Children of the Enemy Read online

  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 I tear up that paper [school registration], and I never go to school no more.

  Lessons emphasizing the “American imperialists” could be equally devastating. History classes decrying America’s role in the destruction of Vietnam were intensely embarrassing for the Amerasians because they emphasized their status as children of the enemy, often turning their classmates against them.

  Amerasians coped with the prejudice directed against them in different ways. Phuc is one whose features allowed him to pass for Vietnamese:

  Sometimes I would go somewhere, and in a social situation people might whisper to me, discreetly, “Are you French Vietnamese, or are you Amerasian?” I would say, “No I’m pure Vietnamese, it’s just the way I look,” and they would say, “Oh, sorry, forget about that, no problem.” I was shy about being Amerasian, and that was one way I could avoid the problem.

  Huynh, a black Amerasian girl, was also able to sidestep the onus of being pegged as the daughter of an American:

  Nobody made trouble for me, because they think I’m Indian. I knew I was Amerasian, but I didn’t say anything. It’s easier to be Indian than American.

  Some whose features didn’t allow for the option of concealing their racial identities sometimes avoided confrontation by simply keeping to themselves, staying at home. Others fought back physically against their tormentors, sometimes spiraling into lives of violence, alcohol abuse, crime, and incarceration. Mr. Loi recounts his Amerasian stepson Dung’s reaction to the taunts of the Vietnamese:

  They teased him with the My lai rhyme. [A nonsense rhyme used all over Vietnam to taunt Amerasians. It says that the Amerasians have twelve assholes, and if you plug one, gas and shit come out the others.] He would fight every time. He always had problems with the police, he fought with them.

  Abandoned and orphaned children and those raised by abusive or unloving stepparents were, not surprisingly, among those who most easily fell in with the underseam of Vietnamese life, the so-called bui doi, the “dust of life,” joining gangs, engaging in street crimes, getting busted, and doing time. This segment has found it most difficult to adapt to life in the Philippine Refugee Processing Center and in the United States as well. A substantial number have mutilated themselves grotesquely. Cigarette burns and razor slashes on the arms, legs, and occasionally the torso are common among both males and females. Also not unusual among men is the lopping off of a part of a digit, generally the pinky, occasionally the index finger.

  Two young men, who told me their stories over a period of several months, began the telling with a full complement of ten fingers each, but finished with nine and a half. During the months in which we spoke, one lopped off the upper joint of his little finger, the other took off half his index finger with a bolo, a Filipino machete. Another, Charlie, whose oral history appears in this book, slashed at his own hand in a drunken rage, but managed only to pare off the very tip of his pinky.

  On a blistering afternoon in the PRPC, I was present when My, a nineteen-year-old white Amerasian with a history of disruptive behavior in his English-as-a-Second-Language class, was told that he would be recycled. This entailed delaying his graduation date from class and, subsequently, his date of departure from the Philippines for the United States. Moments later My had disappeared. We found him shortly, squatting in a drainage ditch on the side of the road, his left forearm dripping with blood, a razor blade nestled between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

  I have heard a number of explanations of these self-destructive behaviors. One American counsellor/social worker who was raised in Vietnam and now works extensively with Amerasians calls them “the externalization of inner pain.” Several of my interpreters mentioned that those Amerasians who scarify and tattoo themselves are emulating the behavior of the Vietnamese underclass with which they associate. Raymond, a black Amerasian, interprets the behavior this way:

  This is very common in Vietnam, among the Amerasians and the Vietnamese. They prove that they are tough, they aren’t scared of anything. If it’s a girl, then that means she’s a wild girl, maybe a drug user or a prostitute. And sometimes if you don’t see many of scars, just one, or one cigarette burn, they might [do it] to prove their love to someone, or [their pain] over a misunderstanding.

  The Amerasians themselves, when asked why they have mutilated themselves, invariably answer, “depression.” This depression is sometimes suicidal, as Hung, a black Amerasian whose torso is horrifically scarred, explains:

  All my life people despised me, they called me a “bastard,” a “nigger.” I didn’t care about myself, I wanted to die. So I took a razor and slashed myself all over. People see my scars and they think, “Oh, he’s a tough guy, he’s a trouble maker.” They judge me. But it’s not like that, I just wanted to die.

  Despite widespread prejudice against them in general, a number report normal lives, not being targeted for discrimination as a result of their American connections. Den, a twenty-one-year-old black Amerasian from Phan Rang province:

  My grandparents advised me to go to America so I could help my relatives, but now I feel very sad. I miss my village, everyone there knew me and loved me. I feel I am Vietnamese, not American, and I wish I could go back.

  MOTHERS OF AMERASIANS IN VIETNAM

  During the war, the American bases in Vietnam were magnets for young women from the villages, who migrated to find jobs either inside the bases themselves or in the thriving economies outside the base perimeters that were fueled by the influx of American goods and dollars. Inside the bases, these women found employment as maids, laundresses, waitresses in the base clubs, and, for those with more schooling, secretaries and clerks in the offices and hospitals. Outside the base they worked in restaurants, markets, and shops. Some had food stalls or wagons where they sold fruit or drinks. And, of course, a number found employment as bar girls in the watering holes that sprung up wherever there was an American presence.

  American civilians were in Vietnam as well, in various support roles for the military, as embassy staff, and in any of the numerous international companies doing business in Vietnam. Vietnamese women also found employment in these sectors of the economy, often as clerical staff for American businesses. Whatever their work, the jobs of these Vietnamese women put them into contact with Americans who, in many cases, eventually fathered their children.

  Although a stereotype persists of Amerasians being conceived through casual encounters of American military men with Vietnamese bar girls, this was the case for only a small number of the women I spoke too. Most of the mothers of Amerasians report living with the fathers of their Amerasian children, sometimes for periods of several years. Eighty-one percent of mothers of Amerasians responding to a 1992 survey claimed to have lived with the American father of their children.4 These relationships are generally viewed in a positive light. Seventy-eight percent of the women surveyed “had positive regard for their American husband.”5

  For the vast majority, the end of the husband’s tour or stay in Vietnam meant the end of the relationship. Men often implored their Vietnamese sweethearts to accompany them back to the United States, but many de-murred, bound by family ties and obligations. Van, married to an air force officer, was one who put off leaving Vietnam until it was too late:

  We stay together until he goes to the U.S. in ’72. He wanted me to come with him, but I cannot go. I cannot leave my mother . . . . Before “Charlie”

  [the Viet Gong]

  came, my husband writes me, he tells me that the VC are coming . . . but I don’t think so, I think never the VC come. He tells me, sure. He says, “Please honey, take my baby, come to America. Charlie will come kill you.” I don’t believe him but in 1975 Charlie comes. My husband cannot write me anymore, and I feel very stupid. I feel crazy that I didn’t listen to him.

  For many others, however, husbands and lovers
slipped silently out of their lives. Hanh, who had five Amerasian children with two men, talks of her second American boyfriend:

  When he goes back to America, he don’t even tell me nothing. His friends say, “Oh, Gleason, he went back already.”

  In April of 1975, as the Communists marched southward, women with American ties frantically disposed of evidence that might link them to the United States. Photos, documents, U.S. military base ID’s, all went into bonfires. A minority severed their most tangible connection to the enemy, abandoning their own Amerasian children. Many children report having been left with baby-sitters and simply never picked up. The market also seems to have been a common venue for discarding infants, as My, a white Amerasian male from Da Nang, relates:

  I was abandoned at the Da Nang market when I was a newborn and picked up there by a lady who had a stall selling fabric. She says that I was about three days old when she found me.

  Rumors flew of the terrible vengeance to be exacted against Amer-asians and their mothers by the new government. Many mothers hid their kids. Others cut off or dyed their children’s hair and rubbed them with dirt to darken white skin in an attempt to disguise their parentage. There was, however, no bloodbath, nor any national policy of violence against Amer-asians and their families. Institutionalized discrimination certainly did exist, but appears to have been more of a local matter, varying from place to place. Some mothers claim that it was worse in the urban areas, others say that rural Amerasians and their families suffered more. Policies affecting them seem to have been largely dependent upon the attitudes of the local officials.

  The new government enacted a policy of clearing the cities of their excess population and using those evicted as laborers to develop uninhabited, undeveloped tracts of land, the so-called “New Economic Zones.” By revoking their household registrations, the documents that entitle Vietnamese to live, work, and study in a specific area, the government was able to force many families to relocate to these New Economic Zones. Families with Amerasians were often among those targeted. Some families hid; others flatly refused to go and sometimes got away with it. Many, however, were forced to comply. For city dwellers, unaccustomed to rural life, the spartan conditions and heavy labor of the New Economic Zones often proved unbearable.

  Chau, mother of an Amerasian son and stepmother to two other Amerasians, was forced out of Ho Chi Minh City to one of the New Economic Zones:

  They sent me and my kids to Tay Ninh. I stayed there two years and worked as a farmer. There was no school, no hospital, nothing. I go to work, and the kids just stay in the house all day. One day I think my kids will die, because they tell everybody to go to work, but they don’t give us no rice, no nothing.

  Like many, Chau eventually returned to the city, living on the periphery of society without the indispensable household registration.

  Our children don’t have food. My kids are all laying down, sick, hardly moving. I realize then that if I stay there we die, so I have to get out of that place. . . . So we left Tay Ninh. I walked, me and many people . . . from seven at night to four in the morning we walked. We had no ride, no bus. We walked for two days. We walked to Saigon, all the way.

  Confiscation of their property by the Communist government is mentioned bitterly by a number of mothers of Amerasians, some of whom, like Nam, wound up on the street when her house was seized:

  In 1975, the VC took my house, took everything. I had nothing. My children and I had no house for eight years. We slept in cars, anywhere.

  Many mothers report being harassed by local officials sometimes they dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and interrogated; sometimes imprisoned for varying lengths of time, and in extreme cases, sent to prison camps. Hoa, mother of a black Amerasian daughter and a white Amerasian son, is one of these:

  They [the police] talk about Ho Chi Minh. They say he is so good because he work very hard and he don’t need no money, he only want to help people. But I say, “I’m not sure,” I never saw him, so how can I say anything about him? So VC get very angry at me, and one night, at about two o’clock, when I was sleeping, he [the police] come to my house and take me to the monkey house. He don’t even tell me where they take me, and my family, they don’t know where I go....

  The VC tell us that we would only go to school for ten days and then go back home. . . . Yeah, ten days, that’s what they say, but they take me go for more than two years.

  A number of Amerasians and their mothers report having suffered no special persecution at the hands of the government, but fewer were spared social opprobrium. Mothers of Amerasians were lumped together in the national eye as whores, and their children as bastards. The ostracization of Amerasians and their mothers intensified after the war, when, along with being the wives and offspring of foreigners, they were the children and mistresses of the enemy. Hanh describes the situation in her home province of Kien Giang:

  Before 1975, nobody talk nothin’ to me . . . just behind my back, so I can’t hear. They don’t talk loud, but I know that they say that I have a GI boyfriend. Nineteen seventy-five, I go back there, and some people look me the same as a dog.

  GOLD CASES

  If after 1975, many Amerasians were consigned to the “dust of life,” with the passage of the Amerasian Homecoming Act in 1988 that dust turned to gold. Ironically, those who had reviled the Amerasians for their American blood were now eager to exploit them as tickets out of impoverished Vietnam to the United States. In socialist Vietnam, a market in Amerasians developed, with people at many levels of society profiting, though least of all, in general, Amerasians and their bona fide families.

  Obtaining a Vietnamese exit permit from the Vietnamese Ministry of the Interior is a prerequisite for the interview with the American Orderly Departure Program and eventual acceptance by the United States. The procedure has several steps. First, the applicant’s name must be on a valid household register. Then completed Orderly Departure Forms must be submitted to the local neighborhood leader, who is entrusted with forwarding them up the chain to national authorities, where they eventually reach the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry of the Interior has the responsibility of interviewing the applicants and, if all is in order, issuing the coveted exit permit. Sharks often hide in the shoals of Vietnamese bureaucracy, and gold is their preferred sustenance. If they are not amply fed, an applicant’s case can founder for years.

  Many Amerasians and their legitimate families lack the resources to make the necessary payoffs and must turn to outside sources or face hideous delays. There is no shortage of Vietnamese willing to pay the requisite bribes in exchange for passage out of Vietnam to America. They approach the Amerasian directly or through one of the many brokers that for a fee find Amerasians for prospective “family members.” The Amerasian then claims these newfound “relations” as legitimate family. Bribes are paid, documents forged, and the Amerasian and his or her bogus family are on their way to the ODP interview, and if lucky, eventually to America. In this way, thousands of Vietnamese who would not otherwise have been eligible have entered the United States in the years since the passage of the Amerasian Homecoming Act.

  All too often in this scheme, the Amerasian’s real family must be left behind, and many Amerasians hope to sponsor their bona fide relations once they reach the United States.

  These “gold cases” rarely end happily for the Amerasian. Once in the Philippine Refugee Processing Center, relations between the Amerasians and their families of convenience generally deteriorate rapidly. Families that were warm and caring in Vietnam when their own interests were at stake often turn hostile and abusive now that the Amerasians have successfully served their purposes. The Amerasians, who have often left their real families behind, once again find themselves ostracized. Phuong, a twenty-four-year-old Amerasian woman, says this about her “family”:

  When we were in Vietnam, being interviewed, they were very nice to me, sure. But now that we are here, they don’t need me anymore. They treat me
like dirt. They even tell me, “We’re on our way to America already, we don’t need you anymore.” They insult me, berate me, the daughters even have attacked me. They loved the Amerasian when they needed to leave Vietnam, but now they despise me.

  In other cases, bogus families have remained cordial, even warm, through their stay in the PRPC, often out of fear that discovery of the details of their fake relationship with the Amerasian might affect their resettlement. Once they are resettled in America, however, any such restraint vanishes. Loc, a twenty-three year old who had grown close to his family of convenience in the PRPC, wrote his friend the details of his resettlement:

  As soon as we got to California, they turned on me and threw me out. I feel like I am in hell.

  Although the high incidence of fraud in the Amerasian program has been common knowledge for years, little was done about it. Once a family reached the PRPC, the policy was, in most cases, to push them through to the United States, regardless of the genuineness of their relationship to the Amerasian. Over the past year however, this policy has changed radically. The Joint Voluntary Agency, the agency responsible for facilitating resettlement from the PRPC, has begun to move against fraudulent families, putting many on hold, delaying or terminating their resettlement in America. What will eventually happen to them is still unclear, as at the moment, Vietnam seems disinclined to take them back.

  It must be pointed out that Vietnamese resorting to fraud to get out of Vietnam are not necessarily base or evil. Living in a country with a repressive political system and one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world, many are desperate to leave at any cost, as witnessed by the mass exodus of boat people in the face of well-publicized risks. Many Amer-asians and their families have, not surprisingly, used the market that has grown up around them to their own advantage. Some have received payment in gold for taking bogus relations to the United States. Truong, a black Amerasian in his early twenties, has a picture of his family sitting in front of a newly built cement house. He explains how his impoverished family was able to afford it: