The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  “The doctor is right. What you can study depends upon your health,” Dong said. “It is better to choose another subject. English is a good choice.”

  Before Phuc left for Ho Chi Minh City, she returned to dine with Dong and his son again. She took away with her a letter of instruction from the prime minister to his aides in his office in the city. As he requested, they wrote the same letter to authorities in Ho Chi Minh City and Tay Ninh, which read, in part:

  . . . Kim Phuc left for the Federal Republic of Germany for treatment for burns from a napalm bombing caused by the Americans and returned to Hanoi on September 11, 1984. However, she still had trouble with her mental health and a growth on her neck, so the authorities agreed to let her stay in Hanoi until October 20, 1984 for treatment.

  During her time in Hanoi she had a chance to meet with Mr. Pham Van Dong who asked about her condition. He told her to do well in her study and labors. To realize the advice by Mr. Pham Van Dong, we recommend that the local authorities pay attention to her case, and help her with her studies at her wish, so that she can become useful to society in the future . . .

  On Hanoi’s orders, Tay Ninh transferred Phuc’s ho khau to a university in Ho Chi Minh City. She enrolled in a five-year course towards a degree in English. The university waived her tuition and accepted her even though classes were already in their third week.

  Phuc would have a chance to express her gratitude to the prime minister the following summer. It was the practice of high-ranking officials in Hanoi to leave the city’s sticky summer heat for the drier heat of the south, combining work in Ho Chi Minh City with retreats to the beach at Vung Tau and the evergreen forests and mountains of Da Lat. When at his villa in Ho Chi Minh City, Dong would regularly invite Phuc to dinner.

  WHENEVER PHUC HAD AN INTERVIEW WITH foreign journalists, minders from Ho Chi Minh City came for her. She rejoiced at the thought that she would never again have to set eyes on Tam. He has lost me, she told herself. I have escaped. Her parents could not say the same. After she had left for Germany, Tung had asked Viet, the interpreter, for help in seeking relief from what seemed like a punitive tax burden on the noodle shop. Viet arranged for Tung and Nu to see his boss, Vu Hac Bong, in the foreign affairs office, the same official he’d once taken Phuc to see. Nu did the talking. “The government does not like the family,” she said, asking Bong to use his influence with officials in Tay Ninh. The kindly, hale and robust Bong, a respected intellectual, gave Nu a letter to take to the Tay Ninh authorities: “. . . please consider the case of the mother of the victim of the napalm bombing who is now in Germany. Because of the special condition of Kim Phuc, we at foreign affairs are very concerned . . .”

  Tay Ninh must have looked upon the letter as Ho Chi Minh City meddling where it had no authority. Even had there been no antipathy between Tam and Kim Phuc, hungry tax collectors, with few places to turn to, could still have targeted the noodle shop in the knowledge that it had a steady clientele and therefore made money. Moreover, the provinces, particularly poorer ones like Tay Ninh, had little financial room to maneuver, what with crippling over-taxation by cash-strapped Hanoi. During Phuc’s sojourn in Germany, Tam had ordered her parents brought to his office to receive a foreign delegation wishing to make a donation to them of dong equivalent to about two hundred American dollars. “This money is for the whole city, not for you,” Tam later told Tung and Nu. If cadres in Tay Ninh believed Phuc and her parents were profiting from her travel abroad and contacts with foreigners, it was because, in their shoes, they would have done the same.

  When she moved back in with Huong and Dai in Ho Chi Minh City, Phuc’s living conditions improved for several reasons. Huong and Dai had a new baby, and therefore they had been allowed to move from the hospital dormitory to a larger flat. Phuc also had her German marks. Realizing that having a source of money unknown to the authorities would be dangerous for her, to say nothing of compromising her aunt and uncle, Phuc presented herself to Bong as needing support: “The government should support me, because it was the government that took away my schooling.” He agreed: “That is how it should be. You shouldn’t have to worry about anything except your studies.” Monthly, Phuc came to his office to collect a small stipend that was just enough to keep her fed. Each visit, he would reach into his own pocket to put a few extra dong into her hand. If he was not there, he left an envelope. The extra sum bought her painkillers, and maybe an ice cream cone or a new pen.

  Apart from school, Phuc’s urgent need was to hear Pastor Anh preach. Some months before she went to Germany, the pastor of Anh’s church had been arrested and Anh had taken his place. Phuc went to the church on the first Sunday she could. The sidewalk outside was ominously empty. The door was locked. Gone was the sign with the name of the church and times of services.

  She hurried to Loan’s house and found Linh, Loan’s daughter, there. “What has happened to Uncle Anh?”

  “He has gone,” Linh said. “The government closed the church.”

  Other Christian friends confirmed Anh’s arrest. Word was that authorities had found Anh with “reactionary” leaflets in his possession. Phuc wanted to visit him in prison, but he had conveyed his wish to have only God as company.

  Anh’s church had been one of several Christian churches closed in a sweep by authorities. The leaders had been arrested and the usual accusations leveled: the churches had used the “mask of religion” to preach against the state, plan acts of sabotage, infiltrate spies and accumulate weapons. This recent crackdown came as Hanoi feared that among the growing numbers of those who had escaped Vietnam for the West were plotters planning subversive activities against the regime and coordinating them from afar.

  From time to time, Phuc went to Sunday service at the church where she had been baptized, which the authorities allowed to remain open. Daily, she took time to pray and read the Bible. You lose money, you can replace it, she told herself. But if you lose something spiritual, you are hungry in your soul. What can you eat?

  BEGINNING IN THE SPRING OF 1985, THE PACE of Phuc’s interviews with foreign journalists intensified as never before. Media the world over were taking a renewed interest in the subject of Vietnam with the approach of another tenth anniversary of the war: that of the fall of Saigon. That there was a greater willingness in America to publicly examine that chapter of the nation’s past was apparent in the number of visitors drawn to Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The granite wall ranked second to the Lincoln Memorial among the capital’s most visited sights. The first audible, if faint, chorus of voices from the former antiwar movement and from the community of former South Vietnamese living in the United States called for friendship with the countries of Indochina. Speculation concerning a breakthrough in relations between Hanoi and Washington came that spring when Hanoi allowed American military officials to step up visits to investigate the MIA issue, from four to six times a year.

  Phuc’s professors and classmates got used to reporters, photographers and film and television crews coming into their classrooms to photograph her and, as well, interview them. Some one hundred and fifty foreign journalists, mostly American, came to Ho Chi Minh City to cover the official celebrations leading up to the anniversary on April 30. More than once, Phuc found herself one of several interview subjects: once she was paired with the widow of the subject of another famous photograph of the war, that of the Viet Cong suspect being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese general. Phuc avoided saying anything to the widow, seeing “Communist” written on her stony face.

  Of the multitude of interviews Phuc gave, one stood out in her mind, not for the interview but for what happened after it was over. The correspondent was NBC’s Arthur Lord, who had reported on the napalm attack that injured her thirteen years earlier. When Lord asked Phuc if she had ever seen the original news item, she said no. Though she had seen some of the footage as part of the Dutch documentary it had made no lasting impression, perhaps because it was in black and white, with the o
riginal sound muted so the narration could be run over it. She expressed curiosity. Somebody popped in a videocassette. Watching it with Phuc was her interpreter friend, Viet, who said he had never seen it either.

  Phuc watched the opening shot of the napalm bomb exploding on the road, then the sequences of the survivors running out of the black smoke. She saw Auntie Anh’s young baby—the cousin who died some weeks after the attack—in the arms of a villager. He doesn’t look so badly injured, she said to herself. Into the frame came her grandmother, struggling forward with the blackened body of Danh.

  “Nguoi oi!”

  Her grandmother’s voice seemed to come from a depth and darkness unknown. It cut like shards of glass in Phuc’s heart.

  “Chay di dau nhu vay ne troi? Chay di dau nhu vay ne troi?”

  Phuc cringed at the sight of chunks of skin dropping from Danh’s burned heels.

  Then she saw herself in her nakedness, running out, with two of her brothers and other cousins. She answered her grandmother’s question on behalf of the dying Danh: “Grandma, I could not run out, not with my heels burned like that.”

  The screen went black. Phuc sat in silence, her cheeks wet with tears. Viet was shaking. “Terrible,” he kept saying. “Terrible.” Viewing the film was for Phuc the death and resurrection of her memories of the napalm attack. The hundreds of interviews she had given had focused solely on her plight. With no awareness of the events as captured on film, she had recounted only what she saw in her mind: turning her head as she ran from the temple to see the bombs falling from the airplane, fire becoming her world. Then, her only concern had been to run, and to keep running.

  Never before had Phuc considered what had happened to others caught in the napalm attack in the time elapsed before she emerged from it into the camera’s eye. Those missing moments were a metaphor for Phuc’s understanding of the war itself; she didn’t know how it had started, who the enemy was, who was fighting whom, who was winning or how it would, or could, end. Now she understood that her two cousins had come horribly to their deaths. Why, she asked herself, why should a baby, a child, have to suffer like that? The film crew was packing up, putting the videocassette away. Now that I see the film, Phuc told herself, I understand why the people in the United States feel for my pain. Now I know what I myself suffered through. She understood why she had emerged alive from the fire of the napalm—to be a living symbol of the horror of war. The film, the picture made me into a moment of history. It is only me in that moment of history. I know I am not the only victim of the war, but others don’t have the evidence. I have the film, I have the picture and I have the body.

  IN JUNE 1985, PHUC’S ACADEMIC SUPERVISOR called her in. The university had received an order from Hanoi: Kim Phuc was to travel the following month to Moscow. Once every four years, a Communist or socialist bloc country hosted a world youth festival on socialist issues. This year’s festival in Moscow had as its theme “anti-imperialism and anti-war.” One year earlier, Vietnam had begun a nomination process to select one hundred “committed sons and daughters of the socialist revolution.” Like other youth organizations, Phuc’s university had already put forward its one name. However, Phuc had been invited by the festival’s hosts; Komsomol, the Soviet youth council, wished her to be a speaker and panelist.

  “If you want to go to Moscow, you have to join the Communist Youth League,” her supervisor said. “Only members can go.” The form he put in front of her was normally used for high school students.

  Phuc laughed. “Okay!”

  Moscow was scrubbed and gleaming in readiness for the eight-day festival. Colored holiday lights had been strung up; locals had washed their cars; a million Muscovites had been shipped off to vacation camps, and local sales of vodka had been cut off. Banners proclaimed “For Anti-imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship.” On opening day in late July, before a crowd of more than one hundred thousand in Lenin Stadium, and as hundreds of doves were released, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared the festival open. Eighteen thousand delegates came from one hundred and fifty-seven countries; the American delegation was three hundred strong.

  The Vietnamese organizers excluded Phuc from participating in the parade of nations and cultural performances because she was at the festival as a guest of the hosts, not as part of the Vietnamese delegation. From the stands, she admired the flowing white ao dais and the conical hats of the Vietnamese women. She herself had a hectic schedule of appearances. Her venues ranged from a classroom to a theater, her audiences from a few dozen to several thousand; her events included everything from friendship meetings with other delegations to “tribunals” on subjects like imperialism, militarism and colonialism, and peace and disarmament. The latter was much in the news, as Physicians for Social Responsibility, led by the Australian activist Helen Caldicott, had won that year’s Nobel peace prize for its advocacy of nuclear disarmament. Typically, Phuc was one of several victims of war showcased. Another story given prominence, recounted by an American religious worker, was the 1980 murder in El Salvador of three American nuns and a lay church-worker by security forces from the American-supported military regime.

  Phuc had faced countless journalists, many of them hardened war correspondents, but never before had she experienced the sympathy of a live audience. When the audience realized who it was who was standing before them, a floodgate of emotion would be opened. Even the moderator and interpreter, and finally Phuc herself, would falter. Sniffles would give way to unabashed tears.

  Question: “What are the lasting effects of a napalm burn?”

  Answer: “I continue to suffer much from both physical and emotional pain. Sometimes I thought I could not live. I suffer from headaches and deep pain inside my body . . . I do not know if my health will allow me to marry or have any children.”

  Question: “Do you hate America?”

  Answer: “I never use the word hate. I never hate the people, because the people have nothing to do with the war. I consider Americans friends, and I want to talk about the war with them. That is why I am studying English, so that I can understand them and they can understand me.”

  Question: “If you could meet the pilot who dropped the napalm, what would you say to him?”

  Answer: “I want to meet him, but I don’t want to talk to him about the war. The war is in the past. We cannot change history. War is terrible and I want to stop war, not just in Vietnam but in the world. I want to say to him that we have to do something to build peace.”

  At the end of every session, hands would reach for Phuc as if seeking absolution. People wanted her autograph. Phuc would remember one American veteran in particular. Wheelchair-bound, having lost a leg in the war, he was convulsed in tears even as they went to embrace. “Sorry,” he kept saying. “I just want to say sorry.” The New York Times published an account of a youth worker from New York meeting Kim Phuc. “I wanted to leave right then,” he told the reporter, “and jump on a plane to tell my friends, ‘Hey, that girl in the photograph.’”

  By the time the festival concluded, Phuc felt propelled onto a world stage. As if in confirmation, when the Vietnamese delegation assembled to leave for Hanoi, authorities singled her out. “You are to remain behind,” they said. Komsomol had chosen her to enjoy a month-long holiday in the Soviet Union, an annual privilege granted to four Vietnamese.

  WHILE WAITING FOR THE THREE OTHERS TO arrive from Vietnam, Komsomol settled Phuc into the modest but comfortable Lenin Hotel, near Red Square. Some three weeks later, a woman and two men joined her. All were in their late fifties or older, all senior Communists. The woman was a minister of the central committee in Hanoi, responsible for labor, invalid soldiers and social welfare; the men were army officers and editors of army publications. Phuc recalled the woman’s name from her high school lessons on the north’s revolutionary heroes. The woman had a recurring eye problem that sent her to hospital in Moscow, and the foursome became three.

  Their itinerary included the maj
or tourist destinations—the sights of Moscow, including Lenin’s tomb; the architectural showpiece Leningrad; Kiev, the pretty capital of the Ukraine; and Sochi, the famed resort on the Black Sea—and sights off the beaten track, Tashkent in remote Kazakhstan and Yakutsk in Siberia. By day, their Soviet guide and interpreter took them sightseeing, with visits to libraries and museums, and by night they went to cultural performances, including the Bolshoi and the Kirov and concerts of Tchaikovsky.

  What was most enjoyable for Phuc was not the travel across the vast Soviet Union but freedom from a Vietnamese government minder. She was able to relax in the company of her northern companions, who were as anxious to meet a southerner as she was to meet them. The talkative three quickly became friends. Phuc sought the opinion of one of the men about the bullying ways of Phuong. “She’s the daughter of the foreign minister; she has everything. Why did she have to treat me, who has nothing, so?” The reply that one of the men offered gave her much to reflect on. “A socialist state has not only good people, but also bad people,” he said. “Lift your eyes over those who have wronged you. Don’t let Phuong occupy your mind. Hang on to relationships with those you judge to be good.”

  At the end of September, Komsomol asked Phuc to stay on several months longer to visit its branches across the country. “Soviet young people today want only to be consumers,” they explained. “They grow up without knowing about war and suffering. We want you to make them aware so they won’t forget.” Since Hanoi had sent her to Moscow in the first place, Phuc readily agreed, giving no thought to the fact that the academic year was about to get underway.