily rituals. “I enjoy it,” Phuc told her family, borrowing a word not used since early childhood days in Trang Bang.

  “MA, YOU SAW THAT THE CAMBODIAN driver was in today?”

  In the summers when school was out, Phuc went to Trang Bang as often as possible, trying to share a daily life with Nu. The hour for mother and daughter to talk began long after the bamboo blind had been pulled down over the doorway, behind the last customer of the noodle shop. Sometimes, long since having gone to sleep on Nu’s narrow cot, Phuc woke when her mother joined her there, usually after midnight. Lying against the softness of her mother’s breast, Phuc felt the security of childhood that had been cut short. The two would steal from Nu’s sleep to talk, their conversation punctuated by the glare of headlights from passing truck traffic.

  The Cambodian driver was a regular customer, stopping in on his way to Ho Chi Minh City with a load of dried fish in his truck and, on the return, with a load of rice. Nu had remarked before that every time he came in, he looked for Phuc.

  “He told me today: ‘I love you.’”

  “Be careful,” Nu warned. “Truck drivers have no home life. They leave a wife behind and keep girlfriends on the road. It is not safe to marry such people. That kind is not for you.”

  Never had Nu worried about her first two daughters when it came to boys, but with Phuc, she was strict and protective. She need not have fretted; Phuc herself stood on emotional guard. “I don’t love him,” she said of any and all who sought her attentions and wanted her company. She had given thought to both marriage and children; she wanted but expected neither. Boys see me as normal, she had told herself, but once I become close enough to marry one, he will have to see my scars. Once a boy sees me as ugly and weak, how can he still love me?

  In their nightly conversations, Nu sought to guide Phuc by painting pictures with words to invite her daughter to make choices best for her life, and to discourage her from making others. Often, Nu recounted the grim news in her parish. She was deeply troubled by the stillbirths and deformed fetuses, which village talk blamed on chat doc mau da cam. What the Americans called Agent Orange the Vietnamese called a “deadly poison to the skin of the color orange,” a term they also used to embrace every contaminant of the arsenal of war that they feared they had been exposed to, from herbicidal sprays seeping into their wells to buried shrapnel pushing at the roots of vegetables in their gardens. Neither Nu nor Phuc gave voice to their worst fear: the effects of a napalm burn on one’s ability to have children, or even survive pregnancy. Nu did not shy, however, from speaking of unhappy marriages, of divorce and women left on their own. One had to be strong and beautiful, she said, to start over, to remarry.

  Nu would steer talk to the order of the universe beyond her own earthly existence. “Before your father and I go to our next lives,” she would begin, “we want to know that you are looked after.” Gently, but persuasively, she spoke of women who chose in their old age to devote themselves to the temple. She praised two she knew who were living out their lives at local temples: one was poor, born into nothing; the other, formerly wealthy, had donated all her land and monies to the religion. Spiritually, they were equal. Neither had any worry of earthly needs: the temple gave them shelter, and the followers fed them. Nu herself stopped in often with rice and fruit, leaving behind two envelopes of money, one for the temple and one for them. She described such “nuns” of the religion as “angels” who brought comfort in their prayers for the sick and for the dead.

  Phuc’s mind floated easily towards that beatific image. As a doctor, she would bring medical care to people in need. And in her old age, she would work for a temple, living there if need be.

  On her eighteenth birthday, on which, by Caodai religious law, a child passes into adulthood, Phuc made the choice to follow Caodai for life. In keeping with Nu’s wishes, she returned to the temple in Trang Bang, so that her mother herself could conduct part of the ceremony to formally induct her into the religion. As Phuc prostrated herself on its cool marble floor, she felt contentment. “I will try to do good,” she pledged, “for myself, for my mother, for my family and for my religion.”

  EVERY YEAR, STUDENTS WHO GRADUATED from high school in the south could sit for the university entrance examinations, mid-summer in Ho Chi Minh City. One’s acceptance depended completely on the score assigned by the Student Recruitment Bureau. Each student’s final score was a sum of points in two parts: results in the examinations (by subject, including compulsory examinations in political indoctrination and socialist morality); and the bureau’s assignment of points, plus or minus, to one’s revolutionary history going back three generations. Consequently, no matter how high one scored on the examinations, the “wrong” revolutionary credentials could ruin one’s chances of getting into university.

  Upon her graduation in the summer of 1981, Phuc went to the local bureau and registered to take the examinations with hopes of getting into medicine. She also filed a Certificate of Confirmation of Identity regarding her revolutionary history. That summer, Nu gave her money to hire a private tutor. The examinations were difficult; it was not uncommon for a student to take two or three tries to get even the minimum grade. Depending on that year’s professional quotas set by the government, the lowest acceptable score might get one into the least-valued faculty (teaching) at the least prestigious college. Even after they got into university, some rewrote the exams year after year in hopes of improving their score so that they could transfer into a better faculty (such as engineering or medicine), or a better school.

  For the first time in years, Phuc’s headaches returned. To keep up the pace of studying, she had to take three or four painkiller tablets daily. What would it be like to study like a normal student? she wondered. Because she kept her head down all summer, the usual late-summer tradition of watching for blooms on her mother’s favorite flowering plant almost passed her by. The plant had been a gift from Tam, uprooted from the forest. A truck he was driving broke down there, and while waiting to walk out at dawn he was bewitched by a fragrance. He traced
it to a plant with large snow-white flowers, its petals like two open palms, its tall stamens like ancient sailing ships. It was the famed quynh hoa, exalted in traditional Vietnamese literature and art. The plant’s buds open only in darkness and usually after midnight. When they do, it is as if nature’s perfume is spilling from a bottle. The buds on Nu’s plant opened on average once in three years. Times she was summoned home for naught, she was philosophical: “The plant will bloom when the family’s time has come,” she would say.

  This summer, the plant had a multitude of buds. As the first of the buds began to open, Nu woke the sleeping Phuc.

  The family turned to Nu. “Ma, what good fortune shall you ask for?”

  Were they scholars or artists, they would have been sipping wine and putting pen to paper, writing poems or rendering a painting. Nu raised a cup of tea: “The noodle shop will have many customers and Phuc will score a high mark in her examinations.”

  All in all, there were ten blossoms that year, the most that plant would ever produce.

  The bureau sent Phuc her final score. The highest attainable score was in the low twenties; Phuc was assigned a score of twelve, two short of the minimum standard that year. Phuc was pleased; her goal was within reach. Her score seemed to confirm that the bureau regarded her revolutionary history as neutral. She herself had thought that nothing she reported in her Certificate of Identity worked for or against her. No one going back the requisite three generations had been a Viet Cong fighter, none was on the state payroll, and she had not joined any Communist organization. On the other hand, neither had anyone in her immediate family worked for the French, the Saigon regime or the Americans, and none had been a government soldier. She had thought to add a line about her singular brush with war: “When I was nine years old, I was wounded by a napalm bomb.”