Children of the Enemy Page 13

  We sleep in huts, about twenty or thirty prisoners to a hut. The huts are pretty flimsy. We sleep on big bamboo pallets, and at night they chain our legs to an iron bar. If you are a good worker or they like you, you might get to go in a hut where they don’t chain you at night. I worked hard there, and eventually I wound up sleeping in a hut where my legs were not chained.

  That’s when I made my escape. Even if you get out of the camp, the forests are dense, and it’s easy to get lost there. You must be brave to try it. If the guards catch you, they string your thumbs together, behind your back, one hand over the shoulder, and the other behind your waist, and they’ll beat you. And there is the metal box . . .

  There are guards on watch at night, but you have to wait until they are not paying attention, or even dozing. This is what we did . . . and we made a break.

  We were in the jungle for several days. We ate some wild fruit—but not much, because nobody knew what was poisonous and what was safe—and we prayed. Eventually we got out of the jungle and made our way to the town of Ban Me Thuot. From there, I got back to Ho Chi Minh City.

  My family made the paper to go to the United States in 1982 but we had to wait almost ten years. That’s how it is. We had no money to pay bribes. We will go to my cousin in America. He was living in Chicago, but he moved. I think he is in Washington now.

  My main concern is my family. I left my wife and son in Vietnam. My wife was an abandoned child, and she moved around a lot. She doesn’t have household registration or any documents, not even a birth certificate. We lived together and had one son. When he was born, I got the birth certificate for my son, but my wife has no papers and we didn’t have enough money to bribe the authorities to make any for her. So I had to leave her and my son behind, and that’s all I can think about. She is living in my mother’s house in Ho Chi Minh City. The house is under my mother’s name, and now that my mother is here, I worry that the government will confiscate it and force my wife and son out on the street.

  I can’t tell you any more about my story. I will not be able to hold back my tears. I cannot remember . . . I only think about my wife and son. How can I go back to Vietnam to visit them? I think I must wait for a long time, and I miss them very much.

  Va

  “John Lennon is my idol.”

  Va is a slight, fair Amerasian. He speaks English well, and, surprisingly, is exceedingly well versed on American pop and rock culture and is a big fan of rock music. I loaned him several music cassettes after the interview.

  As we spoke, Va seemed quite tense, almost overwrought, his composure often on the verge of dissipating. After the interview, I was to discover the cause of Va’s tension. Va’s “mother” has been accused of having been a broker of Amerasians in Vietnam, of finding Amerasians for Vietnamese who wish to claim them as family and thus achieve eligibility for resettlement in the United States. While the charges are being looked into, the Joint Voluntary Agency, which has the responsibility of facilitating refugee resettlement from the PRPC, has placed Va’s “family” on hold, and their departure from the PRPC and subsequent resettlement in America has been indefinitely delayed. Va himself, it turns out, was bought by this family, and is of no relation to them, but is nonetheless affected by the hold. He was originally scheduled to leave five months ago, but must now wait, with no indication of when he will be allowed to depart for America. “I live without hope,” he says mournfully.

  WHEN I WAS a boy, I didn’t know that I was half-American, but when I got older, some children in the neighborhood were very mean. They bothered me, they called me, “half-breed, half-breed.” They even dragged me down. They always use the bad word with me, some even had bad manner with me. I don’t pay attention to them, I just try to go to school and do my work, and I don’t give a damn. But when I growing up, I just hated it.

  The Vietnam always call me “Amerasian, Amerasian.” When I go out, and in my school they all call me that, and I don’t like it. When I make a mistake, they say, “You do that because you’re Amerasian. You’re not the same as Vietnamese people. Your father fought against the Vietnamese government.” They tell me, “You are not the same blood as me. You have to go back [to America].” I don’t like that, I hate it.

  The Vietnamese hate Americans, but they want to go to America. All they think about is how they can go to America, and they have to use Amerasians to go. They just think about how they can get what they want. It is the same in any society, when people want something, they will do anything to get it.

  [Va asks me where I grew up, and I tell him New York.] New York . . . many famous people want to live there so they won’t be recognized. I know John Lennon lived there, he was killed in 1980. I read a book about him, he is my idol. In my mind, he is a genius. I listen to the Beatles, songs like “Imagine,” “All My Lovin’,” “Woman,” . . . I like “Woman” very much. Do you know why John Lennon was deported from America? They say it was because of drugs, but that was just an excuse. I believe he really was deported because he opposed the Vietnam War. I know Elvis Presley too, the king of rock. I like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Sting, from England. Not many Vietnamese listen to that. Most listen to Bony M. and Modern Talking.

  I can play the guitar, but just a little. I hear the American music, and they play very well. When I play it sounds so bad, so I stopped.

  I also have to read books because I don’t want people to look down on me. I read books by Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, and a book by Donald Trump, the billionaire. I would like to do business. I just like society. I don’t like nature [biology], I don’t like chemistry, I just like history and psychology, and poetry. I write poems in Vietnamese, I really like poetry.

  Pha

  “All my life people have despised me because I am black. Will it be that way in America too?”

  Pha sits on her bedframe, holding two of her three children on her lap. The older has a bad eye, the result of an extended illness. As we speak, her mood is one of melancholy and resignation.

  She had no schooling in Vietnam and can neither read nor write. Although she has completed ten weeks of English training in the PRPC, she never ventures to use it, deferring instead to the interpreter.

  When we finish the interview, Pha hesitantly directs a question to me through the interpreter. “All my life people have despised me because I am black,” she says. “Will it be that way in America too?”

  I WAS BORN in Long An twenty-nine years ago. I lived with my mother, my grandmother, and some cousins. I have no brothers or sisters. I never knew my father. I had a picture of him, but when I went to interview for the Amerasian program in Saigon, they took it. I cannot remember his name. It is a long name, and I forgot it. My mother never told me anything about him.

  My mother was a bar girl. That’s where she met my father, in a bar. She had some other pictures of him, with his address written on the back, but my mother died in 1980, and I don’t know what happened to those photos.

  I didn’t go to school, I was embarrassed of my skin. I started to go in Long Anh, but the students always insulted me, called me “black girl.” People always talked bad about me because I was black.

  There were many Amerasians in Long An, but I was not friends with any. You know, in Vietnam, Amerasians are not friends with each other. Black Amerasians are embarrassed of the way they look. They don’t like to play together.

  My family didn’t love me, they didn’t love my mother. They looked down us. Before ’75, it was not so bad, but after ’75, the family didn’t want to keep me at home. They were scared of the VC, they wanted to send me away where nobody could see me. Around 1977 the government told mothers of Amerasians to come to a meeting. Some they let go home, some they sent to jail. My mother was afraid at this time, and she was arguing with my grandmother, so we left for Ho Chi Minh City.

  Pha

  We stayed in Ho Chi Minh with no ID papers, and soon the government forced us to go to the New Economic Zone at Dong Ban, in Tay Ninh Provin
ce. There was nothing there but mountains, trees, and a few huts, no market at all. For that we had to go to the nearest town. My mother worked clearing land for rice fields. She cut down the trees and cut up the wood, and I would carry the wood out. We worked every day, Saturday, Sunday, we didn’t take holidays. And that has been my life even until now.

  Pha and her children

  I grew up strong and could work hard. I was able to earn a living, and the police knew this. Many times they came around, and I had to pay them off or else they made trouble for me.

  My mother died in 1980. We couldn’t pay for a doctor, there was nothing we could do. I thought then that she drank some bad water, but I believe that she just worked herself to death.

  Near Dong Ban there were some other Amerasians, but they all have gone to the United States now. Of course I wanted to go before, but I had to wait until I could get the money to bribe the officials. Some friends helped me by giving me the money, and I am very grateful to them.

  Life here in the PRPC is okay, better than Vietnam. I learned a little English, and we get enough food. In Vietnam I always worked hard, but sometimes we had no food. I was never happy there, even on a big holiday like New Year’s I was sad. I remember the hard times, like when I was pregnant and broke, and nobody would help me. It’s not as hard for the white Amerasians. If they have money, they can go to school. But black Amerasians, even if they have money, they can’t go to high school. The government doesn’t let them. I heard that, I don’t know why that is.

  In America I’d like to be a farmer, to plant rice. That’s what I did in Vietnam, and that’s all I know. I want to work, I must work. My husband is handicapped, one leg is no good. He was born like that. I worry that it will be hard for him to find a job.

  My family is going to California. Our sponsor is a friend from Tay Ninh who went to America two years ago. I want to live with Americans, not Vietnamese. I have American skin. In Vietnam everyone called me American because of my color. So I want to learn American language and customs. I don’t want to stay with Vietnamese anymore.

  I’m sorry, I can’t talk anymore . . . It makes me too sad.

  Mai Linh

  “They say, ‘You black, you can’t sit down with my children.’ So that’s why I didn’t go to school.”

  “When you goin’ back to the world [to America]?” Mai Linh wanted to know. I paused, startled. This twenty-five-year-old black Amerasian would continue to surprise me with snippets of GI slang. Taunted by her Vietnamese classmates and their parents on her first day of grammar school, she left and never went back. She cannot read or write in any language, but she learned to speak English, first from her mother, then from an ex-ARVN officer. Mai Linh loves to surprise with the unexpected colloquialism: “It blows my mind, they [Vietnamese] so stuck-up.”

  We met in October of 1991, shortly after Mai Linh’s arrival in the PRPC, and spoke at length in English without the aid of an interpreter. The conversation turned consistently to her plight as a black Amerasian woman in largely homogeneous Vietnam. At these points, with her emotions close to the surface, her eyes would take on a distracted look and her speech became jumbled, almost incoherent.

  Months later, in March, we met again. She had taken up jogging, and her frame, chunky in October, had turned lean and muscled. Although she appeared more relaxed, the averted gaze and mumbled speech would return when she recalled the painful past.

  Mai Linh is one of the numerous so called “gold cases” in the PRPC. The family who on Mai Linh’s documents appears as her own, actually is of no relation to her. She took their family name and claimed them as kin to enable them to immigrate to America with her. Generally, in exchange for this service, an Amerasian or her real family receives a quantity of gold, and the bogus family pays the requisite bribes to Vietnamese officials for the processing of documents. Mai Linh declined to go into the details of her own particular arrangement.

  She requested that she be referred to as Mai Linh in her narrative, as she was in Vietnam.

  YOU CAN CALL me Mai Linh. I’m from Cam Ranh. My card says I’m twenty-two, but I’m really twenty-five. When we made the paper to come here, we changed my age.

  When I was young, I lived with my mother, only the two of us. My mother never got married after my father left. I don’t have no brothers, don’t have no sisters. My mother, she liked me to go to study. She made the paper to let me go to school, but when I went there, the people, they were calling me “black, black.” I got very angry, so I leave. I come back home and tell my mama I didn’t go. She say, “Why not?” and she make me go back again.

  So I go back to school, and a man and woman over there, they slap me. They say, “You black, you can’t sit down with my children.” So that’s why I didn’t go to school [Mai Linh is sobbing heavily]. This is my country.

  My mother want me to go to school, and I trust my mother, but I never go to school no more. I just hide, I go out and play with my friend. She looks like you, white. About eleven o’clock I go home, and my mother says, “Mai Linh, you go to school?” I say, “Yes,” but she looks at my schoolbook, and she sees I didn’t go, and she slaps me. Then I tell her, “I never go to school no more.” She says, “Why?” I say, “You crazy. I go to school, some people slap me, they slap my friend. They say they don’t want no black, they don’t want no white American.” So I tear up that paper [school registration], and I never go to school no more.

  They be Vietnamese who slapped me. It blows my mind, they so stuck up. Another time, one Vietnamese girl, she talks bad to me and my friend Hue. She say, “I don’t like black girl, I don’t like white girl, because their father American, because their mother be bad, be a whore.” So I slap her. The police come, and they say, “How come you slap this girl?” And I say, “Because she talk bad to us.” So the police put us in jail for one week, and I can’t get home. I don’t like no Vietnamese, I hate them. I like to be friend with black Amerasian or white, like you. I don’t like no Vietnamese.

  My mother was from Saigon. She was part Indian. She not Vietnamese, her father was Indian. She had long, beautiful hair. She go to Cam Ranh to work in the E.M. [Enlisted Man’s] club. Her father say, “You don’t go, you stay in Saigon,” but she don’t listen.

  In Cam Ranh she lived together with one “soul brother,” black. That man be my father. They stay together ten months, then he say that he go to Pleiku. He tell my mother that two or three months he be back, but he don’t come back. My mother didn’t know what to do, because she get no letter. She wait for him, but he never come back, so my mother go to see a friend of his. That guy says, “Oh, your boyfriend go home to America already.” My mother asks, “How long?” He says, “About one month ago.”

  Now, I don’t know if my father he die or not, I don’t know where he go. His name was John. He was in the army, airborne, the Thirty-third. That’s all my mother told me.

  Before, my mother had pictures, had a paper that say she stay with him. [In Vietnam, it is common for unmarried couples to get an official “living together” document.] When the VC were coming, she heard that they would look for the white baby, the black baby, the American baby. They want to know who is the woman that stay with the Americans. So my mother be scared, she burn all pictures, all papers. Because VC say he hate Americans, he don’t like no girl who worked for the Americans, got baby American. He say if he sees black American or white American, he gonna kill them.

  My mother used to take in clothes and wash them. That’s how she made money. Sometimes I also did laundry for some people, Indian people, the same color as me, not Vietnamese people.

  I learned English so well because my mother has a book and she teach me in the nighttime. And she says, “I want you to go to school and learn to read. You very stupid, you can go talk English but you don’t know how to read.” I tell her, “I don’t need to read.” And she slaps me, and I throw the book, but I don’t go to school. I say, “If I want to read I have to go to school, but I don’t want to go
to school. Okay, I be very stupid. Everybody be smart, I be stupid, I don’t worry about it. I never go back to school no more.”

  My best friend was not black like me, she be white. Her name is My. She go to America already. One day she come to me and says, “Mai Linh, three more days I go the world.” I say, “I hope you have very good luck. When you go to America, you write your number so I can find you.”

  In Vietnam, I had only Amerasian friends. I don’t like no Vietnamese. My mother, she work E.M. club, she get married to a black man and born me, so I don’t feel that I am Vietnamese. I speak Vietnamese, because I born in Vietnam, but I don’t like no Vietnamese people.

  They make us feel bad, that’s why you see out of many American black and white children, tens and thousands, only have ten who go to study. The Vietnamese talk bad, they beat American children, they slap them. They say, “You a black girl, you a white man, how come you don’t go to America? How come you live here?” Make anybody feel bad, that’s why we don’t want to study.

  Many Vietnamese children, they treat me no good. They throw rocks at me, they pull my hair. So I say, “Uh-uh, I don’t go to school no more.” Not only me, but all black and white children, it’s the same. One day I see one white Amerasian, some Vietnamese they beat him up. The mother come and says, “How come you do like that?” They say, “We don’t want no Amerasian here.” So that’s why many Amerasians they don’t go to school, and that’s why they be stupid, because they don’t go to school.