The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  Nu had yet another dispute with local authorities concerning the widening and rerouting of Route 1 through Trang Bang. During the weeks of road construction, she had been forced to close the shop. The authorities denied her request for compensation of lost income. When she appealed to them, pointing out that the road widening had eliminated the parking on which her business depended, she was met with reproach. “Kim Phuc received much help to leave this province to go to Cuba. In her years there, she has done nothing to help Tay Ninh. She should have asked for help from overseas to build a school or a hospital for her home province.”

  The news that Kim feared and hoped never to hear came in a letter. It was from Linh, the daughter of Loan. After more than forty years, Nu’s shop was no more. “Your mother could not meet her creditors, so I have bought the shop,” the letter said, “and now your mother is working for me.” It continued: “If your mother gets a chance, maybe one day she can buy the shop back.” Kim wondered where her twenty-three-year-old niece got the money to buy the shop, and could think only that her boyfriend from Ho Chi Minh City was behind the deal. The purchase of the shop marked the beginning of a family feud. The niece would resell the shop, and three years later, in another location in Trang Bang, she and Kim’s brother, Tam, would open competing eateries side by side. Shunned by Linh, Nu cooked for Tam. This, from my own grandchild, she would tell herself, whom I carried out of the napalm attack.

  Worse news of her parents’ plight was yet to come. Tung wrote Kim that in the spring of 1992 her mother had stopped working because of health problems. Ngoc wrote with characteristic bluntness about their parents’ appalling living conditions. “Phuc, our parents are getting old and living in a very poor and decrepit condition. Unless you can find a way to make money and help them, they will live out their lives in a mud hut.” Tung and Nu had to vacate the outbuilding—parishioners tore it down as part of their rebuilding of the war-damaged temple. The parishioners took pity on the aged couple and built them a bamboo hut behind the temple. It was barely large enough for one bed, a small round table and two stools. Nu cooked outside, on the ground. Tung wrote Kim of the flimsiness of the hut in the wind and rain. “Study hard and return from Cuba to find a good job,” he told her. “Perhaps you can find a job as a tourist guide, and save enough to build your mother and myself a decent house.” Where once Kim had seen such letters as hounding her for money, now she saw them as a plea for some dignity.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1992, AS HER THIRD YEAR of studying English drew to a close, Kim was rapidly losing heart for life under the Special Period. By naming it so, Castro had implied that it would last only a limited time, but now no one seemed to know where it would all end. For Kim, it was unthinkable that she might have to relive the desperation of the early postwar years in Vietnam, when she and her siblings’ stomachs were bloated with animal feed and Great Uncle lay wasting away.

  Kim found it ever more difficult to believe in the reason she had gone to Cuba in the first place—to secure a future for herself. Instead, the difficulties of daily life weighed ever more heavily on her mind. She knew that, as a foreigner, she could stay one step ahead of ordinary Cubans. She’d received the blessings of good fortune—namely, hard cash. But she could not count on that to come again. And she didn’t have rich parents like Mohammed’s, or connections like Helen’s. The two years of study that stretched out ahead of her—presuming her health could endure the worsening deprivations—seemed like punishment, like climbing a mountain of sand that was ever sliding underfoot.

  She tried to envisage the life that awaited her at the end of it all, upon her return home to Vietnam. She saw clearly only one thing: that once back in Vietnam, she would be more firmly in the grasp of the regime. She told herself that “they” would decide the choices in her life, before she herself learned of them, if at all. Kim foresaw that any opportunity for her to go to the United States would be kept from her attention. Chance mail and visits, the way it had happened with the German television station, might happen in Cuba, but not in Vietnam.

  They hate me, Kim thought to herself. She saw in the regime’s cancellation of her trip to the United States a change of heart towards her. They hate me, yet I cannot change that; I cannot correct that. She thought of how there were no saviors left to appeal to; she had gone as high as she could, to Pham Van Dong. On her last visit with him, together, in private, they had lamented each their own powerlessness, facing the reality that no individual came before the regime.

  Without my faith, I am nothing, thought Kim. Yet, as she continued to feel herself losing ground in Cuba and dreading her future in Vietnam, the all-too-familiar suffering returned. With each trying day, each anxious night, it kept building, building in her, to the breaking point.

  Then, one day, the pressure to contain it quite simply vanished . At that moment Kim came to the realization that she alone had to seize control of her future from the regime. Her epiphany came when she brought to mind a parable told her by Merle Ratner’s husband, Nhan, in Moscow. It was about a beautiful bird that lived in a forest. A hunter fancied it for its plumage and song, trapped it and kept it in a cage. At the time, Kim saw Nhan offering the tale as warning that she was that coveted bird. Then, she was flush with her success on the international stage. Now, she interpreted the tale more ominously. She had known who the hunted was, but now she saw the hunter clearly: the Vietnamese regime. Kim was resolved: while in Cuba, she would find a way to open the door of the cage and slip out. No more, she told herself, with enormous relief. I do not have to suffer any more.

  Kim became singularly focused on exactly what the Vietnamese regime had suspected her of three years earlier: planning escape to the West. Outwardly, she betrayed nothing. She had faith that at the right moment, God would open a door of escape; her mission was to create opportunity for God. Indeed, faith is sometimes not enough on its own. It can only be realized through experience; it has to be tested.

  On one typical Saturday afternoon that summer, between her third and fourth years of English, Kim was one of a crowd of students dropping in on Ambassador Tai. His wife welcomed the students on weekends, and enjoyed spoiling them with her cooking. In a conversation with their seventeen-year-old son, Kim learned that he was going later that summer on a three-week holiday to Mexico City. It had become common for Vietnamese families posted abroad to send their children to holiday at Vietnamese embassies in foreign cities.

  Kim’s first thought was: Mexico shares a border with the United States! She decided to ask the ambassador then and there for permission to go herself. How can he say no to me, she reasoned, if he allowed his own son to go? She was right. Within days, she had a visa and an airline ticket. She confided only to Helen and Nuria. “Do not worry if I do not return,” she said cryptically. “If I have the opportunity, I will go forever.”

  Mohammed, together with Helen and Toan, drove Kim to the airport. As the plane took off, Helen turned to Toan. “Your girlfriend might not be back.” He chuckled. It was Cubans who often joked about leaving and, if they could manage it, not coming back.

  KIM’S MINDER FROM THE EMBASSY IN MEXICO City escorted her on a sightseeing trip on a city bus, politely pointing out attractions. From the windows, she saw the contrasts of life in the world’s most populous city. The same city entertained the rich—gliding past in shiny, long cars along broad avenues lined with modern skyscrapers, shopping at elegant boutiques and dining at lively international restaurants and sidewalk cafés—and accommodated the beggars, who sang for coins on street corners and tried to sell chewing gum and tortilla snacks to drivers while the stoplights were red. People here are free to do what they want, Kim concluded. Her heart jumped when the bus passed by the American embassy.

  “We want to help you enjoy yourself.” Two of Kim’s minders took her on a day trip to Teotihuacan, an Aztec ceremonial center. The day they went, July 25, was one of the two days each year when the sun appears to set exactly on the points of the Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyra
mid of the Sun, which are aligned along a great Avenue of the Dead. Kim pointedly asked a minder to take her picture against the backdrop of the pyramid, and when they perused the souvenir stalls, she dutifully showed enthusiasm for buying costume jewelry.

  Into the second week of her three-week stay in the guest quarters of the embassy, Kim fretted that her minders were never going to let her out unaccompanied. All she needed was a few moments on a telephone outside; she dared not use any inside the embassy. Her nightly prayers grew anxious. On her knees, with her face wet with tears, she made a desperate appeal: “God, I’m scared. How will I escape? Please, find me a moment.”

  On the second to last day of her stay, by which time the ambassador’s son had arrived for his holiday, Kim casually expressed a desire to her minder to visit a friend from Havana, a Spaniard who once lived in the same student residence as her. He and his Cuban wife were visiting relatives in Mexico City. “Go ahead,” said the minder, asking only that Kim leave him their names, their address and the time by which she would return.

  Kim was in luck. The couple were there, and the house had a telephone.

  Suddenly afraid, Kim confided her intentions to the Spaniard and asked his opinion. She felt compelled to give an apologetic explanation: “I cannot stay in Cuba. I cannot study, I’m not eating well—”

  “It is not easy to claim asylum in Mexico. It might work, it might not. The Mexican government might turn you back to Cuba.” His tone was cautionary but his manner sympathetic.

  Kim dialed the telephone.

  “Hello? Please, can I speak to Nick Ut?”

  The person who answered gave her a new number. She re-dialed.

  The answer disappointed. “Nick’s on vacation. Won’t be back till next week.”

  Back in her guest room at the embassy, Kim found comfort in prayer. “God, I am disappointed, but I am not angry. You know more than me. Please carry my burden for me, and I will turn back to Cuba.”

  KIM WAS STRUCK BY HOW HAPPY TOAN WAS to see her, and how much more demonstrative he was with his affections. God was telling me to turn back to Toan, she told herself. He mentioned Helen’s joking that she might not come back. Kim laughed. “I’m here!” she said. “That did not happen.” The Spaniard paid her a visit upon his return from Mexico City. In hushed tones, he commiserated about the hardships of life in Cuba. He issued a word of caution. “Be careful,” he said. “Be very, very careful.” Kim concluded that it was best to guard the idea of escape, that her strategy would be to be ready for it but not to plan for it, that being both difficult and dangerous.

  Toan was enjoying the summer, and wondering if it might be his last in Cuba. He was celebrating having earned his baccalaureate degree in English. The university had already accepted him into a two-year graduate program in computer programming; he was awaiting a decision from the Vietnamese embassy about whether he could stay on.

  He decided to take the chance of proposing to Kim a second time. Since the first time, when she’d declined to give him an answer, he had written both his father and Kim’s parents, asking their opinion about marrying Kim while they were both in Havana. Toan’s father had been disapproving. “Finish your studies before you marry,” he’d instructed. “Do not marry in Havana. The family must be present at your wedding.” No reply came from Kim’s parents. When Toan spoke to Kim of the silence, she said only that her family found it difficult to accept her friendship with a northerner. To his second proposal, Toan got from Kim the same ambiguous response.

  Toan remained upbeat. To celebrate his graduation, he organized an outing to Tropicana to take in the nightly show, a flamboyant extravaganza of more than two hundred performers, mostly near-naked showgirls singing and dancing on an open-air stage, a show essentially unchanged since 1939. Finally, the Vietnamese embassy decided Toan’s fate. He broke the news to Kim that the Vietnamese government could not afford to pay for his graduate course, that in the fall he would have to return home.

  She wept uncontrollably. “If you go home, I don’t know how I can live here. For sure, for sure, I cannot finish my studies.” Seeing her despair, Toan investigated the cost of staying on in school. He found out that the university was charging the Vietnamese government nothing for his course. He made a personal appeal to Ambassador Tai. “Think of Kim,” Toan begged. The ambassador relented.

  On a Saturday night late in August, ten or so of Kim’s friends gathered in her residence room to cook a meal. The dinner was Helen’s idea—a belated welcome home from Mexico to Kim. Just as they started to cook, the power failed. The group abandoned the darkness of the residence for the lighted bar at the nearby Hotel Panamericano. Yamilen Diaz—who had failed in her ambition to study in Moscow—had a job there.

  The evening wore on through several rounds of beer and rum—in Kim’s case, orange juice. The cigarette butts piled up in the ashtrays.

  Helen, with her usual impulsiveness, tossed out a question as if it were bait. “Kim and Toan, why don’t the two of you get married?”

  Helen is like a child, thought Kim affectionately.

  “How long are we going to have to wait?” Helen played the part of an auctioneer to an eager crowd. “I’ll pay for Kim’s wedding dress!” she declared. She knew a Cuban with a closetful of bridal gowns for rent, all imported from the United States.

  Mohammed was next in. “I’ll pay for their honeymoon: one week at the Habana Libre hotel.” Contributions came in fast and furious. Yamilen had Toan’s tuxedo. Someone was taking care of the beer and wine. Rum. Food. Flowers. Decorations. Even the printing of the invitations.

  Toan looked bright-eyed and hopeful. All eyes turned to Kim.

  “Okay, yes!” She laughed, enjoying the game. “I’ll get married then!”

  A startled Toan fell to his knees at her feet. “Yes? You are saying yes? Is it true?”

  “No—it is not true. I mean, yes. No, I change my answer to no.”

  Everyone, Kim included, felt for Toan. Someone said: “You have to say yes or no.” The court of opinion declared that she had three days to say one or the other.

  Of the men she had been closest to, Kim saw that Toan was the most considerate and generous, in contrast to the healer and playboy Minh. But yet, she and Toan did not share the bond of a knowledge of God, which she had known with Anh. For that reason alone, Kim had been unable to elevate her relationship with Toan beyond friendship. She simply could not see how she could live with someone who did not follow Jesus Christ. From the start, she had taken stock of Toan’s moral weaknesses. He drank. And he smoked. “Every cigarette you smoke burns one minute of my love for you,” she had told him. Three times he had tried to quit, without success. She put the question to herself again: Can I suffer every day living with someone who does not have the same faith as me, who I will see smoking and drinking? A saying her mother told her came to mind: “If you love a man, even his shit smells good.”

  Kim decided to ask God to help her decide. She decided a sign from him that she should say yes was if, at the end of three days of prayer, she felt at peace and had no nervousness about marrying Toan. After three days, she had her answer. God has given me a good man, she told herself.

  Ten days later, on September 11, three hundred guests came to the wedding, held at the home of Ambassador Tai. Never before had there been a wedding in Havana’s Vietnamese community. Both Kim and Toan were in white, in the style of a Western wedding: she was in a floor-length gown that showed her shoulders and arms through lacy tulle; he was in a white tuxedo, accented by a red bow tie and pocket-handkerchief. Toan’s only expense had been the purchase of his white shoes, Kim’s, having her make-up and hair done through another contact of Helen’s. As the bride and groom arrived, threatening thunderclouds opened up. “You will have a life of gold and silver!” said the ambassador, repeating a Vietnamese belief in good luck should it rain on a bride and groom.

  Traditional Vietnamese wedding ceremonies unite two families; the bride and groom speak not a word in th
e ceremony. Accordingly, Ambassador Tai spoke for Toan’s and the embassy’s highest-ranking military officer spoke for Kim’s. After they had signed the marriage documents, the banquet, prepared by the Vietnamese students, began. Two roast suckling pigs were Manuel’s contribution, which he’d had to drive far into the countryside to buy. Tables were set inside in the salon, and outside on the patio and in the landscaped gardens. Kim and Toan took away with them wedding gifts of money totaling four hundred American dollars, thirty of which was from the Vietnamese embassy.

  Mohammed’s gift of a week at the Habana Libre was no luxury. Plumbing worked intermittently, corridors were musty from air conditioners long since shut off, and the pool was empty. In what was formerly the ballroom, now a cafeteria, the ceiling leaked during downpours; and in the restaurant, table service was a minimum three-hour wait. At the week’s end, Toan vacated his room at the residence and moved into Kim’s. Their first days were taken up with well-wishers dropping by. Among them was a friend from the embassy.

  “Why don’t you two go to Moscow for a honeymoon?” he suggested. “Many people go there to have fun.” The city had become a popular travel destination for Vietnamese posted abroad, as well as students. Under the reformer Boris Yeltsin, free markets had sprung up in Moscow. Vietnamese travelers spoke of being able to buy everything from grapes and watermelons to T-shirts and jeans.

  During the newlyweds’ week at the Habana Libre, Kim’s undergraduate classes had begun, and one week later, so too had Toan’s graduate course. While Toan, ever the diligent student, had notified his teachers that he would be a few days late in starting, Kim had not bothered. Most of her teachers had attended the wedding, and she knew Maritza and her staff expected her to take time to set up her married life.