The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  “Yes! I would!” Yet again, Kim saw God opening another door to her future.

  Immediately, she saw in her mind that the request would first have to get through the labyrinth of the Vietnamese foreign ministry bureaucracy. “But,” she advised, “you must ask permission for me to leave Cuba.” Her mind clicked over, looking for the path to success. “Ask the Vietnamese embassy in Bonn.”

  For days, Kim remained nervous that word would get back to the Vietnamese embassy that she had been seen with foreign journalists. She had told Toan, but trusted him to say nothing. The days passed without repercussion. Then, Kim was seized by a greater fear, that the ZDF’s approach in Bonn would reveal to the regime that she had gone behind its back. That she could not afford; the regime already viewed her as a security risk, thinking she had intended to defect to the United States. Kim realized that, in all likelihood, Hanoi would refuse the German invitation.

  She saw what she had to do. She wrote a letter to Pham Van Dong, choosing her words carefully to demonstrate her loyalty to the regime. Without mentioning the shoot in Havana, she wrote of the ZDF invitation to go to Germany to present her famous picture. “I would very much like to visit there,” she wrote, “to say ‘Hello’ to the German people again.” She ended her letter solemnly: “I promise to return.” She posted the letter at Havana’s central post office.

  Two weeks later, Kim’s minder confronted her. He angrily waved a piece of paper, reading aloud from it: “The government has accepted the invitation from German television”—his next words were spoken through clenched teeth—“according to the wishes of Kim Phuc.”

  Spittle shot from his mouth. “Why did you write to Hanoi? Why?”

  She did not answer.

  “How did Hanoi know about this? How did they agree?”

  Inside, Kim was laughing. Hanoi had given an order and there was nothing that he, or for that matter the ambassador, could do to change it.

  Because her minder had said nothing about helping to arrange her paperwork, she proceeded on her own to the German embassy. Kim found that ZDF had taken care of all the details: waiting were her visa, airline ticket and itinerary. Days later, the Diaz family—except for Nuria, who disliked goodbyes—drove her to Havana’s airport.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IN MAINZ, A TOWN FAMOUS FOR THE invention of the printing press and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, Kim spent a relaxed few days in early July—without a Vietnamese minder in sight. A ZDF producer collected her from her hotel daily and took her sightseeing and to tea with her own mother, and, at week’s end, brought her into the studio. Before a live audience, Kim appeared with the host of “Bilder, die Geschichte machten,” a weekly program of ten-minute segments examining a photograph that made history, to introduce the inaugural film, “Das Mädchen aus Vietnam.” At the post-show party, the program’s photographs were on exhibit. Kim was familiar with three others: the execution on a Saigon street of a Viet Cong suspect; a Russian soldier raising the flag of the hammer and sickle atop the gutted Reichstag; and an American sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. At the end of the evening, the producer had her sign a contract and paid her, in cash, one thousand American dollars. Though Kim’s obligation was fulfilled, ZDF invited her to stay on as its guest for several days longer at the hotel.

  There was no debate in Kim’s mind: she ought to check in with the Vietnamese embassy in Bonn. The next morning, she dialed from the telephone in her room. She mentioned ZDF’s invitation.

  “We invite you to come to Bonn,” was the embassy’s response.

  Kim planned a one-month stay in the guest quarters of the embassy in Bonn, the length of stay paid for by what ZDF gave the embassy as the equivalent cost of a few extra days’ hotel and meals in Mainz. Within the compound in Bonn, she was back within the regime’s control and conducted herself accordingly. While at ZDF, she had asked someone to contact Perry Kretz on her behalf, but no one had got back to her before she left for Bonn. Once in the embassy, quite apart from being intimidated by the German spoken at the other end of the telephone, she dared not risk being overheard trying to contact the journalist.

  The month was uneventful, except for one unexpected visitor. A young German man, her age, had seen the documentary shot in Havana, which had aired earlier that summer, and then her ZDF studio appearance. Realizing that Kim had to be in Germany, he pleaded with the station to put him in touch. He had come to Bonn, four hours by train, in hopes of meeting her.

  The two struggled in English. He was lovesick. “I want you to be my girlfriend.”

  Kim giggled, amused. “I am in Cuba, you, in Germany. How can we get boyfriend and girlfriend?”

  “We can write to each other.”

  “We are friend, is okay. We can write letter, but boyfriend and girlfriend, no.”

  The embassy arranged one meeting, between Kim and the administrator who headed the project that Kim herself had launched seven years earlier, in 1984, at the press conference on the day of her discharge from the burn clinic in Ludwigshafen. Finally, a burn facility was about to open in Ho Chi Minh City. It was to be part of the existing Cho Ray Hospital, the same hospital where the Barsky unit had operated until 1975. The administrator blamed delays that had plagued the project on Vietnam repeatedly sending individuals for training in German hospitals that Germany had to reject as unqualified.

  “Will the burn hospital be named after me?” asked Kim.

  “Well, the Cho Ray Hospital already has a name,” replied the administrator.

  With enough money to indulge in a small shopping spree, Kim bought herself and Toan leather shoes, tracksuits and Adidas running shoes, and for herself, a Nikon camera and a supply of film, and a bathing suit in a leopard skin pattern. At an Asian food store, she found a Vietnamese delicacy, cooked sausages stuffed with the meat of shellfish, the pungent smell of which was not appreciated by her seatmate on the flight home.

  With the money earned from ZDF, Kim cleared her debts to Toan and other Vietnamese friends, and was also able, finally, to send something to her parents and her brother, Ngoc. Looking for “something small” they could resell in Vietnam, she settled on Cuban-made glass syringes. She sent a boxful, along with two hundred dollars, with one of Helen’s couriers. None of the syringes arrived intact.

  BACK IN HAVANA, KIM WAS MOVING YET again. The residence authorities had had to close down the uppermost floors of the twin residences on the Malecón. The shabbiness of the ground floor betrayed the building’s poor condition: the security guard’s desk was broken; the decorative pool had long ago emptied of water; and the dry dirt in the planters in which plants had once thrived now blew everywhere. Scheduled daily electricity shutdowns had escalated from four to six hours, then to every other day. To make matters worse for the residents of the upper floors, the out-of-service signs on the elevators never came off.

  The university left its Cuban students on the Malecón and transferred its foreign students to east Havana, where a block of Soviet low-rise apartment buildings had become empty upon the Soviet Union’s abrupt recall of its workers and advisers. Life there was not much of an improvement over the Malecón. These buildings were stark outside, dark and stifling hot inside. Built of Soviet prefabricated concrete and designed to withstand a Soviet winter, they had few windows and no balconies. The only nod to landscaping in front of Kim’s building was a bust of a Cuban martyr, set in a now empty flowerbed. These residences had no security guard checking for student passes, so any laundry left hanging to dry, from sheets (students with pesos to spare forsook the university’s threadbare sheets and bought material to make their own) to underwear was bound to be stolen.

  Emerging from the tunnel into east Havana, one had a favorable first impression because of the gleaming new sports facilities and the athletes’ village built for the 1991 Pan-American games. When the games were over, the athletes’ accommodations were to be converted into hotels for international tourists—part of Cuba’s plan to have touris
m help lead the Cuban economy back from the brink. The games, held in August, were a success, buffing Cuba’s self image and rejuvenating its pride. However, on closing day came international news that stunned. An attempted coup against Gorbachev signaled a disintegrating Soviet Union. In October, bracing Cuba for the aftershocks, Castro proclaimed it each Cuban’s “sacred duty” to save the Cuban Revolution. And, to reinforce his singular grip, he stepped up the harassment and rounding up of dissidents.

  At the onset of the Special Period almost two years earlier, Cuba had prepared for its impending gasoline crisis by calling on farmers to substitute oxen for farm machinery and for the people of Havana to use bicycles—until the late 1960s, virtually unseen in the city. In 1991, the first shipments of 1.2 million Flying Pigeon bicycles from China began to arrive for Havana’s population of 2 million, and on May Day that year, Cuba’s armed forces paraded on bicycles.

  A disadvantage for students reassigned to residences in east Havana was having to rely on the bus to get to classes. Nonetheless, Kim and Toan took up the university’s offer of a Chinese bicycle at a subsidized price of sixty pesos, payable in monthly installments. Five minutes in one direction from their residence were the converted Panamericano hotels, and five minutes in the other were the Diazes. Cycling into central Havana, however, was impractical: at the entrance to the tunnel under the harbor channel, cyclists had to dismount and load their bicycles onto special buses for the crossing. Before the Special Period, the wait and ride from east Havana into the heart of Vedado had been fifteen to twenty minutes. In the Special Period, the wait alone in east Havana could take up to one hour. Buses failed to appear, or passed by too full to stop. The chaos at the bus stops, with a crush of workers trying to get to work, intimidated Kim. An orderly lineup would be maintained only until a bus stopped. And getting on board was only the first hurdle; buses often stalled or broke down altogether.

  The lights went out on the city’s entertainment. Electricity blackouts would darken the cinemas. Often the cafés and restaurants closed because they had run out of supplies. Even Coppelia took on an air of “waiting for Godot.” People would stand in a line that didn’t move or sit at a bare table for as long as five hours, on the off chance that the emporium would receive a delivery of milk allowing it to resume making ice cream. Foreigners with red pesos could always go to the tourist hotels and nightclubs, but with few to spare, Kim rarely indulged.

  She was enthusiastic, however, about a suggestion from Helen’s boyfriend, Mohammed, that she join with him and Helen—the couple were now living together—to buy a car. Mohammed had an international driver’s permit. A car would not replace the bus for getting to classes; the supply of gasoline was not that reliable. Rather, the purpose of a car was to relieve the boredom and grimness of life in the city, to allow outings to the beach and to forage for food in the countryside. It was Mohammed’s idea that Kim tell her minder that riding public buses jeopardized her health. The embassy agreed and provided her with a paper authorizing her to purchase a car.

  There was one red peso car lot in Havana. The cheapest car they found there was a 1984 Lada. Its chassis was broken, the body scratched and the front windshield shattered. Bargaining was illegal in Cuba. The broken-down Lada, in American dollars, cost $1,200. The manager recognized Kim. “You are famous,” he said, recalling the story and picture in Granma, “and I want to help you.” He took it upon himself to replace the windshield and add a coat of turquoise paint on the body before selling it to them.

  Manuel Diaz got the car in running order. Mohammed paid for the gasoline, and a tire lock to guard against theft. More often than not, the car sat parked, its tank empty. When Mohammed could find gas to buy, the foursome went on day trips and weekends away, lodging with families who illegally rented beds in their homes, and dining on black market meals. Like other students, they had the opportunity to go on the annual campismo, but in the Special Period, without enough food brought along, two weeks of living in tents and battling mosquitoes was more ordeal than privilege.

  The Diazes kept an open door to Kim and her friends, and even entertained Ambassador Tai and his wife to celebrate Tet. Kim relied on the Diaz house as a place to do her laundry, to shower and cook. Rarely was there any interruption to their residential electricity or water supply. Manuel managed to keep their Russian-made washing machine running, but for the hopelessly broken wringer, and clothes could be left unguarded drying in their back garden. In return for these favors, Kim took small gifts of soap, shampoo, toilet paper and laundry detergent, items always in stock at the diplotienda but, more and more often, either unavailable in the state stores or of such poor quality that Cubans shunned them. Every late afternoon, the family dog sat with its eyes fixed on the horizon, watching for the approach of a figure on a bicycle. A plastic bag hanging from the handlebars meant that the rider, Kim, was bringing fare from the student residence—a treat, at least for the dog.

  GORBACHEV’S RESIGNATION AT THE END OF 1991 marked the formal breakup of the Soviet Union into independent states. The kingpin among them, Russia, grappling with economic dislocation and inflation (which would soar to 2,500 percent over the next year), abruptly halted subsidies and demanded world prices for its oil and payment in hard currency.

  Immediately, the oil pipeline to Cuba dried up. To compound Cuba’s economic woes, the buying power of its sugar exports dissolved. World prices plummeted to levels that would stay depressed for the next several years. The crop also shrank, as Cuban farmers could not get fertilizers, pesticides or gasoline. By early 1992, the Cuban economy had contracted so drastically under the Special Period that it brought scourges reminiscent of the Batista era: high inflation, joblessness and shantytowns outside Havana. The signs on some state stores said they were closed for inventory, though their shelves were empty. Repeated electricity blackouts disrupted or shut down factories. To ease demand for electricity in downtown Havana, the regime shortened the workday by canceling lunch hours for office workers. It mobilized tens of thousands of city workers to “voluntarily” work extended stints on state farms. Yet everywhere was more breakdown and deterioration. Shoving and fistfights broke out in lineups. Older people took on interlopers: “Comrades, comrades, respect the lineup.”

  Kim took measure of the Special Period only in terms of human suffering. People bore the appearance and smell of decay, their bodies and clothing reeking with stale perspiration. She appreciated that she had privileges Cubans did not. She said yes to her classmates who, pleading hunger, asked for a single candy, knowing she kept them on hand for diabetic emergencies. When some had a few precious pesos, they asked her a favor of buying on their behalf, the next time she went shopping at the diplotienda , a single egg. Policemen would knock at her door in the residence, knowing a foreigner lived there. “I am checking to see if you are safe,” they would say. “There is so much theft in the Special Period.” Eventually, they would work up the courage to beg something. A biscuit? A few flakes of soap, enough for a shower? A capful of shampoo? Never did Kim refuse; the requests were small.

  At the university, hunger and fatigue diminished energy and dinted enthusiasm for both teaching and learning. Teachers and students who relied on public transportation were haphazardly late for class. Some teachers, themselves reduced to begging food from students, devoted class time to organizing car pools and coordinating efforts to find food. Electricity blackouts between six and ten at night forced the cancellation of evening classes. Students wanting to study had to stay up past ten. Few had the energy to stay up late and rise early. In the morning crush to get into the city, some young men scrambled to grab onto the outsides of the buses, hanging by one hand to the edge of the door or an open window. Inevitably, some fell to their deaths.

  Toan, who was close to graduating, kept his zeal for studying. Not Kim. Drained of ambition by the travails of daily life, she cared only that she avoid failing grades. She grew concerned for her health. Privileges at the diplotienda counted for less, as
prices rose sharply and shelves were not restocked. Sometimes, Manuel Diaz, using up his precious ration coupons for gasoline, would drive her and Toan into the countryside in search of rice and eggs, and a chicken or, if they were lucky, two. Yet still her health suffered. Her sneezing fits worsened. By night, to ease her breathing, she took to sleeping upright in a chair.

  A sudden and dramatic loss of hair worried Kim enough to go to a hospital. She was taken aback by Cuba’s changed circumstances when she was asked to pay a fee to see a doctor, on account of being a foreigner. As ever, Helen came through, with a moonlighting doctor. Cubans using Dr. Abdala’s services would pay him a loaf of bread, or remember him at New Year’s with a few slices of roast pork; Helen’s foreign friends paid with small luxuries of shampoo and detergent. More than once, the doctor, an orthopedic surgeon, helped Kim through diabetes and asthma attacks. He acknowledged the illegality of his moonlighting by expressing his gratitude for payment silently, by lightly tapping his fingertips together. The doctor saw himself as having paid his dues to the revolution in the Cuban government’s repeated refusal to permit him to leave for the United States, where his wife had fled in 1960. Some foreign students tried to broach the topic of Castro’s intransigence, but Dr. Abdala would not be drawn in. “Talk doesn’t resolve problems,” he would say.

  UNEXPECTEDLY, AN OFFICIAL FROM HO CHI Minh City dropped in on Nu at the noodle shop. The son of Pham Van Dong would be paying her a visit; she should prepare to receive a seven-car delegation. Calculating upon four or five people per car, Nu readied herself to serve, that day, her famous banh trang, and to go with the rice-paper wraps, tea. On the appointed hour, the motorcade slowed, then, inexplicably, sped off. Some days later, Nu received a letter from Dong’s son. He apologized for not stopping; district officials with his motorcade had advised him not to, “because there is no security at your shop.”