Review: A moving 'Picture'

"The Girl in the Picture"
By Denise Chong
Viking Press
Biography
373 pages

In this story: A prosperous family Empathy for the subject RELATED STORIES, SITES

By L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- The image crystallized a moment of horror, and signified years of misery. It put a face on the pain that was Vietnam. It humanized a war, and may have helped end it. No one who saw the photograph taken on June 8, 1972, could be unmoved by it. That single image -- of a child running in terror from a napalm attack -- remains frozen in memory.

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But what of that child? How did she come to be the target of that attack, and what was her fate? "The Girl in the Picture" tells her story, and by extension, the story of Vietnam during and after the war. Canadian author Denise Chong provides a quietly moving testament of Phan Thi Kim Phuc before and after the moment that seared her image into the world's consciousness.

Phuc, as she is known, was the daughter of moderately successful middle class parents in the South Vietnamese village of Trang Bang, on Route 1 outside Saigon. Their prosperity was the result of her mother's cooking. She ran a noodle shop on Route 1, and earned enough income to keep her large family in comparative comfort. Their village was isolated from much of the fighting that raged in Vietnam throughout the 1960s.

That changed in the spring of 1972, when North Vietnam launched its Easter Offensive to test the defenses of the South as the United States was withdrawing its combat forces. Acting on U.S. military intelligence, the South Vietnamese air force dropped napalm on Trang Bang, and on Phuc. The jellied gasoline clung to her clothes, burning through to her skin. She fled down Route 1, ripping her clothing off, straight into the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Nick Ut.

That could have been the end of Phuc's story. Her burns were so severe, she had little chance for survival. But through a chance sequence of events, which her parents credited to their belief in the Caodai religion, Phuc received the kind of medical care denied to most victims of the war. Eventually, she returned home, but her convalescence was long and arduous. And her future prospects were bleak.

"To Phuc's parents," Chong writes, "her injury became a marker of when the family's fate had turned. They relied on Caodai's infinite wisdom to decide the extent of their own and their daughter's earthly suffering. Much depended on how disfigured she would be and how her health would be affected, but they expected to have to care and provide for her for the rest of their lives."

It didn't turn out that way. Chong chronciles the declining fortunes of Phuc's family, particularly after the surrender of South Vietnam. Yet Phuc managed to complete her schooling and pursue a higher education. Eventually, the Communist rulers of Vietnam came to appreciate the propaganda value of "the girl in the picture." As a result, Phuc was routinely trotted out to tell her story to visiting journalists. She also traveled outside Vietnam. One trip took her to Germany, where she received treatment that helped ease the pain of her injuries.

Eventually, she went to Cuba to study. Her long-time ambition of pursuing a career in medicine never materialized, but she did continue her university education. Ultimately, she and her husband defected to Canada, where she now lives.

Author Chong tells the story of Kim Phuc in understated, almost gentle prose. Her empathy for her subject is obvious in every word she writes. At the same time, she offers the reader a glimpse of Vietnam rarely seen by western observers. Her accounts of the daily life of Phuc's family -- during and after the war - flesh out the often one-dimensional picture most outsiders have of the people who endured that conflict.

Kim Phuc is a living symbol of wartime tragedy. She is also much more. She is a survivor in the broadest sense of the term, seeking her own way in a life that has been buffeted by international politics for twenty-eight years. Chong illuminates the inner strength that allowed her to overcome the horrifying injuries she suffered and to pursue the kind of life she wanted to live. Phuc is now a mother and has converted to Christianity. She makes occasional public appearances, but Chong says she is trying to live quietly in Canada.

At times when the Vietnamese government was manipulating her for its own purposes, Phuc hated her status as a celebrity. Now, Chong tells us, she is at peace with the fact that she will always be "The Girl in the Picture."

Embassy of Vietnam - Washington, D.C.
Viking Press (Penguin Putnam)

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