The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Toan was twenty-eight years old, three years older than Kim. In conversation with her about lives they’d left behind in Vietnam, he spoke of a girl in Hanoi waiting to marry him upon his return. On Toan’s part, what began as concern blossomed into love. He told Kim that it was not a betrayal of the girl in Hanoi; he had not heard from her for more than a year. One week later, a letter did arrive.

  Privately, Toan agonized. I cannot love two at once. After nights of sleeplessness, he was decided: I cannot bring any more suffering on to Kim. He penned a letter to his girlfriend in Hanoi. He tried to give solace, saying that others who went to Cuba fell for “rich, beautiful Cuban girls” but such had not been the case for him. Rather, offering a helping hand to “the girl who was a victim of the napalm bomb” had, unintentionally, turned his heart to love.

  Toan’s own experience with the war was living under its nervous skies. His family was from the desperately poor fishing village of Vi Thanh, thirty miles from Hanoi. American planes came back repeatedly to strike two bombing targets: a railway just over a mile away in one direction, and the engineering faculty of a university two miles in the opposite direction. Various faculties had moved from Hanoi universities and colleges to escape the bombing there. Only once was the village struck, when a rocket, thought to have fallen from the skies during a dogfight between planes, killed a mother and her three children who had just sat down to their meal on the ground in front of their hut.

  But for Toan’s disobedience to his father, he might never have been a university student. When an older teenage brother left to join the North Vietnamese army, the father ordered Toan to quit school to help support the family. Caught sneaking off to school, Toan persuaded his father to allow him to fish half days and go to school half days. He was spared from the army by his father’s pleas that he did not want to lose a second son to the war—years had gone by without word from the older brother, and the family feared him dead (two years after the north “liberated” the south, he returned, severely ill with malaria). Toan was the only one of his siblings to graduate from high school, and one of only three from his high school to pass the entrance examinations. The regime gave him a scholarship to Cuba.

  After her move to Siboney, Kim began to bring Toan around to the Diazes. He enjoyed Manuel’s company. The two often played dominoes and shared cheap, but good, rum and cigars. Sometimes, Kim and Toan bought what Asian ingredients they could find so that Toan could cook the family a Vietnamese dish; once he made mango soup of a harvest from their tree. He retold a morality tale from the north of Vietnam: a husband frets all day about his pregnant wife’s craving for a mango, but one mango costs one month’s salary. Finally, he comes home empty-handed, and finding out his wife has miscarried, is thankful for the money he has saved.

  The Diazes teased Kim about her new “boyfriend.” She was coy: “He is my shield-bearer.” She confessed otherwise in a letter to Pham Van Dong. He wrote back: “I am so happy to hear you have a BOYFRIEND!” The word meant something altogether different in Vietnam than in Cuba. In Cuba, it had everything to do with a rite of passage. Many Cuban families would throw a coming-out party for their daughters when they reached fifteen, the age when they may openly begin their sexual life without family recrimination. In the student residences, women and men stayed in each other’s rooms when roommates were away. It amused Kim to hear her Cuban roommates declare “I’ll love you forever” to their boyfriends, only to throw them over for another the next week. In Vietnam, a boy and a girl could ride around together on motorscooters, but public decorum demanded that the only affection displayed publicly was holding hands, and only if the couple were engaged. Vietnamese in Cuba, especially during the tenure of Ambassador Tai, had become openly romantically involved with Cubans, even despite wives and family left behind in Vietnam. However, Kim remained determined to save herself for the night she married. She had feelings of desire for Toan, which she ascribed to “loneliness.” She prayed to God: “Stay with me and keep me away from the devil.” Her own watchfulness reined in temptation. What if I became pregnant? What if a boyfriend abandoned me? She had only to remind herself: My case is special.

  IN HER FIRST SEMESTER STUDYING PHARMAcology, Kim worked hard to turn in an average performance. Then, in the new year, during the break between the first and second semesters, she went to see the nurse in the residence about a rash in her scarred areas. The nurse sent her to a specialist. His opinion was that Kim’s burn injury might have left her skin sensitive to chemicals encountered in her laboratory work. Barely was she back in school when she suffered a second, much more serious health problem.

  One morning, Kim accompanied Helen to a dress fitting at a private tailor’s. Private business was illegal in the nationalized economy, but Helen had all manner of such connections—tailors and beauticians who practiced in their homes; doctors who dispensed advice off-hours; sources of imported fine foreign silks and cottons that were unavailable in Cuba. Kim had availed herself of Helen’s contacts with Cuban advisers going to and from Vietnam. Rarely now did she use the post to mail letters to her family, instead relying on Cuban experts headed for sugar mills in Tay Ninh province, whose travels up Route 1 would take them by her mother’s noodle shop in Trang Bang. Kim took early advantage of this mail system to send words of caution to her brother, Ngoc. His letters were a rant against cadres in Tay Ninh, a litany of complaint as he recounted his latest failed effort to earn enough to support his wife and children. “If you have a big mouth, out will come anger,” Kim wrote. “Anger is no help at all; it will bring danger to your life.”

  On their way back from the tailor, Helen and Kim stopped for ice cream at Coppelia. In better times, the midday wait had been fifteen minutes. But as Cuba’s economic slide continued, and prices rose while quality fell in the ration stores, the one-peso bowl of ice cream looked like an ever-greater bargain. That day, the line snaked out of the park. After a two-hour wait, when Kim and Helen finally had a table, they were determined to make the most of it. Kim, who had not had either breakfast or lunch, downed ten bowls of double scoops. So did Helen. The student record was fifty scoops at a single sitting. The two left the shop giddy, on a sugar high.

  In the pre-dawn of the next morning, as usual, the stirrings of the first residents trying to beat the rush for the bathroom woke Kim. In midwinter, when the humidity coming off the sea in the morning carries a slight chill, Kim’s routine was to gather her sheets around her and turn over to catch more sleep. This morning, she was startled to feel her sheets soaked with perspiration. Kim sat up. She felt her legs cramp. The room began spinning. Afraid, she called out to the girl in the upper bunk. Her voice was slurred. Her roommates sent for an ambulance.

  Doctors diagnosed diabetes. The telling symptom was Kim’s profuse sweating caused by plunging sugar levels. The absence of pores and sweat glands in her extensive skin grafts trapped heat inside her body—thus the cramps. The medical opinion was that Kim’s diabetes was a consequence of the massive shock to her system of the napalm burn, and of the type where symptoms don’t appear until years after the actual onset. Two weeks later, Kim returned to classes, managing her diabetes with daily injections of insulin. Two months later, she returned for a checkup at an institute specializing in the treatment of diabetes. Specialists concluded that she was a good candidate to manage hers by diet. She stayed at the institute for three weeks, leaving with a diet plan of foods low in fat and high in protein, which required her to snack frequently. Provided she followed it rigorously, she could dispense with insulin injections and avoid another attack.

  Adhering to the regimen was impossible with the residence’s set mealtimes and fare. In better times, students arriving late for the meal service had just gone to the kitchen for leftovers. Now, food ran out before the posted hour of closing. Meat and fish, infrequently served to begin with, became rare. If ever fish was served, students no longer shunned it. The only highlight was the days, about once a month, when hamburguesas, bulked up with g
rapefruit rind, were on offer. The limit was one. Once the students reached the front of the line, they wolfed down their burgers and then rejoined the line, hoping to reach the front again before supplies ran out.

  Had Kim been Cuban, the state would have provided her with the necessary ration coupons to meet her diabetic needs. Maritza stepped into the breach, giving Kim use of the staff’s hotplate, and she arranged for the residence chefs to set aside for her, every couple of days, food, rice and oil. Toan taught Kim the basics of cooking. “Your mother is famous for cooking,” he teased, “and you don’t even know how to cook rice?” However, the residence could only regularly offer Kim some rice, corn and pumpkin, but none of the protein she needed.

  She appealed to the Vietnamese embassy. Hoa took it up with Ambassador Tai. The ambassador approved an arrangement allowing Kim to shop at the diplotienda, the one-stop shopping stores, which were well stocked with best-quality local and imported foods, including frozen chicken re-exported from the United States, frozen fish from Canada and cheese from Europe. They also carried all manner of goods, from Cuban decorative arts to toothpaste and clothes, stereos and televisions. Each had a restaurant on the premises. As the diplotienda took only red pesos (Cuba’s currency of foreign exchange), the embassy would exchange half of Kim’s monthly stipend of domestic pesos for red pesos, and every two or three days she would accompany an embassy worker there who could pay for what she picked out. Besides buying meat, cheese, eggs and yogurt, Kim sometimes also splurged on cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes. The other half of her stipend she spent at the parallel stores on plantain, bananas and beans, and the cookies and candies necessary to keep handy for diabetic emergencies.

  She noticed herself that, because of her diabetes, her stamina was not what it used to be. Maritza, having her usual lunchtime chat with the security guard on duty in the lobby, saw too that Kim frequently returned after her morning classes to lie down for a rest. When she didn’t reappear in time for her afternoon classes, a worried Maritza sent someone to check. Sometimes, Kim didn’t rally until her evening laboratory class. And one nagging health problem remained—Kim’s rash; doctors continued to suspect exposure to chemicals in her laboratory work as the cause.

  Kim came to a decision. I surrender! she told herself. I love medicine, but it is not my destiny. Knowing that she was not going to remain in pharmacology, she did not complete the semester. She set her sights on the coming academic year, planning in the fall of 1989 to enroll in the faculty of foreign languages, to study English. Once again, she would be a first-year student. She was twenty-six. She saw no more diversions, no more doubling back, in the path to her future. In five years’ time, she would return home to Vietnam. I will get a job, maybe get married, maybe not; I will build my life normally there, she told herself.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, Ambassador Tai summoned Kim. His announcement was brief, their meeting short. “Some people in the United States want to invite you to visit. The government of Vietnam believes this would be good, so we agree to let you go. You will wait for us to prepare your papers. We will let you know the travel date.”

  True to the word of Pham Van Dong, Kim’s life in Cuba had remained “quiet” of foreign journalists, which was not difficult given the fact that virtually no Americans visited there. But her presence in Havana was no secret to the Cuban public; there had been, early on, a front-page article in Granma, the Communist daily. That interview had originated with a request from an Angolan student journalist, and Kim—with, as usual, Hoa present—had obliged her Cuban hosts without a second thought. Kim was front and center again for an appearance on a Cuban children’s television show celebrating International Women’s Day, and giving remarks at a reception honoring a Cuban filmmaker. But for her nervousness about her imperfect Spanish, Kim rather enjoyed those engagements. Cubans were curious to meet someone from Vietnam, and they were charmed, though perplexed, by her dazzling smile and laughter, even when speaking on the topic of war.

  She had guessed, however, that foreign interest in her had not ended. In the past three years, three or four times, in her twice- or thrice-weekly regular visits to Hoa, he had put before her on the table the original of a letter from abroad, and alongside it a draft reply, which he asked her to sign. All were proposals from the West, usually the United States, and each sought her participation in, or asked her to lend her name to, a humanitarian project. Kim didn’t bother to read the letters through, noting only the line that invariably opened her replies: “I regret that I cannot interrupt my schooling . . .”

  Kim suspected that the embassy in Havana had been inclined to refuse all invitations, but that this time Hanoi had decided that she would accept. The last time it had given such an order for her to travel to the United States, she had not wanted to go because she was at her wits’ end, unable to bear another interruption to her studies. However, in Cuba, time and again, she had faced setback after setback, first with having to learn Spanish, then with her health, so that, academically, she was hardly any further ahead than when she had first arrived. This time, Kim welcomed the order.

  Except for the one time in her first interviews when she had dared ask an interpreter why her story attracted so much media attention—his reply had been that she was “hot news”—she herself had not looked for answers to explain the regime’s dictates. But then, in a regime where asking questions could be considered reactionary behavior, remaining close-mouthed is a matter of self-preservation. Kim had also long since mostly abandoned intellectual curiosity regarding the question “Why?” Spiritually renewed by her experience of her first prayers to God, she had put a new cast to her victimhood. The napalm bomb was unknown, unexpected, and an “accident” but she came to believe that God, when he saw need, would deliver other “accidents” in her life to offset the suffering and evil wrought by the bomb; these “accidents” would be good people, strangers to her, wanting to do acts of goodness. The first proof was Perry Kretz; the second was Pham Van Dong. This trip, Kim was certain, was a heavenly sign that it was again time for a door to be opened in her life, so that things in her life and her family’s could change for the better.

  Kim left the ambassador’s office, her mind alive with possibilities. Any Vietnamese traveling or living abroad took whatever chances they had to improve their lives and those of their families before it was time to return. For all Kim’s dreams of helping people, in her time in Cuba she had not been able to help her loved ones at home. “Send money or anything small,” Ngoc wrote repeatedly. She ignored his request; better that than to have to refuse. Ngoc persisted, chastising his younger sister: “You have a duty to take care of your family!” How can I make him understand , Kim asked herself, that no Cubans send money or goods out of the country? That they rely on relatives in the United States to help them?

  Ngoc was the one she wrote to when she wanted to share with her family the good news of her upcoming trip. As she awaited the order to travel, her anticipation grew: once Americans heard her tell of the difficulties of her health and of her family, their help would be forthcoming. However, when she was with the diplomats at the embassy, she checked her outward enthusiasm. Of course, she reminded herself, I go under their control. Whatever good came her way, better that to Hanoi she appear blameless, a victim of goodwill. She also reminded herself that her trip undoubtedly had the blessing of Pham Van Dong. She vowed she would not let him down: I will do my best in America.

  ONE AFTERNOON IN LATE JULY, FROM AN upper-floor window of the Habana Riviera on the Malecón, Kim stood watching the parking lot below. The marble-and-glass twenty-floor hotel, casino and nightclub had been built in 1958. With Ginger Rogers as its opening act, in its time the hotel was a model of modern architecture, with an interior intended to outstrip the glitz and flash of Las Vegas.

  Kim had been waiting at the hotel since nine in the morning. Finally, she saw a van drive in and park. Among its passengers were two Westerners, two Cubans and thre
e Vietnamese. Of the latter, she recognized two to be from the embassy. It was the third man she was interested in. His broad but compact physique suggested someone from the Mekong Delta, in Vietnam’s south.

  Among the arriving group were three American journalists. Cuba had granted them twenty-four-hour visas, with, as usual, barely notice enough to grab a toothbrush and head for the airport. The threesome had arrived in the middle of the night, taking the long way around from Los Angeles because of the ban in the United States on flights to Cuba. The Vietnamese embassy had scheduled their interview with Kim Phuc for nine o’clock that morning, but had not said where. Being a Sunday and, as well, the Cuban holiday of the Day of the Martyrs of the Revolution, it was hours before the journalists’ telephone calls to the embassy were answered. Finally, at half past two in the afternoon, they made for the Riviera.

  Two of the journalists represented The Los Angeles Times; Judith Coburn, a writer, and Jim Caccaro, a photographer. The newspaper had organized the trip as if it were a covert operation. Its biggest fear was that other media traveling might recognize the third journalist. He was Nick Ut, a photographer from the Los Angeles bureau of the Associated Press, and the newspaper was taking him to Havana to unite him, for the first time since before the end of the Vietnam war, with his famous subject, Kim Phuc.

  “Oh! I need to meet that man!” Kim had said excitedly when the embassy told her. She said she wanted to thank him for saving her life by taking her to the hospital, not realizing that, though she had no recollection of the occasion, he had met her again in Trang Bang after the napalm attack.

  “Uncle Ut, I’m so happy,” she cried. “I’ve waited seventeen years to see you!”

  Nick was too choked up to speak for several minutes. Normally smiling and affectionate with anyone he knew and liked, his gestures magnified by his diminutive size, on this day, Nick was nervous, even skittish in the presence of the two Vietnamese minders. Dangerous guy, thought Nick of one of the northerners.