The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  The pastor is speaking to my case.

  “Why do you have to carry it alone?”

  I pray to Caodai, I try to do good, and yet, I suffer, I carry a burden.

  “Let Jesus help you. Open the door to let Jesus Christ in. If he knows you have opened the door, he will come to help you.”

  My sin has been to be caught between Caodai and Christianity; I have not allowed God to do his work.

  “He will deliver you from your sins and bring you peace and eternal light from heaven . . .”

  When the pastor called for people to come forward to accept Jesus Christ as their savior, Phuc stepped into the aisle, her face wet with the tears of salvation.

  IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1984, THE FAMILY gathered in Tay Ninh for Tet. Before going to Ngoc’s house, Phuc passed by the local temple. It was as she’d already known: her heart was cold, her spirit dead to it. At midnight on the eve of Tet, the feast with the ancestors began. Phuc declined every dish passed her way. “No, I don’t eat that,” she said, smiling. She felt strong. “You have to eat something!” her family cried out. In reply, Phuc went to the kitchen and came back with a soursop on a plate. She cut the fruit in half and began chewing its white flesh, spitting out its hard, black seeds. No one commented—a bad temper can mar the clean slate of good luck for the new year—but Phuc saw the hurt on her mother’s face.

  The next morning, everyone prepared to go to the Holy See to pray together for health, happiness, prosperity and longevity. Making the pilgrimage there was the extended family from Trang Bang and other distant relations, all of them gathering later at Ngoc’s for a feast grander than the night before. Nu presented Phuc with a new white ao dai. Smiling, Phuc said, “I don’t wear that any more.” Her voice was quiet, controlled. “I no longer practice Caodai. The Bible says that I cannot eat food used to worship the spirits or go to a temple that worships other gods. I respect our ancestors, but I no longer worship them. I only follow Jesus Christ.” With that, she left the house. Her mother’s angry words chased her: “You are not my daughter any more! I am ashamed to have you! You will pay dearly for your betrayal of your religion!”

  That evening, Phuc again refused to partake in the feast. She saw her mother’s eyes well with tears. She knows she has lost me, thought Phuc. On the third day of the holiday, she decided to return to Ho Chi Minh City. The inevitable showdown came. Nu spoke first: “As your mother, I love you. You have been a good and obedient daughter. You have made your parents and your family proud,” she said, “but now you have flouted the laws of the ancestors and of Caodai . . .” Nu broke down, “and in front of family and neighbors!” Ngoc spoke to Phuc. “In all your life, you have never done anything bad. You can make amends to our parents, and to Caodai.”

  “I no longer practice Caodai.” Phuc was unwavering. “I am Christian.”

  Nu tried reason. “That religion is foreign. Caodai is bigger than the religions from the West. If you want Jesus Christ to save you and forgive you, you must pray from the top.” She took a gentler approach. “We have had many troubles and Caodai has helped us. The family must stay together in one religion so that we can be in heaven together.”

  Phuc addressed her entire family: “You do as you like. I pray to God for all of you every day, because I want my family to be saved. I hope it will happen.”

  “If you want to follow God, ask him to feed you! Ask him to give you rice!”

  At those hard words from her mother, Phuc left.

  As the bus rumbled down the highway, she felt stronger than ever about her change of faith. Her father’s parting words had been kinder than her mother’s. “Okay, Phuc,” he had said, his hand on her shoulder, “you go to Jesus, but I will pray for you.” Though she was taking back no packet of money or rice or food from her mother, Phuc was not resentful. I forgive my mother, she told herself. I have an understanding of sin and forgiveness now. With forgiveness there is renewed hope of a future, where there was none before.

  CHAPTER TEN

  PHUC DROPPED OUT OF HER ENGLISH course, figuring she wouldn’t be able to pay the next semester’s tuition anyway. Outside of the interviews in Tay Ninh, the focus of her life was church: she attended the morning and evening services on Sundays, and, with no objections from Loan, took her niece and nephew to the weekly youth social programs and to the Sunday school. She concerned herself only with preparing for her baptism, two Sundays away. For the past several weeks, she had been attending Pastor Anh’s twice-weekly pre-baptism course.

  On the day of her baptism, Anh accompanied her across town to the city’s largest Christian church, located on the major thoroughfare, Tran Hung Dao Street. Anh led her to the uppermost floor, to a room with a baptismal font, where she joined some twenty others, drawn from the handful of Christian churches across the city, for a baptism ceremony conducted by the pastor of the main church.

  Phuc had managed to put aside a little money each week from the amount her mother gave her, by scrimping on what she ate. It was a paltry sum, though, and it quickly ran out. Her situation turned desperate. Had she lived in the country, there would have been ways to scrounge. One could always help oneself to the ubiquitous banana plants, put fish traps in drainage ditches or pull river spinach. In the city, staying alive without money reduced one to begging. Phuc faced the reality that Loan and her husband could not feed her, that to include her at the table only left everybody hungry. It was also a matter of pride that decided Phuc to move; she didn’t want her family to see her struggling to survive on her own.

  With her few possessions—two or three items of clothing, her last remaining tablets of painkillers and her Bible—in a small plastic bag tied onto the handlebars of her bicycle, Phuc pedaled across town. The address she had in hand was that of a relative on her father’s side named Huong, a woman she had never met. Tung and Huong were siblings of sorts; Huong’s parents had daughters only, and they had adopted Tung as a stand-in son, since his family had one to spare. Nu had done this family a favor: in the earliest years of the American war, she’d taken in two siblings for a couple of years while their bomb-damaged house was being repaired. Huong’s father had taken the teenage Huong and the other older daughters and gone north to join the Communists, leaving his wife on her own with the younger children. Huong had spent the war years in the jungle nursing wounded Communist soldiers and Viet Cong. Despite only a primary school education, after the war she was rewarded with a spot at Hanoi University, where the offspring of the Communist leadership were enrolled. She struck up a relationship with her married physics professor, a Party functionary named Dai who could boast a Communist indoctrination in Moscow and Beijing. Dai had the Party transfer him and Huong to Ho Chi Minh City. He was assigned a job at a college; she became a doctor at a city hospital—part of the regime’s policy of replacing southern doctors with those who had the correct revolutionary credentials. Dai then divorced his wife and married Huong.

  Phuc passed through the gates of one of the city’s hospitals to a low-rise concrete dormitory in the rear of the compound. A pretty woman, who looked hardly older than Phuc, and a short, older man answered her knock. Phuc introduced herself. As she had hoped, Huong and Dai took her in. Their one room was small and barren, the floor covered with linoleum, the walls of unpainted concrete. In one corner, a curtain enclosed an area around a drain. Beside that was a small sink. There was no toilet; each floor had one communal toilet. In another corner was a hotplate and a couple of pots and dishes. There was a bed in the middle of the room. Phuc slept on the floor until Huong was able to find a folding bamboo cot. To gain a measure of privacy, the couple strung a curtain round their bed.

  The appearance at the door of a terribly thin, sallow-faced woman, her hair hanging limp, with little more than the clothes on her back, had suggested to Huong and Dai someone beset with poverty. They were surprised, then, by her cheerful disposition and absence of complaint. They thought that those qualities probably endeared her to other occupants of the building or e
lse friends in the city, from whom they assumed she begged money and food. If ever they had extra, they invited her to share it, but they almost never did. Phuc relied not on anyone in the building but on four friends: Trieu; Trieu’s older sister, a nurse; the teenage daughter of Loan’s husband; and Anh. When they could, they sacrificed a handful of rice. Anh, who had less to spare, would buy her a bowl of noodle soup at a stall.

  Huong or Dai often came home to find Phuc crying, sitting on a stool and lifting the back of her blouse to waft air up her back. Her painkillers exhausted, Phuc could not afford even ice. The first time the couple saw her blackened striations of scar tissue they were shocked. Whenever she was driven to seek relief under the shower—fortunately, the hospital’s water supply was unlimited—one would look to the other, exchanging the same thought: “What a pity.” Neither knew the picture of which Phuc spoke, but they quickly became accustomed to the knock at the door that announced Phuc’s minder from Tay Ninh. They themselves politely greeted the official, anxious that Phuc not keep him waiting.

  As for her family, Phuc consciously adopted a Christian attitude, as if all were “normal” between them. However, when in Tay Ninh, she rarely stopped in at Ngoc’s to see her siblings and nieces, and only sometimes did she break her return trip to see her parents in Trang Bang. Tung and Nu asked nothing of how she lived in the city; they knew about Huong and Dai—“Communists,” in Nu’s mind. Phuc asked for neither money nor food, and Nu offered her none. No one spoke of religion. On one visit that coincided with a religious holiday, Nu brought out Phuc’s white ao dai. She looked to her daughter’s face for an answer. “I don’t wear that any more,” came the reply once again. The spells between visits lengthened. Aside from her spiritual detachment from her family, Phuc was, increasingly, too fatigued to manage a stop in Trang Bang.

  VIETNAM RESIGNED ITSELF TO THE UNITED States government’s insistence on a one-issue agenda with Vietnam: American MIAs from the Vietnam war. However, Vietnam hoped to use the issue as a lever of goodwill to get the United States to soften its stance on Vietnam’s military occupation of Cambodia, thus reducing another obstacle towards the lifting of the American economic embargo. Hanoi refused to make concessions on withdrawing from Cambodia; it saw holding sway over Cambodia as vital to Vietnam’s security against China. But, on the economic front, despite the benefits of liberal reforms, Vietnam’s outlook remained bleak. Starved for capital, it staggered under the burdens of outside debt and a military budget worth half its national wealth.

  In looking to the United States, Vietnam also wanted elbow room with the Soviets. To repay debt held by the Soviets and other eastern bloc countries, Vietnam was obliged to send more than half a million “guest workers” to work for reduced pay in their factories. Never was Hanoi comfortable with the Soviet Union’s influence in its affairs. Only grudgingly did Hanoi allow a Soviet buildup at the American-built former naval base at Cam Ranh Bay (the world’s best natural harbor after Sydney, Australia). Certainly the Vietnamese people had a distaste for anything Russian. They turned off their television sets when Russian programming came on, stayed away from the cinema when Russian films were showing and didn’t enroll in Russian foreign language courses. They regarded Russians as rude and overbearing and privately ridiculed the Russian technical experts and military advisers in Vietnam, referring to them as “Americans without dollars.”

  Of the two issues that Hanoi thought could entice Americans to keep talking with its regime, one dropped from view in May 1984. A class action lawsuit, representing many U.S. veterans and their survivors, and alleging detrimental health effects, had been launched against seven American chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange for use in the Vietnam war. The case was settled out of court with the establishment of a $180 million compensation fund.

  That left the issue of the American MIAs. Successively higher-level American delegations came to Hanoi to discuss it. The total was small compared to other wars: in the Second World War, some 79,000 American servicemen were listed as MIAs; in the Korean war, 8,000. The number in the Vietnam war was 2,477. In truth, the likelihood of finding remains dating back to the 1960s was remote. In the hot jungle climate, remains decay within days. Vietnam had long since abandoned its search for the remains of at least three hundred thousand of its own missing in action during the wars with the French and the Americans. In the south, the death toll of Vietnamese in the American war included more civilians than soldiers. An estimated 183,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 415,000 civilians died in the south. The death toll among northern soldiers was estimated at 925,000.

  The American accounting of its MIAs from the Vietnam war began in earnest in 1984, when Hanoi turned over remains—bone fragments—of eight bodies. Over the next two years, Hanoi would sporadically turn over more remains (by 1992, the number would be whittled from 2,477 to 2,202). However, with each shipment or subsequent attempt on Hanoi’s part to remove the issue of MIAs from the table, Washington would reaffirm its policy that any move towards normalization was out of the question until there was a full accounting of all MIAs. Yet, the American military knew conclusively that half the total had been killed in action, and another fifty-five were known to have been alive and held in captivity. Of the remainder, whatever American officials believed privately, publicly they kept alive rumors that Hanoi had not turned over all prisoners of war in 1973 and that it was still holding live Americans captive. Ultimately, in the MIA issue the United States had a convenient tactic for stalling the softening of its stance on Vietnam. As long as the issue of MIAs was in the forefront, America’s recrimination about why it had become involved in a war without meaning, and its resentment over its defeat there, were redirected towards the enemy that was Hanoi.

  RECOGNIZING THE POPULARITY OF KIM Phuc’s story with the foreign press, the information ministry in Ho Chi Minh City took to assigning the same interpreter to cover her interviews. Considered one of their best, Viet was both adept at English and effective in his dealings with Western reporters; they found him affable, helpful and sensitive to the demands of their profession. Phuc recognized in him the southerner’s warmth and openness that she had seen in Thach, who had conducted the search for her. Unlike Thach, Viet was neither cowed nor cowering in Tam’s presence.

  Phuc warmed to Viet and he to her. The two southerners were artful in their tandem performance: she, the schoolgirl explaining her ambitions as a medical student in Ho Chi Minh City; he, animatedly and subtly translating it. As they played to journalist after journalist, Phuc was nagged by the urge to tell Viet the truth. She longed to confide in someone; her instinct was that he was someone she could trust.

  One afternoon, she showed up unannounced at his office in the information ministry. He was welcoming, and Phuc did not hold back: “It is not true I am in medical school.”

  “No?”

  “I lost my school.”

  She recounted how Tam had removed her records because he wanted her to return to Tay Ninh. Without mentioning that her mother had cut off her support, Phuc told of the precariousness of her life in Ho Chi Minh City: “My family has to pay high taxes at our noodle shop . . . I have no job. I have no money. How can I live?”

  Viet was visibly upset. “Something is wrong. People who are powerful are using you.” But, in the end, he could offer little more than sympathy. “You are from Tay Ninh. Your records are not with our city. Even if we in Ho Chi Minh City disagree with Tay Ninh, we can do nothing.” He shook his head in regret. “We are powerless to help you.”

  The knowledge of Viet’s tacit participation in her charade plunged Phuc back into darkness. After every interview, when he, together with the journalists, left in their van for Ho Chi Minh City, she made ever more wearily for the bus, slumped ever lower in her seat. She saw her life to be without shape or purpose. She pondered the naiveté of once praying to Caodai for happiness. She yearned for something far more complex than happiness: goodness. Knowing the Western God had answered her once, by de
livering the woman in the church, she put him to a second test: “Dear God, I need someone to rescue me, a savior.” Who could that person be? She could think of no one in Vietnam who could help her. Then, the name Perry Kretz came to mind. He cared about me enough to come back, thought Phuc. She wrote him a letter, an appeal for sympathy as much as for help. Even after she’d posted it, she feared arrest, worrying that it might have fallen into the wrong hands.

  The weeks passed without a reply. Phuc’s health deteriorated. She had trouble sleeping. She had relied on the banquets in Tay Ninh to keep herself fed, and she had developed stomach problems, which she attributed to eating meat again after several years as a vegetarian. Huong could offer only pity. Though assigned to be a doctor, she was not yet qualified; she was learning on the job and attending night courses that the regime had set up in the south for those who had sacrificed their education for the revolutionary cause. As Dai pointed out, had Phuc a ho khau for Ho Chi Minh City, she would have qualified for a health examination booklet, which allowed one to see a doctor for a small fee and obtain prescriptions for medicines and painkillers. This was all academic; she had the money for neither. Weeks turned into months. Whenever there was a knock at the door, Phuc gave up hoping it was the postman with a return letter from Germany. It was only ever the minder from Tay Ninh.

  PERRY KRETZ SAW THE DOCTOR’S REFUSAL TO diagnose burn wounds from afar as suggesting the obvious: Kim Phuc must be brought to the doctor. Kretz put the proposition to his publisher at Stern: “We’ve run her picture and done stories on her many times. Why don’t we do something for her? Why don’t we get her over here and see what we can do?” The publisher was wary, worried that such a mission would lay the magazine open to the criticism that it was in it solely for the publicity. If done, it would have to be in absolute secrecy. “Find out how much it would cost,” he said.