CHAPTER 14

SAIGON

PERILS LEFT AND RIGHT

SPRINGTIME 1983

For many weeks following that disastrous trip to Tay Ninh, I repeated the phrase from Scripture, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,”[15] as though each time I said it, life would somehow find its balance, its stride. And yet nothing of the sort occurred.

I was hungry, with nothing to eat until my peers kindly gave me bread and milk. Within four months of my return, the church I had been attending was shut down by the communist government, and Pastor Ho Hieu Ha was imprisoned for six years until American president George H. W. Bush signed a letter demanding his release; the gaping wound created by the argument between my ma and me seemed to expand; and the government continued to abuse me, forcing me to miss language class in order to sit for interviews that misrepresented my views.

To be honest, I was cracking under the weight of so much ongoing struggle and strife. Had not Anh taught me that God was “a very present help in trouble” and “a refuge for the oppressed” and the one who upholds me with his righteous right hand?[16] If these promises were so, then why on earth was I enduring such unrelenting pain? Why are you abandoning me, Lord?

I realized that I could no longer afford even the one class I was taking. Besides, given the government’s frequent interference with my studies, what was the point of staying in school anyway? I dropped the class, figuring it was more important for me to sort out my new faith and secure a steady source of food. Whenever I was not under the control of my minders, I would lose myself in the pages of Scripture, focusing intently on stories such as that of the apostle Paul, who wrote candidly about everything he suffered as a believer in Jesus the Messiah.[17] Poor Paul! His story made my own seem tame. And yet my suffering was very real. I needed a dose of hope, some sort of supernatural signal that God had not lost sight of me.

By spring, the worldwide media was focused on the tenth anniversary of the Paris cease-fire accords, which had prompted the US withdrawal from the war. The public attention to my story escalated, as droves of journalists now wanted articles that “looked back.”

Now, instead of arranging one-on-one interviews with reporters, my minders held large press conferences. Often these media events were held in Tay Ninh, the province that still maintained official jurisdiction over my citizenship.

On one such occasion, I concluded my remarks and then was introduced to the government’s media-relations photographer, whose name was Minh. Mister Minh had been given permission to escort me to a nearby state-run daycare center, where children played for hours each day while their parents worked.

“I would like to take pictures of you smiling and laughing with children around you,” he explained, “to show that you are doing all right.”

I knew there was no use protesting. “All right,” I said. “Let us go, then.”

When we entered the daycare, Mister Minh spotted a lovely little shiny-haired girl on the other side of the room and ushered me to her side. “Here,” he said, hoisting the girl toward me. “You hold her in your arms and just talk sweetly to her.”

For a moment, I lost myself in the sheer joy of holding a baby girl. How wonderful to be a mother someday. That simple act of holding a tiny baby in my arms, her countenance brightening as I cooed and sang to her, caused all of the medical input regarding my sure infertility resulting from my burns to momentarily slip away. But as quickly as the hope-filled thought of ever becoming a ma entered my mind, I evicted it. Who will ever want me for a wife? Without a husband, there would be no child.

I smiled enthusiastically for Mister Minh’s camera, genuinely enjoying the few minutes basking in the tender innocence of a child, and then I was whisked away for whatever was next on the agenda.

Days later, one of the photos that had been snapped during my daycare-center visit appeared in the national newspaper of Vietnam, which came as no surprise to me. What did catch me off guard was the caption that accompanied it: “A decade later: Kim Phuc and her baby girl.”

When I read those words, I was angry, experiencing something rising up from a deep place in my soul. “What have they done to me!” I silently cried. “Now what will become of me?”

It was true that with my wretched scars and my painfully slow recovery, I had very low expectations for one day marrying and bearing a child. But I had not given up hope entirely; that is, not until now. Everyone in my country would see that photo and its caption, and then think, Oh, Kim Phuc has found a husband, and look—they have had a baby girl. Any prospective husband would avoid pursuing me altogether.

Mister Minh had not requested the caption that ran alongside his staged photograph; in fact, he had no knowledge of the misrepresentation until I pointed it out. I did not blame him, but oh, how I wished he had never arranged for that shot. Within hours of its publication, the image and the words circulated all throughout Vietnam, taking with it the final glimmer of hopefulness that I would ever find true love.

One of the journalists who surfaced during those tenth-anniversary-celebration days was a German man named Perry Kretz. I had first met Mister Kretz in my hometown of Trang Bang, shortly after I returned from the hospital and during his visit to Vietnam to file a report on the Paris peace accords. My country’s government had denied him entry and placed him under house arrest, most likely because he published a photograph he took of a South Vietnamese soldier asleep at his machine-gun post, a disparagement the South would not soon forget.

In 1973, while Mister Kretz was holed up in a hotel awaiting the next flight from Saigon to his native Hamburg, he bribed his minder with American currency to allow him to go visit the Associated Press office nearby. “I cannot get out of here for another three days,” he mentioned to a colleague there. “Any ideas on how I should spend my time?”

“You should consider checking in on Kim Phuc.”

Mister Kretz replied, “Who is Kim Phuc?”

“Surely you remember the napalm girl!” the colleague said, which prompted Mister Kretz’s visit later that afternoon to Trang Bang.

I had been wandering around at my grandmother’s hip for hours when the long, black car pulled up in front of my parents’ home from which Mister Kretz emerged. My father, who was out front, escorted the journalist to me, explaining that I was wanted for a news story regarding my burns. Mister Kretz was warm, friendly, and very patient as I explained my experiences through the interpreter who had made the trip with him. At the journalist’s request, I showed him all around what remained of our family home. I led him over to the CaoDai temple and told of how the other neighborhood children and I had been chasing a black bird all over the place when the soldiers ordered us to run for our lives. And I escorted him all the way up Route 1, retracing the steps I had taken fourteen months prior, as wild, hot flames licked my heels.

I had not spent any time around reporters at that point in time, save for the moment with the ones on Route 1 who offered me a drink and doused my blazing-hot skin with water, but I knew instinctively that this man possessed a rare level of compassion. He looked at me and truly saw; he listened to me and truly heard. I trusted him almost instantly.

Now back in Saigon for the first time since that visit with me nearly a decade before, Mister Kretz found himself reliving his times in Vietnam and longing for how the South once was. The communists had changed street names and city names, altered business models and lifestyle norms, and strangled whatever beauty and liberty we had once enjoyed, in favor of “reeducating” us in their ways, none of which was lost on Mister Kretz.

When he returned home to his native Hamburg, perhaps in an effort to revive his fond memories of “old Saigon,” Mister Kretz rummaged through his file drawers until he found copies of the photographs he had taken during wartime all those years ago, coming across the handful of images he had snapped in and around my parents’ home. He was the reporter who had wondered “whatever happened to that girl,” and while his decision to find me would bring me into the public eye and thus present wild complications for me for years to come, it also may have saved my life.

Mister Kretz submitted the necessary paperwork and secured the required permission to return to Vietnam and interview me for himself. After greeting me with a great big hug, he asked me how I was doing. I had to trot out the lies I had been trained to trot out: “I am very well! I am studying in Saigon to be a doctor. I am enjoying my studies very much!”

I thought that I had been convincing to Mister Kretz, but either I was not as persuasive as I had hoped, or else his years as a human-interest reporter made him keenly astute. He returned to Germany haunted by my countenance. Something is not right with her, he thought. She is not doing as well as she says.

Later, Mister Kretz would explain to me that he simply would not have been able to live with himself, had he not at least tried to help get me out of Saigon.