the girl in the photograph

naming, seeing, knowing

Her name is Nguyên. She has two boys—one in third grade and one in eighth grade—and she loves math. Once, she even worked in an office calculating numbers (accounting, I think it was), but this was when she was in college. Now, instead of doing math, Nguyên is rowing my boat. 

I sit in front of her, a life vest strapped to my body. Nguyên is not wearing a life vest. Why? I ask. 

Because if you fall, you could drown. 

But what about you? 

Nguyên says she doesn’t need one. She says it like I asked a silly question. Then she says something like: Mostly it’s a liability thing.

The further Nguyên rows us into the water, the heavier my life vest feels. I think about what it means to be a liability—and what it means that Nguyên is not. I also think about how loud I must look, and how, if someone were to take a picture of me, my foolishly orange life vest would devastate the soft green river. I suppose, picture or not, it already is. I already am.

Someone takes a picture of me. 

Smile! the photographer yells. Hello! SMILE!

The green silence is shattered, and, shocked by the sudden command, I smile. My mouth involuntarily creases upwards, teeth bared, cheeks taut. My body, too, jolts towards the sound of his voice.

In the mere seconds it takes the photographer to point the camera and shoot, I suddenly feel naked and taken advantage of. I feel the weight of my unawareness, my illiteracy, and indeed, my state of liability—all choking my entire body into a tight smile.

Smile! the photographer shouts again. He looks at me, and I look at him, and I realize he does not look at Nguyên. I realize Nguyên does not look at him, either, and I think to myself: they are used to this. I am not.

Let me take more pictures of you, the photographer tells me. You buy later. Good quality pictures! 

I say no more, no thank you. I look at Nguyên. He says, come on. I say no thank you, I don’t want it. 

Come on. 

No thank you.

Come on. 

No. 

Only when I insist in Vietnamese does the photographer stop asking me to play the role of the tourist. 

But as Nguyên rows the boat into the first cave, the life vest only grows heavier. Even in this darkness, I am glowing orange. 

---

Her name is Kim Phúc. She is 59 years old and lives in Canada. Her cropped black hair and square face remind me of my aunt’s mother, and she, like Nguyên, has two boys. In 1997, Kim Phúc founded the Kim Foundation, which provides medical and psychological assistance to children affected by war. In the same year, she became a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace. 

25 years later, Kim Phúc is on my computer screen. She is naked. And screaming. 

I am sitting on my neatly pressed hotel bed, and Kim Phúc is part of a Zoom presentation on the history of Vietnam. It is clear that the presenter does not know her name. The presenter says, here is a picture of a naked girl, running. This might be the most famous picture of the Vietnam War.

The presenter says, Did you know there is a book written about this girl called The Girl in the Photograph Or Something Like That. (The real book is: The Girl in the Picture.) Then the presenter repeats the word napalm over and over and over. Devastating, she says. I turn my camera off and wonder just who is doing the devastating.

It’s been 50 years, Kim Phúc writes. I am not “napalm girl” anymore.

Someone types in the chat, Napalm girl lives in Canada now.

I type, Her name is Kim Phúc.

---

I have failed. I know this. 

Her name is Nguyên, and her name is Kim Phúc, and my name is Kaitlan Khánh Lan Bùi, but I have failed, and I know I will continue to fail again and again these next ten months. 

When Nguyên tells me that she has never spoken to anyone this much while rowing a boat—and she has been doing this for five years now—I cannot help but feel proud of myself. But very quickly, this pride feels off kilter. 

“In order to do the critical research,” a friend once told me, “you have to pay to see the attraction you don’t want to support.” Prison relics, and war museums, and, even now, perhaps, a boat ride. 

“So what do you do?” 

The truth is, I didn’t even board Nguyên’s boat to do critical research. I boarded it because it was part of a team bonding weekend, and also because the American government paid for my touristy pleasure in the name of cultural exchange. 

I wanted to speak to Nguyên, to know her life, and to share mine—but there were times my questions were either insensitive (why are you rowing with your feet? / because it makes me less sore) or laced with privilege (would you ever consider going back to school for math? / i have never considered this because i can’t afford to). It took me minutes, even hours, to realize my insensitivity, the double lag of language learning and self-reflection. 

I desperately wanted to become Nguyên’s friend, at least for the duration of the boat ride. The truth is, I might have even felt morally compelled to do so—which is such a sticky, othering, and unwarranted thing to say. But what felt even stickier in the moment was watching a man and woman ride down the river with a selfie stick, blasting something on a speaker while an old lady rowed their heavy bodies. What felt even stickier was knowing that locals were underpaid by noisy tourists, who would undoubtedly gush about how cheap everything was when they moseyed into their hotel room later that night. What felt even stickier was judging these people and knowing that I, too, was just as bad, a tourist in a boat, being paddled around, impressed by—I’ll say it—the exoticism of paddling with one’s feet. It’s true, I couldn’t stand to watch the selfie-stick scene. But maybe what’s truer is this: on that boat, a fluorescent orange piece of nylon strapped to my body, I couldn’t stand myself. 

---

“The right to conquer is intimately connected to a right to know,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write. Maybe the truth is that I wanted to know—Ninh Bình, Nguyên, that boat, that river—and maybe, in that knowing, hid some impulse to conquer. The truth is that if I’m not careful, my cultural exchange experience will just mean imparting my American ideals, and imparting my American ideals will mean imperialism, and imperialism will mean colonialism, and then I will be perpetuating all the ideals I meant to shred. 

What was I doing on that boat? How was I listening to Nguyên's story? And what does it mean to know someone not from a place of pride and conquest and violence—but from a place of empathy and humility and co-creation? What does it mean to be a writer when writing has so often hurt others? Can I ever write at all? Does it matter?

Perhaps, even in this piece of writing, I have failed. I am sorry. With words we create genies which rise on the table between us, and fearfully we watch them hurt each other; they look like us, they sound like us, but they are not us…

---

“The general killed the Viet Cong,” Eddie Adams wrote three years before his own passing, “[but] I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.”

“This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn't taken the picture, someone else would have, but I've felt bad for him and his family for a long time. I had kept in contact with him; the last time we spoke was about six months ago, when he was very ill. I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, ‘I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes.’"

---

Perhaps, even in this piece of writing, I have failed. I am sorry.

So many of us fail: we divorce wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers, go once again into the lonely march, mustering our courage with work, friends, half-pleasures—or, as Eddie Adams wrote, “half-truths,” not whole because they are not shared.

Yet I still believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth.

“Yet you still have to write,” a friend told me on the bus back to our hotel. “And of course it matters.”

My time is confused and lonely and fearful and short, but for these moments, with these people… [I] have been given an eternal touch.

So here I am. I am writing, and I am failing, and I hope you forgive me.

---

SMILE! and I do, without realizing it, and then I do while realizing it. Only when I say no thank you, no thank you, and only when I slip into my accented Vietnamese, and only when Nguyên rows the boat further and further away from the camera, do I realize the weight behind my orange life vest.

This vest marks my privilege over—yet my inability to survive without—Nguyên, and the photographer, and the boat itself. It marks my demand as a tourist to be taken care of—as well as the locals’ demand of me to play the role of tourist. The truth is, I do need the care; I am a bug-eyed, inarticulate child. The truth is, a large portion of Ninh Bình’s revenue does come from tourism; through my program, I have the money to spare. So much of me feels sticky, and still I cannot do anything but sit, enveloped in this orange trap.

Nguyên, I attempt, Thank you for talking with me.

I’m sorry if I’m the reason your shoulders are sore.

The river is beautiful.

Will you text me the address of your parents’ restaurant?

---

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. 

‘To be’ is to ‘inter-be.’ We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.¹

---

Let me begin again.²

This is a sheet of paper, and here I am, and here you are, and that is all we can really say for now.  

This is a story about Nguyên, and Kim Phúc, and the presenter, and the selfie-stick tourists, and me, and I couldn’t tell you, even if I wanted to, which parts of this story have already failed. 

So many of us fail, reads the PDF my friend sent me at 8:28pm—my first Andre Dubus read, and the one that got him through a difficult, difficult breakup. 

So many of us fail… and yet I still believe in love’s possibility.

Too often the words are the wrong ones, and we cannot know and understand all of each other. 

Still, we can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn’t need words, an act which dramatizes for us what we are together. 

The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved.³

Or it can be a boat ride, a stumble of questions, an attempt at connection, several failures and a follow-up text: 

Hi, Chị. I am writing something right now. Would you mind if I used your photo? It’s okay if you say no.

K sao đau em. Chúc em gặp nhiều may mắn và thành công trong công việc nhé.

Her name is Nguyên, but on this texting app, she calls herself something else. 

Hope.

1. This entire section is excerpted from Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Interbeing.”

2. This is the very first line of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Jennifer Huang writes a tender review of this novel, reflecting on this sentence, in her article on The Rumpus.

3. All italicized portions of this essay are taken from Andre Dubus’s essay, “Charon’s Wharf.”