The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Still, he asked that she bring Minh along next time. At that dinner, Phuc was at her most relaxed, chatty, laughing, her appetite healthy. Minh was nervous and ate almost nothing. The next time Dong dined with Phuc, he told her he was satisfied with her judgment in love. “However,” he added, “I want you one day to have a boyfriend.” He went further in his counsel. “You must ask of a boyfriend who may be a future husband: ‘Will you be happy in marriage even if we were unable to have children, or maybe to have only one child?’” It was not the first time they had spoken of children. She had once shown him the magazine cover showing her with a baby girl, who the caption said was her daughter. Though they laughed at the mistake, Dong had gone on to speak of the singular joy of becoming a parent.

  “God will help me in love,” Phuc replied. “I cannot go in search of it.”

  “Okay.” He smiled. “I am concerned only with your happiness.”

  After a wait of two weeks, the prime minister’s aide brought word: Hanoi and the government of Cuba had agreed that Phuc would attend the University of Havana. She was to fly immediately from Hanoi, via Moscow.

  Before leaving for Cuba, Phuc wanted to spend a few days with her parents, sure that they would miss her. “I am the last daughter of the family,” she explained to the aide. He arranged a return air ticket to Ho Chi Minh City and wished her well in her new life. “The weather in Cuba is so wonderful!” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PHUC’S FLIGHT LANDED IN HAVANA AT three in the morning. She stepped out into the refreshing night air and lifted her face to a soft rain. Two other Vietnamese passengers, both from Hanoi, shed layers of clothing, and Vietnamese minders took the three arrivals to the guest quarters at their embassy in Havana. The Vietnamese couple working as caretakers there, expecting the travelers to be hungry after their long flight, had prepared a snack. It was pho, the noodle soup of the north, where the stock is made from beef rather than the pork used in the south. Though the hour was late for conversation, Phuc could not resist a question about the new country where she had come to study.

  “How is it in Cuba? How is life here? How do the people live?”

  The husband responded. “Well, they speak Spanish—”

  “Spanish!” Phuc was both stunned and crushed.

  WHEN TOLD SHE WAS BEING SENT TO CUBA, Phuc had seen the move as anything but a backwards step. She knew almost nothing about Cuba, except that Fidel Castro was its leader and that Vietnamese guest workers sent there worked in sugar mills. However, she thought of it as a boat ride away from the United States, and therefore assumed that Cubans, like Americans, spoke English. Kim did not know that the two countries had been locked in mutual antagonism and paranoia ever since Castro and his guerrilla band had overthrown Cuba’s president, strongman Fulgencio Batista, in 1959, ending American corporate domination of Cuba’s economy. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion followed in 1961. One year later, Washington and Moscow nearly ignited World War III with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a thirteen-day standoff over Soviet deliveries of nuclear warheads to its missile sites on Cuban soil. America subsequently imposed a trade embargo against Cuba.

  Successive American presidents hardened the anti-Cuban line. What the American public knew of Cuba came from Miami, where most Cuban exiles lived, having fled there in the wake of Batista’s fall. Few Americans contemplated travel to Cuba. Since 1983, the United States had banned flights to Cuba, and any Americans who did travel there not exempted beforehand by their government could have difficulty reentering the United States, and were subject to possible fines and confiscation of their Cuban-bought goods.

  In the socialist fraternity, Vietnam and Cuba were regarded, after the Soviet Union and China, as the elite guardians of socialism. The Vietnamese triumph over French colonialism was hailed as a historic defeat of a Western power, and the Cuban revolution was admired for having succeeded without Soviet help. Non-aligned countries in the Third World saw in Castro’s Cuba a nationalistic, anti-imperialistic victory. During the American war in Vietnam, Havana hosted the sole North Vietnamese embassy in the western hemisphere. The Cubans also staged noisy anti-American and pro-Vietnamese demonstrations in Havana and, upon the north’s victory, renamed streets and schools after Vietnamese revolutionary heroes. Vietnam and Cuba had an American trade embargo in common, and they were both members of the COMECON Soviet trading bloc. Cuba joined in 1976, two years before Vietnam. The ruble also underwrote Cuba’s economy, with Cuba paying its debt to the Soviets in refined sugar and guest workers.

  Phuc was devastated to find out that her daily life and her education would be conducted in a new language. Just when she had thought, finally, that she would be able to focus exclusively on school, she found that she would have to drop yet another year behind, this time while she tried to attain proficiency in Spanish. She did not know that in Hanoi, Spanish was a popular language to study; many northern students hoped that the regime would send them to a Cuban university. One reason was Cuba’s climate. The prevailing northeast trade winds temper the effect of warm Gulf Stream currents. Just as the day’s temperatures start to rise, the trade winds conveniently begin to blow, and they caress the city through to the pre-dawn hours, so that even in summer, the Cuban city’s tropical clime feels refreshing.

  The University of Havana, which had graduated a young Fidel Castro in law, was Cuba’s most prestigious. The person responsible for the comfort and welfare of its foreign students was Maritza Yip. Short and round, with glittery nail polish her nod to feminine glamour, Maritza was like a den mother. She had a particular empathy for students of Asian origin, because she herself was the daughter of a Chinese immigrant father and a Cuban mother. She was also used to dealing with the health problems of war victims, as the university’s policy was to accept students from countries embroiled in civil war, or where Cuba had intervened with troops and aid, such as Ethiopia, Angola and Nicaragua. Maritza made the rounds of teachers, staff and Kim Phuc’s future roommates, taking with her a copy of the famous picture, which she herself knew well: “The American atrocities were well publicized in Cuba.” In Havana, Phuc became known by the first name Kim. Except in Vietnam, Phuc herself adopted Kim as her name.

  Late in the fall of 1986, Kim became the fourteenth Vietnamese studying that year at the University of Havana. Not only was she the only new student and the only southerner from Vietnam, she was also the first female student in years. While Hanoi frequently sent female guest workers and diplomats to Cuba, it feared that female students would be a corrupting distraction to male Vietnamese students, who might more easily succumb to the relaxed sexual mores there and forget that they were in Cuba to “study hard to come back to serve the country.” The university enrolled Kim in its preparatory faculty to study Spanish. The university was conveniently located in the district of Vedado, the heart of modern Havana, but the language institute was in the district of Siboney, a suburb at the city’s westernmost edge. Most students there were Cubans in their final year of high school studying a foreign language in hopes that Cuba would send them abroad to study.

  KIM HADN’T BEEN IN HAVANA TWENTY-FOUR hours when the abrupt climatic change landed her in hospital. What had happened in her first exposure to snowy Moscow recurred in her first experience of Havana’s frequent daily fluctuations in air pressure; she was felled by extreme fatigue, headache and pain. Frightened, her minder had her brought by ambulance to Manuel Farjardo Hospital for foreigners. Doctors there were able to control her pain, and the rich hospital diet of meat, milk, yogurt and cheese improved her strength. After a few weeks, Kim was discharged healthier than when she’d arrived. Her body had acclimatized, and her bouts of pain were no more than the occasional headache or deep itchiness. In Cuba, she could go pain-free for as long as three weeks, and she was to have none of the sudden heat attacks that in Vietnam would send her running for the shower.

  Maritza felt an instant and lasting affection for Kim. Years later she would still marvel at her. “Somebody who ha
s met death up close can be so full of life? Smiling all the time, with everyone?” The main student residences were also in Vedado, on the Malecón, Havana’s four-mile-long seafront boulevard, which stretches from the harbor entrance, along the Bay of Havana and westward along the Atlantic. The residences were a pair of Cuban-built, Bulgarian-designed, stark but well-maintained concrete towers, each twenty-four stories. The first three floors accommodated offices, including those of Maritza and her staff, and the cafeteria. The next floors were assigned to females, the upper ones to males. Maritza installed Kim on the fourth floor. Upper floors had the view of the sparkling azure sea, but the advantage of being lower was the shorter climb up the windowless stairwell whenever both elevators were out of service, which was often. Kim moved into a room with seven roommates. Each floor had three rooms of eight, and each floor shared one common room and one washroom with one toilet, one sink and one shower.

  Hoa, a tall, balding man in his forties, was Kim’s new minder. In her time at the Manuel Farjardo, he had been her sole visitor. She had appreciated his weekly visits as she’d had no one else with whom to speak Vietnamese. On her discharge, Hoa had collected her and, en route to the student residence, stopped at the embassy to pick up a glass, a hand towel and a plastic pail, saving her the expense of buying them. A pail (better-off students owned two) was a necessity of residence life; daily, one had to take water from the floor’s cistern for showering and washing. Water at the residence was turned on twice daily for one hour each time, the responsibility for filling the cisterns on each floor rotating among its residents.

  Early kindnesses on Hoa’s part were tainted by what Kim saw as his true mission: to snitch should she put a foot wrong. Three days into her stay at residence, a roommate reported that he had come round asking pointed questions about what Kim Phuc had been up to. Having escaped life at the end of a string, Kim was in no mood to be reeled in. Accordingly, for the duration of her stay in Havana, she took to “visiting” her minder herself every two or three days. The Vietnamese embassy was a ten-minute bus ride away, in the once upscale district of Miramar, on one of its wide streets lined with fig and palm trees and decorated with Greco-Roman planters. Up close, like all the other old mansions, the embassy showed a dearth of maintenance: it was shored up in places with wooden braces, and the sidewalk in front was an obstacle course of cracked and broken pavement and puddles of leaking water.

  After classes were done for the day, Kim would go to the embassy, press the buzzer at the high, locked gate and wait for the guard to admit her. It did not escape Kim’s notice that other Vietnamese students came and went from the embassy as they pleased. She noticed also that they had, if not relatives, then at least close friends working at the embassy.

  Kim and Hoa would retire to a room furnished with a table and four chairs, adjacent to a larger one with a television, a couch and a ping-pong table.

  “What have you been doing since the last time?” was always his opening question. Often, one or two others from the embassy would join them and occasionally slip in a question.

  Kim thought Hoa to be genuinely concerned, always inquiring after her health, always asking, “Is there anything that you need?” But he was also prying, asking what company she was keeping, asking for names. Kim kept up her guard. They don’t love me without reason. They know I am famous, that I am a witness to the war. When she felt she had volunteered enough information, she would rise from the table, push back her chair and announce: “Well, I’d better go back to study!”

  TRAVELING ABROAD HAD BEEN A PERK; LIVING abroad was another matter. Homesickness almost did Kim in. Isolated by the Spanish spoken around her, she had been weepy with longing for her family even in hospital. In the residence, her roommates were all Cubans, few of whom spoke English, the only language she could converse in until she had vocabulary enough in Spanish. Whereas Kim believed in a “quiet life,” her roommates were boisterous, and communal life was noisy—American rock music competed on several cassette players, and roommates chattered, mostly about boyfriends, far into the night. However, Kim had planned and looked to anchor her new life in the Christian faith. She counted on making her friends in the new church that she would join. Christmas was approaching. Not only was it an opportunity to become active at a church, but Kim looked forward to seeing Cubans in a festive mood. In Ho Chi Minh City, even those who did not celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ used the excuse to take to the streets.

  “Please, where may I find a church?” Kim asked a roommate.

  “There are some in Old Havana.”

  East along the Malecón from the residence she found the former fortress town, with its baroque façades, Greek columns and Romanesque arches dating from the sixteenth century. It remained a maze of narrow streets lined with former mansions and naval warehouses. On one of the cobblestone squares, Kim discovered the famed Cathedral of San Cristobal. There was a service going on, but the five or six people taking part were all elderly, and easily outnumbered by the tourists wandering through.

  There was no sign of decorations for Christmas on the streets of Havana, and Kim was bewildered. She inquired of a roommate, only to learn that, like Hanoi, the Cuban government had eliminated Christmas as a national holiday.

  “Where can I find practicing Christians?” she asked.

  “Nobody practices religion,” came the reply. “Nobody can disappoint the government.”

  Cast back onto the shoals of a foreign environment, Kim struggled to find a comfortable footing. Unbeknownst to her, the hospital diet, which offered best-quality foods served in quantity, was the exception. The low standard of the daily fare in the student residence came as a surprise. The daily staple was rice, with red or black beans and soups made of the previous day’s leftovers. Kim was not alone in turning up her nose at the food on offer. Students left mounds of uneaten food on their plates, especially on nights when they were given fish, often served with egg, both of which Cubans traditionally dislike and try to disguise the taste of by adding oil.

  Kim hid from Maritza her growing loneliness and homesickness for family, friends and the Vietnamese way of life. For much of her first six months in Cuba, she spent an inordinate amount of time sleeping. Four male Vietnamese students roomed together on one of the uppermost floors, and Kim would encounter them from time to time in the cafeteria, but she kept a polite distance. On her first day, one had been welcoming, showing her the routine in the cafeteria, telling her to mark her pail with her name and offering help should she need it. When he heard talk that she was homesick, he made efforts to include her on outings, but Kim always declined. For one thing, Kim regarded them, being northerners, as unworldly, living in a cup of Vietnamese Communism, Cuba their first glimpse over the edge. For another, she saw in their friendliness more of Hoa’s prying. She was sure all other Vietnamese students looked at her suspiciously, because, normally, southerners were not sent abroad. And they had to wonder about her connection with Pham Van Dong; on Tet, he’d sent her, care of the embassy, a basket of candied fruit, roasted melon seeds dyed red and a couple of the paper lanterns usually given to children, in the shape of a fish and a star.

  Added to the pressure of feeling like an outsider was the deafening silence from her family and friends left behind in Vietnam. On visit after visit to the embassy, she would check the list posted there of mail being held for Vietnamese living in Havana. Only one person wrote to her: the healer, Minh. Kim did not reply to his letters, put off by their demanding tone. “I am your fiancé,” he wrote. “Send me a ticket to visit you.” Though Kim never heard from her family, she continued to write into the growing void. She swung between frustration and worry. Didn’t her parents care enough to write? Had something gone terribly wrong with the noodle shop? With their health? Kim grew afraid, convinced that Tam in Tay Ninh had found some way to take vengeance for her escape from him on those left behind.

  KIM’S MOVE TO CUBA BROUGHT AN IMMEDIATE improvement to her quality of life in two areas: heal
th care and education. Both were free; both were the crowning achievements of the Cuban revolution.

  In pre-revolutionary Cuba, only the rich could afford good medical care, and when Castro took power, half the country’s doctors fled. Two decades later, Cuba could boast that it had no shortage of medical schools, doctors or hospitals, and medical care was free. In quality of health care, Cuba ranked first in the Third World; Havana had some seventy modern hospitals and specialized medical centers. Cuba, in keeping with its reputation as “a little country with a big heart,” had in the year of Kim’s arrival accepted for medical treatment children injured in the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear generating plant.

  Where pre-revolutionary Cuba had an illiteracy rate of 24 percent, Castro’s Cuba had virtually wiped out illiteracy. Where once 40 percent of the population had never gone to school, it now had one of the highest per capita rates of university graduates in the world. University tuition was free, along with textbooks and pens and notebooks, and so was university housing. Moreover, the Cuban regime paid students a monthly stipend, starting at twenty pesos (about five or six American dollars) and rising with each year that they were in school. With careful budgeting, it met their other expenses, such as bus transportation, clothing and personal items. And there were other comforts that came with student life. At Kim’s residence, students weekly exchanged dirty sheets for clean ones, and monthly collected their individual allotments of soap, toilet paper and toothpaste, and, for women, sanitary pads. Her building shared four televisions, assigned according to which floor won the monthly competition for cleanliness and order. Cuban television carried Castro’s speeches and other revolutionary programming, but it also regularly aired American movies and rock concerts.