Children of the Enemy Read online

  Mai was returning from her last day of ESL class. There had been a party, and Mai and her companions, all women in their mid-forties, were resplendent in their ao dai, the flowing pantsuits which are the traditional dress of Vietnamese women. She invited me into her billet and said a few words to a neighbor’s boy in rapid fire Vietnamese. The boy disappeared and returned moments later with an armful of Cokes.

  Thuy, Mai’s twenty-one-year-old Amerasian daughter, sat along with her husband and small daughter on the raised platform of wooden slats which serves as a bed in the PRPC billets. Freckle-faced and willowy with long flowing brown hair, Thuy more resembles a midwestern farm girl than a Vietnamese refugee. Extremely shy, with very little knowledge of English, she deferred to her mother whenever a question was directed to her.

  Mai lit a cigarette and began to talk about her life. As she spoke, the window filled up with children’s faces. Occasionally squeals of “My, My” [American] could be heard. The word was out that an American was around, and the neighborhood kids came to see what was up.

  Mai was to continue her story over four meetings. Her English was fine, though a bit rusty after years of disuse. After our second meeting, she asked that I bring an interpreter along the next time we met. I did so, but whenever there was a difficulty in understanding, it was Mai, and not the interpreter, who came up with the correct translation.

  Mai spoke with composure and wit. Even when describing subjects as disturbing as her imprisonment by the North Vietnamese government or her daughter’s misery at the taunts of her classmates, she retained her aplomb. Only when speaking of her mother’s death of a heart condition which Mai believes was exacerbated by government harassment, did she lapse into tears and bitterness.

  Mai: I am from Bao Vinh village, two kilometers from Hue. My father was a soldier; and I am the oldest of my five brothers and sisters, so I can only go to school two years. I have to stay home to help take care of my young brothers and sisters, and I help my family plant rice and bananas.

  When I was nineteen, I went to work at Phu Bai base in Hue. It’s an American and Vietnamese base together. I was a waitress at the NCO club. My boss at the club, his name Hal, we fall in love. He be about forty, I am only nineteen. He went back to America, stay six months. Then he come back Vietnam again, as a civilian. He work aero-sci, fixing airplanes, and we go all over—Hue, Nha Trang, Saigon, Bien Hoa—but our base is Da Nang. That’s where he was stationed.

  One time we go to Da Nang from Hue. That be Mau Thanh [the year of the monkey, often used synonymously with the 1968 Communist Tet offensive]. There was bad fighting in Hue. We went back four months later. It was all rubble. Many died, the VC bury many alive. There were many famous buildings in Hue, the Khai Dinh temple, King Minh Mang temple, King Thu Duc temple, Linh Mu pagoda. So many were destroyed in the fighting. Bao Vinh was destroyed, my parents’ house in pieces, several of my friends were killed. My husband gave my family some money, and they built a new house there.

  Me and my husband had a good life, a nice house, two maids. My parents didn’t want me to marry an American, but I got pregnant, so what could they do? They must accept it, but they think it’s not good for a VN woman to marry an American man. People think that such marriages are made for money and not for love, and they look down on the woman.

  Hal left May 30, 1974, for a long stay to work in the United States. He was supposed to return July 1975. He wrote me every week. In ’75 he realized that the VC would win the war, and he sent tickets for me and my daughter to go to the United States. We had tickets to leave from Da Nang on March 27, but it was too late. We went to the airport and it was closed, nobody was working. [Da Nang fell to the North Vietnamese three days later on March 30]. So we took a boat to Saigon.

  In Saigon, I stayed with a friend on Nguyen Minh Trieu Street. I tried to go to the airport a few times, but it was crazy, packed. Everybody want to get out Vietnam. I call the Vietnamese army. I tell them that I am married to an American, and I have to get out; but they don’t care about that. They have their own problems. I call my husband’s Saigon office, in the airport. Nobody answers the phones. We were trapped. All women with Amerasian kids were scared, they thought the VC would kill us and our babies.

  So I destroy my marriage paper, I be afraid the VC kill me if they see I am married to an American. The VC come, I stay in a friend’s house, hiding, worrying. After about a month, I took a bus back to Da Nang with my daughter. I cut her hair, so no one would know that she was American.

  My idea was I go to Da Nang, not so many people know me. They don’t know that I have an Amerasian, it be easier for me and my daughter. Hue is a small town. If I go back there, everybody know that I have an American baby. The VC, maybe they kill us.

  In Da Nang I start to sell medicine in the market, but I have many problems. The police, they call me in, and I be afraid to lie. I think they know already about me, and maybe they kill me if I don’t say the truth. So I tell them that I had an American husband, even that I had the tickets to go to America. They hate me for that and because I have an American daughter. Many times they come to my house in the middle of the night. There would be that banging on the door, and they take me down to the office and question me, harass me. “You’re no good. If you were any good you wouldn’t have an American baby. We’re going to send you to the mountain” [New Economic Zone], things like that. I cried, what could I do? Sometime they keep me for a few days. Then one time they tell me, “Next time we will send you to the mountain.” So when I go back to the market, I was crying. I don’t know what I will do. Since I be a little girl, I never lived in the country or work as a farmer. How can I go live on the mountain? So one man he work in the market with me, he say he will help me. He paid the bribes to the police to keep me out of the NEZ. He had to pay many times but still the police never gave me papers [to live legally in Da Nang].

  Soon after that, we get married, but we don’t make paper . . . you know. We just live like husband and wife. I am his second wife, he has one more wife besides me. She live a few kilometers from my house. We were very friendly, we don’t be jealous. We often ate together, our children play together. I have two children with him, and his other wife have three. My husband, he still in Vietnam. He stay with his first wife.

  So I have a husband, and I still work buying and selling medicines. I go up to Hanoi by train four times a month and buy medicines to bring down and sell in Da Nang. The trip from Da Nang to Hanoi takes about twenty-five hours. It is illegal to buy and sell medicine, but many people do it. I had some contacts in Hanoi, they had a son studying in the Soviet Union. He sent them medicine from there, and they would sell the medicines for profit. These were North Vietnamese Communists, but they were capitalist Communists. They were VC, but still they hate the VC, and several of them have left Vietnam by boat.

  Now Hanoi is rich, at least the upper and middle classes, but before 1975 it was a poor town, they had nothing. When they took Saigon, they took all the goods, refrigerators, televisions, everything, and sent it north to Hanoi. So now, everybody has a TV, a radio, a refrigerator, but it all was stolen from Saigon. The people up there, they are liars. They cheat when you do business with them, when you buy and sell. There are some good people, like the people I get the medicine from, but many are deceitful. They are very different from southerners, from the people from Saigon.

  One night I was on the Thong Nhat [Unification Train] in Hanoi, on my way to back to Da Nang with a bag full of medicine to sell, when the Economic Police boarded the train and came right for me. They didn’t even look at anyone else, so to this day I believe that they must have been tipped off, maybe by the Da Nang police. They took all my medicine, and they took me to Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi. It’s where they kept the captured American pilots during the war. [It was known to Americans as the “Hanoi Hilton.”] It’s a huge building, it was built by the French.

  When I was in Hoa Lo, the police went to my house in Da Nang and cleaned it out. They took e
verything I had, my TV, my cassette player, all my medicine, and all my money. They found two hundred dollars that my husband had hidden in a cabinet. We had changed some gold for these dollars in the market, but the VC accused me of getting that money from the father of my Amerasian daughter. This was not true, but that’s what they said. My husband was also arrested. A woman in jail heard that he was being brought to Hoa Lo prison and she told me, but I was not able to see him or speak to him. He was released after three or four months.

  In Hoa Lo we had to wake up at five, and at about seven we would have to go outside for attendance. They would call our numbers. Then they would send us back inside, and we just stay in the cell. At about eleven they fed us . . . rice and sauce for six months, troi of [my God], terrible! Then we sleep, and they give us some food at four o’clock, then nothing to eat until eleven next day. We didn’t work, just stay in the cell.

  The first month I was there, another prisoner take my food every day. She don’t let me eat, so for one month I don’t eat anything. I don’t fight with her, I give my food.

  In the cell there were a hundred and thirty-six prisoners. After a while, they made me the prison leader. The other prisoners voted me that. I think it’s because they thought I would be there for a long time. I had to check the number of prisoners, line them up for food and bath, things like that. Prisoners were in for different reasons. Some were taxi girls [prostitutes], some bought and sold on the black market like me, some were even government workers who got caught taking bribes.

  Every night they wake me up and take me to interrogation. I never sleep, I never eat, I become very thin. They ask, “Where you buy medicine?” I say, “I buy at the market” because I don’t want to get my friends in trouble. The VC don’t believe me, they beat me. A young woman guard, about the same age as my daughter now, she beat me, hit me many times. They ask, “Where did you get the dollars?” I tell them that I buy in the market, and that’s true. But they think my American husband send them to me, and they hit me for that.

  On December 26 they sent me to trial, and I was convicted of being a capitalist, of hoarding goods. I had already spent five months in jail, so they let me go with two years probation and a big fine. I was broke. They kept all my medicine, all my money. They took everything in my house.

  So what did I do? I went back to Da Nang and started buying and selling medicine again. This was how I made my money, so that’s what I did. I still went to Hanoi and bought medicine and sold it in Da Nang, just like before.

  Thuy: I went to school for five years. That’s where I found out that I wasn’t Vietnamese, that I was Amerasian. The other students let me know. I was the only Amerasian in that school, and they always put me down, make fun of me. They tell me that the Amerasian has twelve assholes . . . [part of a derogatory rhyme used to taunt Amerasians]. Students who made friends with me were threatened by other kids. They said they would beat them up if they made friends with “the American.” People didn’t like me, and finally I didn’t want to go to school anymore.

  Even when I quit school and went to help my mother at the market, people would insult me. Vietnamese just don’t like Amerasians. So many times I wished that I was Vietnamese, so people would like me.

  Mai: My daughter married in 1988. Her husband was our neighbor in Da Nang. His mother and father worked with Americans before, so there was no problem, they didn’t care that my daughter was Amerasian. That same year we applied to go to the United States. We had to pay a bribe to the officials, but not too much. The American from ODP who interviewed us, his name was Bob. He could speak Vietnamese very well. He asked us why we wanted to go to America. Thuy said she wanted to go to America to find her father. We have no sponsor in America, we go free case.

  Thuy: I would like to find my father in America, but I don’t know how. We have no sponsor in America. I don’t know where we will go, who we will meet.

  Mai: After the fall of Saigon in ’75, I got a letter from Hal. My father didn’t accept it, he was afraid the VC would do something to us because we got a letter from America, so he said that it wasn’t for us and had it returned. That was the last I ever heard from Hal.

  I can say my husband’s name, but I can’t write it, how will I be able to find him. His name is Hal Dellin. I will try to talk to people who worked for the embassy or the bank in Da Nang, who might remember me or my husband. Maybe they can help me.

  Thuy: My biggest worry is learning English and finding a job. I would like to do nails. That’s what I did in Vietnam before I came here. My husband Minh was a welder. He hopes he can find a job doing that in the United States.

  Mai: I will do any job in America, wash dishes, anything. There was no future in VN. The VC didn’t give me papers, no ID card, so it’s very hard to stay there.

  I tried to escape from Vietnam twice. The first time me and my daughter got on a boat in Quy Nhon, but the police caught us and took us to jail, fifteen people in all. I think someone probably informed on us. . . . You know many people will inform to the police for money. I lost one bar of gold that time, and we had to stay in a tiny crowded cell with many people. We took off our clothes it was so hot. We only had enough water to take a bath twice a week. After two months they sent us to Da Nang, and my husband paid off the police and they let us go.

  I tried to escape again in 1990. We had already applied to go to America through ODP, but under the old rule the wife can only take either the husband or the mother, not both. [That rule has since been changed, and both spouse and mother are eligible to go.] My daughter cannot take me and her husband, so I try to escape. This time I went to Hanoi, to the north, to try to escape through China to Hong Kong. I did business with Chinese, and they told me that they could get me to Hong Kong. I went to Lang Son, all the way in the north. I was supposed to be there at nine P.M., but there were many checkpoints, and I got there late. No one was there, they had left without me. I was supposed to pay the guard at the meeting place, so at least this time I didn’t lose any gold.

  The VC, they killed my mother, you know. In April 1975, they took Hue. They found out that I had an American baby, an American husband. I was not even in Hue, but they went to my mother’s house. They started to bother her, “Where is your daughter? Why she has an American husband?” My mother got very scared and nervous, she had a bad heart and couldn’t take it. Finally she had a heart attack and died . . . [Bitterly, in tears] I very hate the VC.

  Nguyen Thi Nguyen Tuyen and Nguyen Ngoc Minh

  “I hope you, sir, can help rescue my beloved orphans.”

  Outgoing and exuberant, Nguyen Ngoc Minh does not want to use an interpreter to tell her story. “I can speak for myself,” the nineteen-year-old Amerasian says, and she does. Minh, an orphan, was raised by Buddhist nuns, and five of the eight people who accompanied her to the Philippine Refugee Processing Center are women of the cloth.

  As we enter her billet, one of the nuns, a young lady in grey habit, a sock hat pulled over her shaved head, looks up from her English text and greets us warmly in Vietnamese. In about a half hour, the head nun, Minh’s “auntie,” arrives.

  Nguyen Thi Nguyen Tuyen, sixty-five years old, is in orange habit, her hair close cropped, her smile perpetual. We begin to speak through an interpreter, and she talks predominately of the orphans she left behind in Vietnam, those who were not approved for resettlement in the United States. There is a strange dynamic between Minh and her “auntie. Although Minh exhibits deference and respect to her auntie Tuyen, who adopted and raised her, Minh makes funny faces in the background when Tuyen speaks. Tuyen decides that it will be easier for her to write her story in Vietnamese than to tell it. It will be ready the next day, she assures me. Before I leave, she shows me a packet of photos taken in her orphanage in Vietnam. I ask if I can borrow them to have them duplicated. She is hesitant to let me do so, and the matter is dropped.

  After I’ve walked a hundred meters or so from the billet, I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around. Minh is ther
e, an impish smile across her face as she hands me the packet of photos.

  Nguyen Thi Nguyen Tuyen: I was born in the countryside of Long An province, near Saigon, in 1928. My father was a woodcutter, my mother a housewife. When I was still a girl, I was touched by the suffering of my country, the fires and death of war, and I decided to lead the religious life. I had no desire for the loving that goes on between a man and a woman, the marriage, the beautiful clothes. I have never coveted gold. At sixteen I became a vegetarian, and at twenty-five I shaved my head and entered the pagoda.

  Orphans at the temple in Vietnam in the mid-seventies; Nguyen Ngoc Minh is in the front center, next to the statue (courtesy Nguyen Thi Nguyen Tuyen).

  A few years later, I went Pleiku in Central Vietnam and worked in the Co Nhi Vien Nhut Chi Mai orphanage. We had forty-six orphans, eight of them Amerasian. We took care of many children of South Vietnamese soldiers who had been killed. I often went to the 71st hospital in Pleiku to look for orphans, and that’s where I found Minh, on New Year’s Day in 1975. She was very sick and small. Her mother gave money to some people to take Minh to the hospital. She was afraid to keep her, afraid of the VC.

  I also founded the Bao De school for children, hoping to earn a little money with which to support the orphans. I tried to help children whose parents were dead or who had been abandoned or separated from their parents in the turmoil of war. I love these children very much.

  The war affected me so much. I will tell you a story: A colonel in the South Vietnamese Army, he was eating dinner with his family when a rocket hit his house, killing him and his six children, scattering pieces of their bodies everywhere. Only his wife, who had been in another room when the rocket hit, survived. She was pregnant and had been badly wounded. The doctor told her that he could save the baby, but in doing so she would not live. She agreed, and the baby was born. The doctor brought him to me, and showed me how to care for him, and I raised him. This child’s name is Quoc Thoi. He is a beautiful curly haired boy, but he was taken away by the Communists and now lives abandoned in Vietnam.