The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Within months, there was such an alarming rise in respiratory ailments among the population of Havana that Castro himself would publicly criticize the poisons spewing from city buses. In bad repair, they wheezed along the streets, belching thick clouds of noxious, black fumes. Like others in the residence, Kim began to have sneezing fits. A specialist confirmed an asthmatic condition brought on by allergies. Whenever Kim had an attack, unless she could calm herself enough to release the tightness in her chest and ease her breathlessness, she had to be rushed to hospital.

  IN THE YEAR SINCE THE REGIME HAD canceled her trip to the United States, Kim’s anxiety over what had gone wrong had not lessened. Each time she felt her suffering trying to force its way up, she swallowed, so that as the months passed, she was bloated with it. She felt her life to be in limbo, her future uncertain. She wondered if Hanoi would ever again allow her to travel to the United States. She came to one conclusion: only one person can tell me if I have freedom in my future, and that person is Pham Van Dong.

  At the end of her first year studying English, Kim bought a ticket for a one-month visit to Vietnam. She financed her trip with Merle’s one hundred dollars and by borrowing another five hundred from Toan and several other Vietnamese students. At a parallel store, Kim bought several T-shirts imprinted with photographs of Cuban beaches for her brothers, and guayaberas, the traditional Cuban dress shirt decorated with embroidery and favored by older men, for her father and Pham Van Dong. At the diplotienda, she bought French perfume and Cuban cigars for her parents, and a watch for Duong, whom she counted on to take her to see his father.

  The Westerners on Kim’s flight to Hanoi were a sign of doi moi at home. Hanoi had partially put the brakes on economic reforms in 1989, but it had less to do with domestic concerns than with what had happened in China, with the fledgling democracy movement that ended with the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Still, Hanoi had succeeded in reining in inflation (from 1,000 percent in 1988 to 30 to 50 percent in 1989 and 1990). Kim had noticed people she presumed to be Western businessmen on her flight, and on the road in from the airport, she thought that the rural poverty looked less harsh than it had four years earlier.

  The maid at Duong’s house in Hanoi told Kim she was in luck: by this time in July, the son was ordinarily already in the south with his father and mother. That evening, Duong showed up on his motorbike at the address Kim had given the maid. As yet unmarried, he had retired from the army to head his own company. Besides arranging an appointment for Kim with his father, he would take her sightseeing, and as well, pay for a return plane ticket to Ho Chi Minh City.

  The former prime minister was still living in his government villa. The eighty-four-year-old Dong had little vision left, but his eyes shone brightly, and in Kim’s, he appeared ever more angelic. They embraced and held hands. He wanted to know of her life in Cuba, but nothing that she said of the growing difficulties of daily life there appeared to be news to him. When the topic turned to her Vietnamese boyfriend, Kim commented on the differences between Vietnamese and Cuban attitudes towards love. “In Cuba, people change partners so easily,” she said. “To them, love is as normal and ordinary as eating a meal.” He laughed. “Cubans are good people,” he said, “but when it comes to love, they are very free.”

  After dinner, Kim felt the time right to put the question on her mind. “Uncle, I want to ask you why the government canceled my trip to the United States.”

  He waved the question off. “Don’t think about it any more, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I’d feel much better if I knew the reason.”

  In the silence that followed was Kim’s persistence, and finally Dong’s willingness to trust her with the truth. “The people had reason to believe that you had ideas about staying behind in the United States after the trip,” he said. “The people feared that your family told you to take advantage of the opportunity of the trip.”

  Kim asked no more.

  As soon as Dong had uttered “family,” she’d fingered her brother, Ngoc. She knew what had incriminated her. “When you go there,” Ngoc had written her, “take advantage of your trip to stay. Do not come back to Vietnam.” Kim was bitter. That is Ngoc’s problem, always saying what is on his mind. She had received this letter from a contact of Helen’s; he must have given her the same advice in another letter intercepted by authorities. Kim saw that she had paid gravely for Ngoc’s stupidity. They don’t believe in me. I never had it in my mind to escape.I never had it in my mind to make a scandal. They thought I was going to betray them. Now, I will never have freedom living under their control.

  AS SOON AS SHE ARRIVED IN HO CHI MINH City, Kim left for Tay Ninh. She found Ngoc at home in the dilapidated house on Future Road, as disillusioned as ever about the Communists. His latest failed venture had been buying bamboo blinds from small suppliers for export. Buyers rejected the blinds for their poor quality, leaving him holding inventory and in debt to a northerner. Three years later, Ngoc would go to jail for eighteen months for failing to repay the loan, the principal amount equivalent to about forty dollars American.

  Kim tried to explain to Ngoc why she’d been unable to respond to his pleas for help. She characterized Cuba as so poor that, though surrounded by sea, it had to import salt. Then she said what she had come to say, lecturing in a way that reversed their roles, as though she were the older sibling, he the younger. “The government canceled my trip to the United States because of you.” After she’d explained, she realized that Ngoc was as saddened as she had been hurt. Feeling a debt of gratitude for the sacrifices he and his wife had made in raising her and her siblings through some of the darkest years of deprivation, she softened her tone.“We have to be very smart. If you say something stupid like that, and they hear you, it is not good. They won’t believe in you; they’ll try to control you more.”

  Ngoc was not to be deterred. He later wrote to Merle Ratner and Nick Ut. Neither replied. Merle thought Ngoc’s letter, written in English, to be calculating. “Since you are trying to help Kim Phuc,” he had written, “could you please help us?” Knowing times were improving in Vietnam, Merle asked friends who knew of Kim Phuc to make inquiries about her family, and they reported that they were not in the desperate straits that Ngoc’s letter made them out to be.

  Ngoc would also write a letter of appeal to Pham Van Dong to relieve the tax burden on his mother’s shop. In his reply to Ngoc, Dong expressed affection for Kim Phuc, but added: “I cannot help you. You live in Tay Ninh and you must appeal to them.” Shortly afterwards, the district tax official in Trang Bang ordered Tung and Nu before him. “We received a telegram from Hanoi,” he said. “The people are very sorry for you; we will see what we can do.” As Nu had to get back to the shop, she instructed Tung not to leave until he got on paper a promise of relief. He returned empty-handed. Vindictiveness aside, Nu’s problems might have been indicative of the regime’s failure after four years of economic reforms to make the breakthrough to the next plateau of making radical changes in tax assessment and collection policies.

  During her three-week stay in Ho Chi Minh City, Kim stayed once again with Huong and Dai. They now lived behind the walls of a colonial villa, occupying its main room, which was so large that Dai had partitions built to divide it into bedrooms. The couple and their son also had a live-in maid.

  Kim made three day trips to Trang Bang. She was pleased to see old Grandmother Tao for a last time; she would die two years later. There was no room for Kim to stay overnight at the noodle shop, as Loan’s two children worked and slept there. Kim saw that her mother, as ever, could not take a day off work. “Home” was two hammocks strung in the outbuilding behind the temple, where her parents lived without electricity, carried water from a well and used an outhouse. Nu continued to support many on the earnings of the noodle shop. Kim was particularly rankled by the idleness of her thirty-year-old brother, Tam, who had playboy ways and a gambling habit. The youngest sibling was eighteen, and though he had passed t
he university entrance examination, Nu had not the money for him to go. When Kim said goodbye, she gave her father some American dollars. “Hide it,” she told him. He put it in his shirt pocket. “There is no security at the temple,” he said. “Anyone can come and go.”

  Loan’s daughter was able to get word to Anh that Kim was visiting from Cuba and wished to see him. Since she’d last seen him, he’d spent three years in reeducation; the pastor of their church was being held still. Of his time in prison, Anh, who had aged beyond his years, would say only, “It was because of my religion.”

  Though the authorities had allowed the large church at Trung Hung Dao to remain open, because Anh could not risk being seen by authorities, he took Kim to an underground Christian church service. The services were held in private homes, and never in the same house two Sundays in a row. Kim reveled in hearing the word of God with her Christian friends. She did as they, prayed in a low voice and sang in a murmur hymns chosen for their subdued tempos. One sad note for Kim was to see that none of her Christian friends was better off, but for the few with relatives gone to the United States.

  KIM DINED A LAST TIME WITH PHAM VAN Dong in his villa in Ho Chi Minh City. When he asked after her family, she bemoaned their plight. They remained poor, she said. Her mother still had a business, but no house, and she labored under the burden of debt and onerous taxes. Kim made a woeful comparison: “Officials in Tay Ninh live like kings!”

  Dong shook his head. “Some in government have done wrong by the people,” he said. “Innocent people suffer. It saddens me, but I can do little; I am only one man.”

  Since their talk in Hanoi, Kim felt the air had cleared between them. She had one remaining mission. “Uncle, I want to share with you my experience between me and God.”

  In her resolve to make a testimonial to Dong, Kim had considered that she might never see him again. Who knew how much time an old man had? She cared deeply about his soul and that it should be saved, and thought that, being a northerner, he probably had no religious beliefs.

  “Jesus Christ came to the world to die on the cross to pay for our sins. Only if we believe that can we go to heaven.”

  Dong did not stop her. He’s open to hearing me out, Kim thought. She continued: “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ I believe in and I pray through Jesus Christ. God opens the door for me and gives me faith to overcome my burdens. You see that I am not sorrowful. I am not complaining. I think only of the present and the future, not of the past. I live with my faith, because without my faith I am nothing.

  “You need to be saved. I know that people who die and are not saved will go to hell like the fire of the napalm bomb. So I pray that people will be saved and go to heaven.”

  He was still listening politely.

  “I receive blessings because I was burned badly. You see me? I look normal. My face and my hands were not burned. My feet were not burned in order that I could go out of the fire, and have my picture taken. That gave me a chance to receive rescuers and saviors to help me.”

  Dong chuckled kindly. “That religion is from America.”

  “I will keep praying for you,” Kim said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Never was Kim filled with more respect and admiration for Dong. Keep me in your hands and I can escape their control; I can do anything, her inner voice told him.

  BEFORE LEAVING VIETNAM, KIM SHOPPED IN the free markets of Ho Chi Minh City. She bought several chiffon scarves and handfuls of trinkets and hair barettes. The scarves were gifts for Cuban friends; the trinkets and barettes would fetch two or three pesos apiece in Havana. Since the onset of Cuba’s Special Period, such dealing in the student residence, once unthinkable, was spreading, every student accepting that each did what they had to to make a few pesos. Fortunately, as Kim was out of practice at bargaining, and as well was unused to shady practices, she had the company of her girlfriend, Trieu. Trieu was biding her time in Vietnam waiting for her husband to send for her from Canada; the two had planned to escape by boat together but had been able to raise only enough gold for one. After making a deal for Kim on some fine leather goods for Toan, Trieu caught the seller trying to wrap up an item of lesser quality. For herself, Kim brought back from Vietnam a gift from Anh of a new Bible and hymnbook, in a white leather zippered case.

  Back in Havana, Kim saw in the diplotienda a large rectangular picture, embroidered in sunset colors, of the face of Jesus Christ, with angels hovering in the four corners. Toan helped her frame and mount it on the wall above the head of her bed. In that first year of the Special Period, Castro had relaxed his attitudes towards religion. While Castro’s Cuba was officially atheist, religion had never been banned, but the practice of it, never strong to begin with, had virtually disappeared. However, that year, Castro allowed papal emissaries to visit. For the first time in thirty years, Cuban radio and television began playing religious music, and religious art and icons appeared for sale in the diplotiendas.

  Neither Kim nor Toan was shy with the other about their differences of beliefs.

  “I am Christian and I pray for you,” she would say to him.

  “I am Communist,” he would reply.

  Toan, able to quote the teachings of Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Engels and Marx, regarded the crumbling of the Soviet bloc as the result of serious mistakes by the Communist parties in those countries. Kim would bring such discussions to a quick end by saying: “We disagree—forget about talking about politics.”

  Talk of the growing privations of daily life in Cuba came to a similar end. “Cuba’s socialist brothers have let Castro down,” was Toan’s opinion. “We pray for the people,” was Kim’s final word.

  Neither did they have a meeting of minds on the future of their relationship. Toan’s first concern had been to seek his father’s approval. As their village had neither newspapers nor television, the father knew nothing of Kim Phuc’s fame as a war victim and was taken aback that his son should be friendly with a southerner. When Toan wrote to describe the effects on her health of the napalm bomb, his father wrote back: “You are an adult. You can decide the matters of the heart for yourself.”

  On Kim’s recent visit with her own family, she had deliberately mentioned Toan in Cuba—whose family she visited on a day trip from Hanoi—and Anh in Ho Chi Minh City. Neither Tung nor Nu said anything—better that a daughter had more than one male friend; one alone would cause raised eyebrows from a parent. As ever, Ngoc was opinionated. Kim played up Toan’s virtues in hopes of overshadowing the fact that he was a northerner. “He is a wonderful friend. He is sensitive to everyone.” Ngoc had cut her off. “I know he is from the north. He is better for you than Anh; better that you marry a Communist than a Christian.”

  After Kim’s return from Vietnam, Toan proposed. She wouldn’t say either yes or no. “You are very good to me,” she replied, “but I cannot decide about marriage at this moment. I have to think of my health, my studies and my future.”

  THE END OF KIM’S SECOND YEAR AS A student of English approached, the furthest she had gone in her academic endeavors. One day, in May 1991, a letter addressed to her at the residence arrived in the post. Kim used the embassy’s address for her mail; nobody had ever written to her at the residence. The postmark was Germany. Kim’s heart pounded with excitement. It had to be from a stranger.

  The letter was from Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), a television station in Mainz, Germany. It proposed to send a reporter and a cameraman to do a day-long shoot in Havana for a short documentary updating Kim’s life. Immediately, Kim realized that this letter had not taken the usual diplomatic route. Normally, the interview request would have been made to the foreign ministry in Hanoi, which would have forwarded it to Havana.

  The letter went on: of course, ZDF would pay her for her participation. If she agreed, she should sign and return the attached one-page contract, which provided for payment of five hundred American dollars.

  Five hundred dollars. Since her return fr
om Vietnam the previous summer, Kim’s prayers to God had been mostly for help to find ways to repay the five hundred dollars borrowed from Toan and other Vietnamese friends. And she longed to relieve the plight of her parents. Seeing them had left her overwhelmed with disappointment at how their lives had turned out, how they would probably have to work to their dying day. A recent letter from her father told of her mother’s shop being assessed yet another special levy. He had gone to the district tax office seeking an explanation. “Because your shop has been very famous for forty years,” the official said. It is famous because of me, Kim thought.

  Kim wrote “YES!” on the bottom of the ZDF contract, signed it and walked to the central post office in Havana to mail it.

  One morning in June, just past nine, two German men arrived in Havana, rented a private car and driver on the black market and drove to Kim’s residence.

  “How did you get my address in Cuba?” was Kim’s first question.

  Their response was offhand: “We telephoned the Vietnamese embassy in Bonn [the liaison office had been upgraded to an embassy upon the reunification of Germany] and asked, ‘Where is Kim Phuc?’ The man who answered said you were in Cuba. We asked for your address and he gave it to us.”

  Kim was thankful that the day’s classes had begun; the residence had long since emptied of students. After filming there, the threesome went to the university and filmed Kim inside a classroom, and outside, against the backdrop of the neoclassical architecture, and on the university’s immense stone staircase, famous for its wide steps that appear to rise from the Gulf of Mexico to the height of the campus.

  At the end of the day, the two ZDF journalists gave Kim, in cash, five hundred dollars. They explained that the documentary would promote a new program to be launched that summer on ZDF entitled “Photographs that Made History.” One of them had an inspiration: “Would you like to come to Germany to the television studio to introduce your picture? We will take care of everything—”