The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War

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Chapter One

    KIM EASED BACK A CORNER OF THE bedroom window curtains. Only from there could she see signs of life outside. The windows of the living room looked at the brick wall of the house next door. Though a skylight in that room made the concession to light, the feeling in the second-floor apartment of the duplex was one of claustrophobia, echoing that of the one-way, one-lane street on which the Bui family lived, in a poor, congested neighborhood tucked in behind the smaller of Toronto's two original Chinatowns. However, from the bedroom window, if one lifted one's eyes over the unbroken line of parked cars and the jumble of flat and peaked roofs opposite, one could take in a view of Toronto's modern downtown skyline.

    Kim's eyes swept the sidewalk for anybody watching the duplex. Then the uncovered porch below. Nobody. But the evidence remained: a crushed pop can and the telltale red-and-white carton of a Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch from the outlet at the top of the street. Yesterday evening at dusk, she and Toan, believing they had entered their apartment unseen by coming up the back stairs, had looked from this window, and noticing the pop can and carton left behind, had come to the same conclusion—the two women they had just met on the sidewalk had been staking out their address for some time that day, at least long enough to get hungry. One of them had a camera. Kim had cautioned her husband against opening the front door to remove the refuse. This much she knew: the long lens of a camera can see a lot.

    The night before, Kim had gone to bed in anagitated state. She had called Michael Levine, the lawyer acting as her agent, who was handling her publicity, including requests from the media. "If those women try to get into your house," he'd said, "call the police." The image of men in uniform made Kim anxious, and that night, she had one of her recurring war nightmares. Sometimes they involved bombs, sometimes mortar fire or gunfire. But always she is a child. That night it began with her standing amidst a group of chatting soldiers. An argument broke out among them. Gunfire erupts. "We have to get out!" Kim screams. She runs, terrified of being killed. But as she runs, she tires, and she doesn't know how she will keep going.

    As usual, she woke to escape death. Feeling stone cold, she did as always: she shook Toan awake. "Hold me," she whispered. When her tears stopped, as usual, she found she was consoling him: "It's okay. I have to suffer like that."

    Toan left to go job hunting, picking up the pop can and carton on his way out. Kim turned her mind to how the day would unfold: the colleague of the photographer, or rather, the one without a camera, had agreed, as Kim had asked, to call Kim's lawyer. "After you call him, after that I can work with you," Kim had told her. All that day, Kim found herself waiting for the telephone to ring, expecting Levine to call to say that the two women had requested an interview. Not even her usual hour of Spanish-language daytime TV soaps could distract her from the questions that paced back and forth across her mind. How did the two women know her address? Why had they been waiting all day on the sidewalk? The day came to an end, marking the beginning of the weekend, when Levine's law office would be closed.

    By Sunday, Kim was relieved to have church to occupy her mind. The word of God made her forget all her worries. The family's church was in Ajax, an hour away from Toronto by the church van service, and no one there but the pastor knew of Kim's history. Since she and Toan were the only Vietnamese in the congregation, it seemed unlikely that her past would even come up. On Sundays, they attended both the morning and evening services, spending the interval at the home of a friend from the congregation.

    After the first service, she and Toan went to collect their eleven-month-old son, Thomas, from the church daycare.

    Kim felt an urgent tap on her shoulder. It was another father. "Your picture is in the newspaper!" he exclaimed.

    The man, who was responsible for buying newspapers for the church's reading room, held up a Toronto tabloid, The Sunday Sun. It was that day's edition, March 19, 1995. "The photograph that shocked the world" shouted the front page, above a picture of a young girl, naked and running in terror. There was another headline, "Child of war is a woman living in Metro," alongside another picture, one of Kim, wearing the coat she'd been wearing all week.

    Kim lifted her eyes from the newspaper. Clearly, the two women had got the photo they'd come looking for. "Yes," she said. "I am the girl in the picture."

    The newspaper that broke the news—that the subject of one of the famous pictures from the Vietnam war now lived in the West—was The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid. It syndicated the story to, among others, Toronto's Sunday Sun, which played it across pages two and three. Accompanying the article were photographs of Kim and Toan pushing their baby in a stroller on a Toronto street, and of Kim's parents in front of their mud hut in Trang Bang, Vietnam. The article began:

To her neighbors in a working-class area of Toronto, she is just another young mother, anonymous and hesitant. But to the world, she will remain forever the human symbol of the pointless brutality and savage cost of the Vietnam war. Next month it will be 20 years since the futile American military campaign finally ended ...

    Of all the countless photographs and films which captured that terrifying and bloody war, one potent and compelling image remains: of a young girl, naked and terrified, screaming in pain as she flees a napalm attack on her family's village, Trang Bang, 40 miles from Saigon.

    Today Phan Thi Kim Phuc is a woman of 32. Once exploited by the Vietnamese for anti-capitalist propaganda, wheeled out by the Marxist regime as painful proof of American colonialism, she is now living in hiding in the West, a defector from the Communists who have manipulated her almost all her life ...

    The breaking story was picked up by international wire services. Within a couple of days, Kim's telephone began to ring, and didn't stop. In short order, she tired of hearing callers, complete strangers all, asking to speak to Kim Phuc. She took to letting the telephone ring, leaving Toan—if he was home—to answer and give out the telephone number of Kim's agent. Upon the insistent ringing of the door buzzer, the couple would go to the front window to spy on the person below. Invariably, it was a journalist—or so Kim assumed, judging by the camera bag over a shoulder or the notebook in hand. Often there was a waiting taxi. Eventually, getting no answer, the journalist would leave.

    Night and day, the couple kept the curtains drawn on the front window. Kim grew afraid to leave the house for fear that it was being watched, or that someone lay concealed, waiting for an opportunity to take her picture. Whenever the buzzer sounded, she tried to keep the baby quiet, and to avoid stepping where the wooden floor would creak. Sleep did not release Kim from her anxiety but rather plunged her into the darkness of her recurring nightmares. Exhausted, she spent entire days in her turquoise dressing gown.

    This was not the scenario she had contemplated when, a few months earlier, she had made the decision that, in order to help support the family, she would reemerge from her private life and sell her story; it would be her "work." She had gone for advice to Nancy Pocock, a lifelong social activist well into her eighties. Kim and Toan, like many Vietnamese and Salvadoran refugees in Canada, called her "Mother Nancy."

    "Mom, I want to stop being quiet. Please, how can I do that?" Kim had asked her.

    Nancy had a family friend who knew a prominent Toronto entertainment lawyer, but before making the introduction, she had first wanted to make certain that Kim understood something: once she invited publicity, there would be no going back.

    "Yes, I know. I cannot be quiet again," Kim had said.

    But after a month of jangled nerves and recurring nightmares, Kim was having second thoughts. She worried that plans made with her agent to have the media pay for publicity might be for naught, that, like those two women from the British tabloid, the media would try to get a story and pictures of her without paying a cent. She felt as though the journalistic hounds would make her into a victim all over again. "The accident of those two women on the sidewalk," she lamented to Toan, "was like a bomb falling out of the sky."