Kim Phuc: The enduring image of the Vietnam war

By MICHELE HEWITSON

It is the beginning of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, the day I phone Kim Phuc in Toronto. Thirty-two years ago, on the eve of another Tet, the almost 5-year-old Phuc was preparing to move with her family to their new home in the hamlet of Trang Bang, near Saigon in South Vietnam.

This home represented prosperity and stability in a time of instability: its pillars were hung with garlands of perfumed flowers, baskets were filled to overflowing with tropical fruit, charms hung from the lintels to ward off evil spirits who might arrive bringing bad luck.

The double doors were fastened open in welcome to the ancestral visitors who it is believed return from heaven to visit their families for the three days of Tet.

Instead, minutes before midnight the sound of gun shot rang out. In what would come to be known as the Tet offensive, communist forces attacked the American embassy in Saigon and teams of Viet Cong commandos attacked more than 100 small towns across South Vietnam.

One of these was Kim Phuc's home town, Trang Bang.

Moving to the new house was delayed while roof tiles were replaced and shrapnel damage from mortar fire was repaired. Moving house is the first memory of a then-unknown little girl from an isolated part of a country at war.

The next event of note that happened to Kim Phuc was one that was to bring her a curious sort of celebrity. For Kim Phuc is The Girl in the Picture - the title of Denise Chong's book which tells her story.

That one photograph would burn her image into the consciousness of the world for all time. Kim Phuc became the face of war. As George Esper, the Associated Press' last bureau chief in Saigon, says in The Girl in the Picture, that photograph "captures not just one evil of one war, but an evil of every war."

Kim Phuc is now 37. She lives in Toronto, where she defected in 1992, with her husband, Toan, their two young children and her parents. She says she escaped to the West to get away from the manipulations of a communist regime which used her peculiar claim to fame for propaganda purposes - she was paraded at socialist festivals as an anti-imperialist and anti-war icon. Her defection came out of a desire for what she called "the quiet life."

It is an odd contradiction then, that Kim Phuc has swapped one set of watchers for another. Chong's book opens with a view of the congested neighbourhood where the girl in the picture lives in a cramped apartment. She is seen peering out of a window. There is nobody on the footpath but there is a Kentucky Fried Chicken container and an empty soft-drink can. The watchers were back - only this time they were journalists, not communist minders.

There is a Vietnamese saying which sums up Kim Phuc's predicament. In making a decision to emerge from "the quiet life" as a suburban mother living in anonymity she found herself caught between the sticky rice and the bean.

She originally decided that her new life in Canada was to be "very normal and have nobody know that I am that little girl in the picture ... life with my husband and family like any other lady."

But financial considerations - the family was struggling despite Toan working two jobs - helped change her mind. She decided she would sell her story; that would be her "work." This time, though, she thought, "I don't have to be afraid of it [her history] any more. I can say yes or I can say no. I can control my life. This is the big difference in my life."

She has since come to appreciate that it doesn't always work that way; that while people are interested in what became of the girl in the picture they are not always going to want to pay to hear the rest of the story.

Kim Phuc has come to regard the picture in a different light: "My picture is famous, not me." And, she says, "that picture is a very powerful gift. I say, 'Okay, from that picture I can do something because that little girl tried to find her own life. I learned to forgive."

Kim Phuc now works as a Unesco ambassador and has set up the Kim Foundation, a non-profit organisation which raises funds and awareness to help children who are victims of war. She still suffers from her burns whenever the weather changes abruptly. She laughs a lot and credits her Christian beliefs with helping her cope with pain and with poverty.

It can't have been easy, going through life as the girl in the picture. There is, as Chong notes, a struggle for those who appear in famous photographs to be recognised not as icons but as individuals.

Kim Phuc says she's just always been herself. "I am just the same, even with the Queen of England. I have never changed, not with the famous or the not famous. I have my own life."