You’ve seen her face, even if you don’t know her name.
Kim Phuc was 9 years old when she was photographed running from soldiers down a dirt road in South Vietnam. Captured in black and white, she is naked and screaming in obvious agony. Phuc spent 14 months in hospital recovering from the extensive napalm burns she received.
It’s an infamous image and became an emblem of the Vietnam War. In recent months, it’s been compared with the image of the body of Alan Kurdi washing up on a Turkish beach.
Phuc sought political asylum in Canada in 1992 and received her Canadian citizenship in 1997. Shortly after that, author and Prince George native Denise Chong began interviewing Phuc for her book, The Girl in the Picture.
“When I met her, her presence was almost unknown in the west,” Chong says. “And I set out to do her story. It evolved into really rolling out a whole story of war and living in a wartorn country and the aftermath.”
Chong says it took hundreds of hours of interviews with Phuc to prepare to write her story.
“When she first arrived in Canada, she had come out of a communist regime. She’d had minders all her life. She’d been watched. So, it took me a long time to coax her to talk freely and of intimate things.”
The Girl in the Picture was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. Chong says it has been published in a dozen languages and sold well even in places like the UK and Germany, which weren’t involved in the conflict. Chong says she believes that speaks to the deep cultural impact the Vietnam war had – an impact she says continues to this day.
“It raises what are perennial issues. It’s a war that didn’t respect borders at all – it involved several countries. It’s a war that has entered the modern parlance people talk about the ‘Vietnamization’ of conflicts.”
Both Chong and Phuc are in Prince George this weekend.
Phuc is the keynote speaker at this year’s Bob Ewert Dinner, taking place on Saturday, April 2.
Chong, who holds an honorary degree from UNBC, is presenting a reading and discussion of The Girl in the Picture, first at UNBC’s Canfor Theatre on Friday, April 1 then at Atrium on UNBC’s Quesnel campus on April 4. Chong will also be offering a free workshop on memoir writing on April 7 at Books and Company in Prince George.