The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  More than one year passed without reply. Finally, in the summer of 1982, Phuong brought word that Kim Phuc had been found. What seemed an inexcusably long process had in fact been expeditious by the standards of Vietnamese bureaucracy: Phuong had kept from Kretz the fact that her contacts in Hanoi were at the highest levels: her father was the foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach. Still, it would be some months yet before Kretz could free his schedule to go to Vietnam.

  TWO DAYS AFTER PHUC LEFT TIEN GIANG and arrived home in Tay Ninh, ready to put her mind to retaking the entrance examinations later that summer, the same four men who’d showed up at her school arrived in a van. They came to take her to see their boss in Ho Chi Minh City. Quickly, Phuc changed her clothes, ran a comb through her hair and climbed aboard. As the van passed by the noodle shop in Trang Bang, she longed to stop to share with her parents the excitement of being escorted to the city.

  At the information ministry Phuc was shown to the office of someone named Thach (no relation to the foreign minister). An interpreter for visiting foreign journalists, he also wrote for the Communist daily. Thach was talkative, explaining animatedly to Phuc that the search for her had begun upon a German journalist’s request to Hanoi. “He met you ten years ago and he could not forget you.” Hanoi’s order to the information ministry in Ho Chi Minh City was this: find the girl. The order came to Thach. When cadres in Trang Bang reported that the girl’s family had moved from there at the end of the war, Thach broadened the search to towns and hamlets throughout Tay Ninh province. The break had come one year later, when his officials saw the sign above the noodle shop in Trang Bang.

  Thach and two security cadres escorted Phuc to the former Majestic Hotel, once the city’s most prestigious and elegant wartime hotel, popular in its day for the view from its rooftop terrace of the busy Saigon River. There, three foreign journalists awaited. Phuc would remember one to be Japanese. The others she thought were “Americans”—in south Vietnamese eyes, Western foreigners were all Americans; to the Vietnamese in the north, Western foreigners were all Russians. The journalists wanted to know what she remembered of the napalm attack and her hospital stay later, and what she was doing now. She spoke of her dream to study medicine.

  The details that Phuc could not wait to tell her family concerned not the interview itself, but rather the lavish lunch that followed in the fifth-floor restaurant. She ate little, as the food did not suit her vegetarianism. In any event, all she could think was that Ngoc’s household could eat for a month on what the meal must have cost. What impressed her most was Thach’s delight that he’d finally been able to tell Hanoi that he’d found her. He laughed himself at how he’d had authorities broadcast her name over neighborhood loudspeakers. “It was very hard for me to find you,” he told her, “but I was very determined. If I’d had to, I would have looked under the sea and over the mountains.” Phuc smiled broadly. I am nothing, I am nobody, and now I am that important? She asked no questions; a good citizen under Communism asks nothing.

  The summer was enlivened a second and third time when a car and driver and, as always, a minder came to collect Phuc from Tay Ninh for an interview and lunch in Ho Chi Minh City, and to bring her back afterwards. Phuc’s family was pleased for her. The one unpleasant side of talking about the napalm bombing was that it stirred up memories so vividly that her nightmares of war recurred. She had not had them since the war ended; the Cambodian war had not provoked them, perhaps because there had been no airplane strikes or bombing.

  Otherwise, the summer was a repeat of the summer before, a routine of studying and attending rituals at the local temple. She no longer went with Lien; her girlfriend was among the growing numbers staying home because of what Ngoc called “trouble in the religion.” It had begun with the government’s closure of the Holy See for daily worship. It was now allowed to open only for the three or four major religious holidays in the year. Those in the delegation that went to appeal the government’s decision disappeared and were rumored to have been arrested. Like Ngoc, Phuc was unafraid. “My belief is strong,” she told him.

  Late that summer, Phuc sat once again for the entrance examination. The bureau scored her three points higher than the year before, enough for her to get her second choice, a medical college in Ho Chi Minh City. Trieu got her third choice: a nursing college there. That October, Phuc moved to Ho Chi Minh City. Loan, recently remarried to a widower, had invited Phuc to live with them. Loan had met her new husband at the noodle shop, when he was on his way to the Cambodian border area where he worked as a forestry engineer. Because his employer was in Ho Chi Minh City, his ho khau was for there. This all-important residence permit was necessary for everything from owning or renting a home, starting a business, attending school and seeking employment to getting medical care and registering a motorscooter. The couple and Loan’s teenage daughter lived in a small flat in central Ho Chi Minh City, on a quiet street behind the old American embassy.

  Nu met Phuc’s expenses: tuition, books and pens, food and clothing, medicine. Students in the city received a monthly rice ration which they could purchase at the rice distribution center at their school. Nu replaced the bicycle taken by thieves in Tay Ninh; Phuc would need it in the city, where local bus service was almost nonexistent. From her opening day of school in October 1982, Phuc settled in for serious study: the requirement for a doctor’s diploma was five years of university, followed by one year’s residency in a hospital. Loan did her the favor of going to Trang Bang to collect her weekly allowance of food and money from Nu. I have a future, Phuc told herself happily—something only a privileged few in Vietnam could say.

  To Phuc’s profound disappointment, however, once she started school her interviews with journalists did not stop. What had been an entertainment in the summer was now an aggravation and unwelcome intrusion. And gone was Thach. New officials took responsibility for her, according her none of the same respect. A cadre named Hai Tam from Tay Ninh province took over Phuc’s interviews. It was his prerogative; she was a permanent resident of Tay Ninh province and therefore under its jurisdiction, and as an interview subject, she was the responsibility of the propaganda office, which Tam headed. Where Thach had been young, in his early thirties, Tam was older, in his late fifties. Where the former was educated and refined, having lived a dual life in Saigon during the war, the latter had spent years in the forest after no more than a couple of years of primary education, emerging at war’s end to claim the reward of a job.

  In Phuc’s first month of school, Tam summoned her one afternoon a week for an interview. Without notice, a minder or two from the province would show up at her morning class to spirit her to Tay Ninh. At Tam’s bidding, foreign journalists wishing to interview Kim Phuc had to come to Tay Ninh, bringing in tow a minder and a government interpreter, provided by the information ministry in Ho Chi Minh City.

  From the start, Phuc disliked Tam but feared him more. Others under his authority, small-voiced minions all, fairly tripped over each other to fall into line. Short and hollow-cheeked, coarse and overbearing, Tam had a smile he could switch on and off at will. Puffed up with self-importance, he would first address visiting journalists on the subject “Building Vietnam under Socialism.” Then, in the brooding presence of several unidentified security cadres, the interview with Phuc would proceed. Once it was over, Tam would lead the entourage to another building within the walled complex of the People’s Committee of Tay Ninh for a reception, where waiters stood ready to offer Vietnamese cola, juice, beer and wine. All such services, as well as transportation and interpretation, were paid for by “representation fees” the Vietnamese government charged to the journalists.

  Afterwards, Tam would call Phuc into his office. His smile in the off position, he would admonish her. “Don’t say this!” or “Don’t say that!” He lectured her for embarrassing the regime by speaking of the difficulties of life in postwar Vietnam, of times when, in her own family, there had not been enough to eat. In her first interviews ea
rlier that summer, overseen by the interpreter Thach, Phuc had spoken freely along those lines, and without censorship. She would learn quickly what passed Tam’s approval: she could make as much as she liked of her physical suffering from her napalm burn endured in the American war, but she was not to portray the people as having suffered under the new regime.

  After each interview, Phuc had to find her own way back from Tay Ninh to Ho Chi Minh City. Wanting to avoid the long bus ride back, as well as the expense, Phuc found the nerve to ask: might she catch a ride back to the city with the foreign journalist, whose car and driver were going that way anyway? “No!” Tam’s tone was as much reprimand as accusation that she was trying to associate with foreigners, which was strictly forbidden. Once, among the interpreters, she saw the familiar face of Thach. She longed to exchange more than a smile, but she saw in his meek manner an acknowledgment that the hour and jurisdiction were Tam’s.

  Phuc began to feel as if she were leading a dual life, as student and as war victim. By November, one month into her school year, interviews were more frequent, at least twice weekly. Tam took to scheduling them for the morning instead of the afternoon, so his minders would have to come to collect her from Loan’s house the evening before. They seemed to have no qualms about the lateness of the hour, once showing up at one in the morning. Often, on the way there, the car broke down—a common problem, what with road upkeep and repair starved for public funds. Initially, they would take Phuc to Ngoc’s to spend the night, but finding it bothersome to have to come to collect her the next morning, they took to dropping her at the complex of the People’s Committee, expecting her to sleep on a couch outside Tam’s office. The days were long; the receptions that followed the interviews became midday banquets of hot and cold dishes, served at tables decked out with white tablecloths and floral centerpieces. Phuc would take no more than a glass of cola or juice and a slice of bread on which she sprinkled salt. The longer the day dragged on, the more consumed with worry she would be about missing yet another entire day’s classes.

  She tried to make up for missed lectures by borrowing classmates’ notes. But she was also missing sessions in the laboratories, at clinics and hospitals. Phuc spoke to her professors, trying to both apologize and explain.

  “This situation is impossible,” replied one.

  “It is not my fault,” she pleaded.

  “I’m scared,” Phuc told Loan. “I don’t want this any more!” She did not understand how she had got into this predicament. “Why all this attention for one picture? There are other victims of the war against America, why choose me?”

  By December, Phuc was more often in Tay Ninh than in class. She grew anxious about the upcoming end-of-semester examinations. During the long car rides to Tay Ninh, she would pointedly ignore the driver and minder and bury herself in her books.

  One evening, a frustrated Phuc could bear the interruptions no longer. “Please, I don’t want to go!” she begged the minder standing at the door. “Let me study, please!”

  “My job is to pick you up.” The minder returned to the waiting car.

  To retaliate, Phuc contrived to make life difficult for Tam. I will travel like a bird, she decided. She took to staying overnight with different friends of her sister’s. But no matter where she alighted, she could not elude Tam’s people. This dangerous game might indeed have provoked him. What his associate said one day to Phuc perplexed her. “We want you to come back to Tay Ninh,” he said. “We can find a job for you.” Instantly, she was afraid and she hastened to reply: “I don’t want to work in Tay Ninh. I want to study.” On another visit, he took her to the radio station, where she read a script put in front of her into a microphone. “You have a good voice,” the associate said later. “I wouldn’t want that job,” Phuc replied. “The career I want is to be a doctor.”

  She was nervous enough about what lay in store to risk, during a banquet following an interview, a question of an interpreter from Ho Chi Minh City. She cloaked it in a tone of innocence, so as not to arouse the suspicions of any who might overhear. “Why so much attention to my story?” she asked. “You are ‘hot’ news,” he replied. It was not an expression she understood.

  IN JANUARY, AS THE FIRST SEMESTER’S CLASSES drew to a close, the dean called Phuc in. She had been expecting a meeting, knowing that the college and she would have to come to some accommodation. Better that they do so before the upcoming examinations.

  “You can no longer stay at this school,” he announced.

  Phuc was in shock.

  “Tay Ninh has removed your ho khau back to the province.”

  Phuc cried out. “Why did you let them do that? Why?”

  His tone became apologetic. “You are from Tay Ninh. By the rules, after your schooling, you would have to go back to Tay Ninh anyway. People try to break the rules, but . . .”

  The official population of Ho Chi Minh City was 3 million, but unofficially it was closer to 4 million. The city hid many who had “escaped” either the new economic zones or their home provinces, where their ho khau dictated that they live. Whole families squatted under the city’s bridges, preferring the life of a beggar to that in the harsh frontier. Others were in hiding from authorities, on the move from one apartment to another while plotting to escape the country by boat or trying to hasten their legal departure. As of 1980, the regime allowed those with relatives abroad to apply to leave under a program for orderly departures sponsored by the United Nations (stalling on the part of Hanoi meant it would not function as intended until the late 1980s), to stem the flow of the boat people and to alleviate overflowing refugee camps in Southeast Asia.

  “Please, can you help me to stay in school?”

  Phuc was asking the impossible. To get one’s home jurisdiction to relinquish one’s ho khau required untold bribes, as cadres suspected a plan to escape from the country. It was difficult to get another jurisdiction to grant even visiting status for more than one week at a time; and even then, the person had to furnish proof that he could bring enough rice to feed himself.

  “Tay Ninh says that you have become an important person in Vietnam.” The dean tried to explain his predicament. “They say Ho Chi Minh City is not safe for you. They are right. What if something should happen to you? You could be kidnapped. The school cannot protect you. It is better that you live in Tay Ninh.”

  There was silence on both their parts.

  “I can do nothing,” the dean finally said. “You are a special student.”

  “Special? How special?” Phuc was in tears.

  For the next few days she continued to go to class, though she knew it was futile. Finally, she took a bus to Tay Ninh and went directly to the offices of the People’s Committee. The guard, so used to seeing her, took her identity booklet without bothering to call ahead.

  In Tam’s office, she waited for him to speak first. The floor fan in the corner whirred loudly. Finally she broke the silence, but politely. “Please, why did you take my records?”

  “You cannot go to Ho Chi Minh City to study. You are an important victim of the war. I want you here. Your job is to answer the telephone and type for me.”

  “I wish to say thank you—but I want to be a doctor.”

  Tam was affronted. “A job in the propaganda office is a good job. It is not hard work. A lot of people would want it and can’t have it!” He was yelling now: “Why don’t you want it?”

  Phuc looked him in the eye and borrowed from a Vietnamese proverb: “When I am healthy, I want rice. When I am sick, I want soup. I know a lot of people want to eat rice, but I need soup!”

  Tam’s face darkened ominously.

  PHUC BROKE HER RETURN BUS TRIP IN Trang Bang. She told her parents about Tam wanting her to work as his secretary. Nu had barely begun to question her when Phuc cut her off. “I don’t have another breath for that man,” she said. “I’m going to escape from Tay Ninh.”

  As her daughter left, having collected the usual weekly packet of money and fo
od, Nu was shaking her head. “Phuc will drop dead in any job,” she said to Tung. While the family had been cheered to see her take to studying—“What else would Phuc do?” they asked each other—Nu had remained convinced that her wounded daughter could never work enough to support herself.

  Some days later, a familiar black car pulled up to the noodle shop.

  Tam or his minders had shown up before. Sometimes they came to take Tung and Nu to Tay Ninh to put them on display to foreign journalists. However, they were there to be seen, not heard. If an interpreter put a journalist’s question to either or both of them, Tam lashed out in admonishment: “You do not ask the mother or father; you ask the People’s Committee.” Or they were there to be a receiving line. Once, a visitor had a gift of a carton of cigarettes for Tung; another offered a tin of candies. “These are not for you,” Tam said, confiscating both. “They are for the people’s government.”

  Tam plowed out of the car. Even as he approached, he fixed them with a stare and wagged his finger. In Vietnamese culture, making eye contact is socially impolite, and finger-wagging is particularly rude and demeaning, a reprimand appropriate for a dog.

  “You must convince your daughter to come back from Ho Chi Minh City to Tay Ninh as I want,” he said sternly. “What is she doing there?”

  “We do not know what Phuc wants to do,” Nu replied.

  “Order her to come back!”

  “She is not a child. She is old enough to decide for herself.”

  Tam walked backwards towards his waiting car, his finger going maniacally. “If something happens to her, both of you will go to prison!”

  PHUC SAW NO POINT IN RUNNING; TAM HAD proven he could find her. She saw her choices as limited. She was not physically up to working in the noodle shop; she could not return to Tay Ninh, as that would be admitting defeat; that left staying in Ho Chi Minh City with Loan. Above all, Phuc wanted to study. But college and university—and therefore a career in medicine—were now out. She settled on learning English and signed up for a course at a private language school, three nights a week, thinking that maybe one day she could work as an interpreter. Illegal year-round schools and tutoring in English had sprung up in the wake of the exodus of the boat people. Others planning escape believed that English would help them in international waters when they were looking to be rescued from a boat, and later, in their new life abroad.