Barbara Ludman
THE GIRL IN THE PICTURE by Denise Chong (Simon &Schuster)
There are arguably half a dozen iconic images from the Vietnam war an American soldier flicking a Zippo to set fire to the thatched roof of a Vietnamese peasant’s hut, a South Vietnamese general shooting a Viet Cong fighter in the middle of a Saigon street, panicked South Vietnamese hanging from the runners of the last helicopter to take off from the American Embassy roof.
And there is the photograph of a naked child, her clothes burnt off in a napalm strike, running in terror down a rural road.
The child was an 11-year-old girl called Kim Phuc, and The Girl in the Picture is the story of her life, both before and after the accident of war.
A peasant child whose mother supported the extended family from a noodle-soup kiosk, Kim led an ordinary life in a village just north of Saigon until the day she was caught in a “friendly fire” mistake. She should not have survived; and wouldn’t have, had Nick Ut, the Vietnamese photographer who took the picture, rushing to process his film, not dropped her off along the way in one of the few Saigon hospitals equipped to treat burn victims.
Her life was unremarkable, if intermittently painful, for several years afterwards, until she was “discovered” first by a German photographer, then by a local official who saw her as his ticket to fame, fortune and high office. Shuttled between international fame and desperate poverty (her mother’s kiosk was taken over by the state and handed back only after it had been ruined), her education continually interrupted by camera calls, Kim by now a beautiful young woman learned to use that fame to get away from all of it and now lives in relative obscurity with husband and child in Canada.
It’s a strange story, encompassing her friendship with legendary fighter and politician Pham Van Dong, her attempt at higher education in Cuba, visits to Moscow and poverty so severe at the height of her international fame that she had to beg family, friends, visitors for money to eat.
Strange, too, is the back cover of the book. For while the front shows the famous photograph, the back reproduces a prize-winning image of Kim now, cuddling her baby boy. Only one problem, especially for a book about a photograph: it’s been flipped. Her burn scars are on the wrong side.