The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Over dinner, a relaxed Kim spoke of her comparative anonymity at home. “In Vietnam, they say that I am nobody special, that a lot of people were injured in the war,” she said. “I have seen other pictures of the war. But this is my picture.” When it came time for goodbyes, she hugged the journalists in turn. In the embrace, it was impossible not to feel the tightness of scarred skin on her back. I know she’s unhappy. I can see it in her face, Nick told himself.

  “THE GIRL IN THE PHOTOGRAPH: 17 YEARS LATER” was the headline story on the cover of the August 20, 1989, edition of The Los Angeles Times Magazine. It reported that Kim Phuc would embark in September on a six-week trip that would take her across America.

  It’s the magic hour in Havana, when the sky goes iridescent indigo before the light drops. The young woman poses for the photographer on the low wall of the esplanade above the sea, with racing clouds as a backdrop. The young woman loves the camera,

  and the camera loves her. She’s a Vietnamese Marilyn, wrinkling her nose, giggling and tugging at her skirt. She flirts with the photographer (Nick), wants to pose rubbing her cheek against his, giggles and tosses hair caught back by an orange and silver flower. . . .

  “If I ever see those pilots who dropped the bombs on me—or any American pilots—I would say to them, ‘The war is over. The past is the past.’ I would ask those pilots what can they do to bring us all together. There’s such a connection between Vietnam and America, but it should be one of friendship. Not bitterness. Not enemies. But I’m not coming to America to talk about the war. I’m coming so Americans can meet the girl in the photo and to tell them I’m alive and about my life and what’s happening to my family. . . .”

  [S]he told Nick Ut that the seafood dinner he had treated her to cost more than what her family could live on for several months. . . . [S]he hopes that her trip to the United States will raise money for her poverty-stricken family and for her return to the United States to study and get medical treatment. . . .

  War calls many things out of people—crusading zeal, crushing sadness, mysticism, martyrdom, victimhood. From Kim Phuc’s wounds have sprung a passion to be normal. “I want to live my life, marry, have children.” She admits that Nick Ut’s photo enshrined her as a symbol of agony. “But I’m alive and now I’m happy!” “A joyful young woman,” says her interpreter from the Vietnamese Embassy in Havana. “That’s the symbol now . . .”

  IN JANUARY OF THAT YEAR, NICK HAD MADE his first return trip to Vietnam, fourteen years after he’d left on an evacuation flight from Saigon. He went on assignment, accompanying Saigon’s last bureau chief for the AP, George Esper. They had each been granted one-month journalists’ visas to cover the return of six former Marines journeying there to make their private peace with the past.

  While Hanoi had no luck securing economic aid from the United States, there had been a breakthrough in expanded American relations in the fall of 1987. The United States amended its trade embargo regulations to permit private charitable and humanitarian aid to Vietnam in exchange for greater cooperation on unresolved MIA cases. In the spring of 1989, Hanoi removed a second longstanding obstacle to normalization when it announced that, in the fall, it would unconditionally withdraw its fifty-thousand-strong combat troops from Cambodia. However, yet again, Washington stalled, seeking from Vietnam a guarantee of peace in Cambodia, an impossible demand.

  Upon his return from his assignment in Vietnam, Nick got a telephone call from New York from a woman he’d never met. Merle Ratner and several Indochinese activists were raising funds to bring Kim Phuc on a speaking tour of the United States. In Hanoi, Nick and George Esper had known from the AP’s files that Kim was in Cuba, but they’d been put off by her minders whenever they’d asked after her. According to Merle, Hanoi had already approved Kim’s visit.

  Merle was an antiwar activist who, when the war ended, had directed her efforts to getting America to help rebuild war-torn Vietnam. She’d been a teenager when her father took her on a “dentists for peace” march, and she happily gave up a chance at a singing career to yell at demonstrations. After the war, she and a handful, toiling out of their apartments, sought to pressure the United States to honor Nixon’s pledge for war reparations. Realizing that government negotiations were going nowhere, they turned to people-to-people ties. In the late 1980s, working directly with Vietnam’s delegation to the United Nations, Merle led visits of American activists to Vietnam and hosted Viet Cong combat veterans on visits to the United States.

  Merle had met Kim in Vietnam. In 1986, she and her fiancé, Ngo Nhan, had gone to Hanoi to be married there by a top Party official. Nhan had met Kim at the youth festival in Moscow. A member of the American delegation, he had interviewed her for the American magazine Nguyen Thai Binh, named for a fallen student leader. Expelled by the United States in 1972 for his anti-war speeches, Binh had left for Saigon aboard a Pan American plane, and was shot to death before it landed, purportedly for threatening the captain with grenades unless he diverted the plane to Hanoi; the grenades turned out to be lemons in aluminum foil. Like Binh, Nhan had been handpicked by the CIA to be a leader of the next generation in South Vietnam, and had been brought to America as a scholarship student.

  A decade and a half after the end of the war, homegrown Indochinese issues and concerns were cropping up in the 800,000-strong community of Southeast Asians in America: it wanted the United States to allow Amerasian children and political prisoners who’d worked for the United States or the former regime during the war to emigrate from Vietnam, and as well, to allow the reunification of families separated between Vietnam and the United States. Among Merle’s network, talk turned yet again to how to influence the rest of the American public to turn away from the issue of MIAs. Someone mentioned the picture of the napalm girl: “That picture has instant recognition among Americans.” Someone suggested they bring Kim Phuc to America. “There’s no more powerful person to speak of healing the wounds of war,” was Merle’s view. “If she can forgive, why can’t anyone?”

  Merle made a request of Nick. Would he speak about his famous photograph to a small, select audience in Los Angeles, who would donate generously for the privilege?

  Vietnam and the war had shadowed Nick’s life in America. He did not travel without his cassettes of Vietnamese antiwar folk songs. He listened to them in his hotel rooms and wept. On damp days, he was bothered by shrapnel imbedded inside one thigh. Some months before the end of the war, he and another AP photographer had chased reports of fighting on Route 1 near Trang Bang. Upon hearing artillery fire, they had pulled off the road and started walking in opposite directions, Nick towards the Caodai temple there. While chatting with villagers out front, he’d spied two government soldiers on the balcony beneath the large, mystical eye. He raised his camera. At that moment, a shell came whistling in. Nick tried to run but his legs wouldn’t move. He looked down, expecting to see blood. His clothes were pinpricked with ash instead, and there was a hole in his camera. He tried again to run but collapsed from a painful heat deep in his thigh. Doctors in Saigon decided to leave the shrapnel where it was. Fearful that his luck might have run out in Trang Bang, Nick stayed away from the town for the remainder of the war.

  Many times, shaken awake by his wife from a nightmare, Nick would look around and recognize by the television in the bedroom that he was in his home in Los Angeles and not on a battlefield in Vietnam. In the years since he’d left Vietnam, he had felt helpless to make a difference to the lives of his mother and siblings there. Their letters were piercing cries for help: “We are very poor. Your brothers need help. We don’t have jobs, food or medicine. We have no money to live.” He did what every overseas Vietnamese did: he stashed bills inside seams of clothing, toothpaste tubes and bottles of toiletries sent home. And he hoped that thieves would be as careless as prying authorities, who opened letters and haphazardly taped them shut. In his own letters to friends and family, Nick censored himself, afraid of jeopardizing his chances of returning to Vie
tnam to see his mother before she died, and maybe, to live out his life there.

  Before the month was out on his return trip, Nick had gone to his home village of Long An. The visit with family and friends was filled with the tension of not being able to speak openly and freely. They whispered caution against saying “wrong things.” Two brothers refused to speak of their time in reeducation. One friend had still not returned. When Nick left Vietnam, he smuggled out more than one hundred letters to be posted in America.

  Some thirty people attended Merle’s fundraiser, held at the home of a socialite in Beverly Hills. Nick noticed three or four Vietnamese among them. One was author Le Ly Hayslip (whose memoir of the war, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, published that year, would be made into a movie of the same title by Hollywood producer Oliver Stone). The others had northern accents. Communists, or friends of Communists, Nick thought, avoiding them. He showed slides of a sequence of photographs from the day of the napalm attack in Trang Bang, ending with the famous picture. As a soundtrack to his presentation, he had selected “The Song of the Yellow Skin,” a popular antiwar song once banned by the South Vietnamese government. It starts with the haunting lament of a mother, who sings a song of love to the cold body of her dead child in her arms.

  KIM LOOKED AT HER SOUVENIRS OF THE journalists’ visit: an 8 x 10 print of the famous picture and a T-shirt emblazoned with Mickey Mouse. The shirt was from Jim Caccaro’s teenage daughter, though Kim assumed it to be from Nick. She did not know that Nick had looked for but found no opportunity to slip her some American dollars.

  After their emotional sharing of memories, Kim was puzzled: Why did Uncle Ut never come back to rescue me? If Perry Kretz could come back for me, why not Uncle Ut? Kim perceived only one difference between her world and that of those who lived in the West: she lived under control; they did not.

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, KIM’S MINDER accompanied her to the Interest Section of the United States government in Havana. (Cuba and the United States had established these offices in each other’s capitals in 1977, to facilitate communication between the two governments.) All was in order: her visa and airplane tickets. Then, one week before her departure date, Ambassador Tai called Kim in. He was his usual smiling self: “How are you? How is everything?”

  For weeks, Kim had maintained an appearance of calm. “Fine, thank you,” she said.

  Then he dropped a bombshell. “Kim Phuc, I called you here today to let you know that the trip to the United States is canceled.”

  Kim’s eyes widened. Her mind raced with fear: What happened? Obviously, she had made a misstep. But how? A moment too late, she realized that she had to tame her fright and stem her welling emotions. Tears would be seen as misplaced affection for the United States. Or worse, she might blurt out something that would reveal how much she had wanted to go.

  Her faced cracked painfully into a smile. “Why?”

  “You will understand you cannot go for two reasons. First, there is the problem of your health, and second, your studies.” The ambassador knew she was shocked.

  “SOMEBODY SHOULD GO TALK TO HER,” someone said to Merle, “get her to change her mind.” Trip organizers and sponsors, spread over fifteen cities, were, in a word, irate at the abrupt cancellation. The fundraising had been entirely at the grassroots level. No foundation approached would contribute. However, the media’s blitzkrieg of interest had inspired the fundraisers; network television shows had lined up to interview Kim Phuc and Nick Ut.

  Merle could not think what might be standing in the way. There had been but one small uncertainty about whether the American government would grant Hanoi’s request for a second visa, for someone from the Vietnamese foreign ministry to accompany Kim in the United States. But certainly Hanoi understood that the American government preferred to see her trip as an unofficial visit.

  It took two weeks for Merle to get a twenty-four-hour visa to Cuba. At the embassy in Havana, she found Kim waiting for her. Their embrace broke Kim’s seal on her emotions and she wept openly.

  They were three around the table: the minder, Merle and Kim. Kim guarded her tongue; she noticed that Merle wore a khan ran, the signature woven and fringed, black-and-white checkered scarf worn by Viet Cong guerrillas during the war. While Merle read Kim’s tears as disappointment, she was convinced that the reasons Kim gave were her own. Kim spoke of her unstable diabetic condition and how she did not wish to interrupt her schooling. “School is the most important thing in my life,” she kept insisting, and she signed a letter to Merle saying the same. From what the minder added, Merle was left with the impression that Vietnamese and Cuban authorities considered Kim’s marks to be “problematic,” that quite apart from jeopardizing her health, the tour would imperil her studies.

  The minder allowed the two to spend the rest of the day together without him along. Merle is a daughter to them, thought Kim, cautioning herself to watch what she said. Over lunch, Kim spoke of worsening times in Cuba, how everybody had less money, less to buy, less to eat. At the residence, she opened a drawer to reveal a stack of letters. Each, she said, was a demand from her family for money. “They think I am rich, that I live in heaven.”

  Merle asked Kim if she had what she needed to treat her burn scars. Upon hearing that she couldn’t afford to use her Nivea skin cream every day, that she had to conserve it as massage cream when she needed pain relief, Merle was insistent: “Let me take you shopping.” At the diplotienda, Kim bought only one jar. “What else do you need?” Merle asked. “I can send you something from New York.” Later, she would send a pair of long evening gloves, an item favored by women in Ho Chi Minh City to shield their arms from the sun while riding their bicycles.

  When the two parted, Merle gave Kim one hundred American dollars. She also took the gold chain from around her neck and slipped it around Kim’s. In return, Kim bestowed on her a ring of fake gold that had been her mother’s.

  Some weeks later, for the first time ever, Kim’s minder asked her opinion before drafting a reply to a letter. It was from Merle. To which humanitarian causes did Kim Phuc wish to distribute the money raised for her tour? Among the choices were a school and a hospital in Vietnam. The sum was a few thousand dollars. “It doesn’t matter,” Kim said, smiling.

  SINCE THE CANCELLATION OF HER TRIP, KIM had cried into her pillow nightly. Why? Why, why, why? Thinking her anger un-Christian, she prayed for it to subside. Keep quiet, keep friendly, she cautioned herself. By day, she donned her smiling mask.

  After weeks of misery, Kim sought sympathy by confiding in Helen and the Diazes. “Take it easy, Kim,” was all Helen would say. Manuel and Nuria shrugged. It doesn’t occur to them that I might be upset, thought Kim. They love Cuba too much; they don’t understand.

  THE REVERBERATIONS THROUGHOUT THE Communist world that had begun with Gorbachev’s perestroika in the Soviet Union led ultimately to a dramatic collapse of the Soviet bloc. The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire came in November 1989, when the Berlin Wall was breached.

  Castro turned his back on what was seen elsewhere as the inevitability of political change. In January 1990, he sent Cubans once again to the defense of his revolution. He proclaimed a “Special Period in Peacetime” and brought in draconian economic measures to severely ration consumer goods, fuel, electricity and food (monthly ration booklets henceforth provided enough food for only twenty days). “¡Socialismo o muerte!” was the new slogan that ended his interminable speeches; death as an alternative to socialism appeared to be a grim possibility.

  Cuba’s economic crisis turned calamitous overnight when the Soviet Union, to stave off its own collapse, stepped up its economic restructuring and further tightened foreign aid and exports of subsidized oil. As the Berlin Wall came down, Cuba lost its Communist trading partners in Eastern Europe. Within a year, West and East Germany were reunified. Hungary and Poland elected democratic governments. The Communist government of Czechoslovakia collapsed. Romania’s dictator was executed. Cuba’s im
ports from former Soviet bloc countries fell by half in 1990, and in 1991 virtually ceased, dropping to 7 percent of 1989 levels. The cutback in cheap Soviet oil left Cuba without a surplus to sell to earn hard currency to replace imports from the former Soviet bloc. Sensing Castro’s regime to be on the brink of collapse, the United States responded by widening its embargo, including a ban on shipments of food and medicine.

  The Special Period marked the end of any and all normal practices in Cuba. Immediately, gas was in short supply. Without raw materials or fuel, factory production was disrupted. Water pumps could not pump. Farm machinery couldn’t run. Trucks couldn’t bring food to the cities. Garbage collection was haphazard. Hospitals ran short of medicines. Without parts from Hungary, city buses could not be repaired. Without East German powdered milk, Cubans could not make butter; without Czechoslovakian malt, beer. Within weeks of the proclamation of the Special Period, all consumer goods in the state stores were of worst quality and in short supply, from clothing to shoes to cooking oil to shampoo.

  The once comfortable life at the student residence on the Malecón was no more. Electricity was turned off for four hours a day. One elevator was cannibalized for parts to service the other. Water could stay off for as long as two days at a time. The stairwells were wet from students sloshing pails up from the ground floor. Plugged toilets took on a bad smell. Garbage piled up; students on upper floors took to throwing it out the window, and the wind carried it through windows below. Dormitory sheets went unwashed. The university handed out newspaper for toilet paper, salt for toothpaste. Fortunately, Kim had Toan and her privileges at the well-stocked diplotiendas. And her minder allowed her to do laundry at the embassy, where an emergency generator kept a regular water supply.