Children of the Enemy Read online

  I couldn’t speak a word of English, nothing at all. They put me into this school where I was the only Vietnamese. They put me in a class to try to teach me English, but I had no idea what they are talking about. I stayed in seventh grade for just two months, because we got to the States in April, and we get out of school in June. So the following year they just pushed me up to eighth grade.

  One day this man saw me playing in the street. He was the Boy Scout master, and he came over to ask me if I wanted to join the Boy Scouts. I couldn’t speak any English at the time, so he went upstairs and talked to my mom and said he’s interested in putting me into the Boy Scouts. She said, ‘Well, he don’t know any English.” So he came over my house every day and sat there teaching me one thing at a time. He would point at something and say, “What’s this called?” and that’s how I started learning English. He is like a father to me because he taught me everything I know—English, math, reading, writing, everything. Every time I had problems in school, he would be there till midnight, one in the morning, to help me. And I was able to go all the way through high school.

  About a year or so after we got to the States, my mom made contact with the foster parents of my brother and sister, and they were nice enough to bring them over to Rochester to meet us. My brother’s foster family was in Washington, my sister’s was in Virginia. The man who taught me English, I call him my “uncle,” he telephoned them and arranged for us to meet them on the road.

  They both came on the same day, in the same car. We parked on the interstate and waited for them. We sat there for a while, and then this big van pulled up, and the two of them walked out. I looked at them, and I said, “That’s my sister, that’s my brother,” and they looked at me and did the same thing. I mean, we knew instantly, as soon as they walked out of the van. My mom cried all day long, everybody cried.

  We went to our house, but first we went to a park where we could play around. Now when I think about it, it was kind of foolish. We didn’t even sit around and talk to each other, sayin’ “How you doing?” We just held each other and walked around the park, goin’ on all the rides, just the three of us. My mom and their stepparents are the only ones who really talked.

  That’s the only time I saw my sister. My brother, he calls my mom all the time. He’s in the marines now, but when he was going to college he used to drive up and visit us. My sister, she don’t contact my mom that much. Once in a while she calls, and that’s it.

  I was dating this girl, almost since the time we came to the States. She was a full-blooded Vietnamese, she came over with her brother and sister. She was the youngest in the family, and they keep tellin’ her not to see me because I’m Amerasian. They put me down, they put my mom down. They say that we are nothing, that she deserves better.

  After I graduated high school, we went to the same college, Rochester Institute of Technology. I was studying micro-electronic engineering, and she was studying electrical engineering. There was too much fighting going on between her and her family about me. They were saying that my family is low, that my mom been with an American guy and stuff like that. They assume that if a woman has an American child she must have been working in the bar. The fact is that my mom lived with my dad for three or four years and had three kids with him, but they don’t want to look at that. They just say that she has an American, a mixed-blood boy, and that’s all they need to know. So my girlfriend was always fighting with her family, and we keep fighting between ourselves all the time. There was just no way to take the pressure, and finally, we broke up and I left school.

  I told my mother that I quit school, and she yelled at me a bit, but I told her that I would go back again, this time to a different school. I made an application to go to the University of Buffalo, and they accepted me. I got a job, just waiting for the fall to start school. One day I was looking through a pile of junk mail, and I saw this letter. It said, “If you want to learn about the military, just check here.” I was kind of bored at the time, so I said, “Well, let me learn a little about the air force,” and I checked it and sent it in. About a week later, a recruiter called and told me to come out to the office to talk to him, and that’s when I got lured into enlisting. They persuaded me, and I kept on going along with them until the day I raised my hand and was sworn in, and that’s when I realized, “Man, I’m in the military.” I called my mom from Buffalo, and said, “Mom, I’m in the military.” She almost passed out, she didn’t know anything about it. At the time I was still waiting for school, that was May, and school was supposed to start in September.

  Julie also lived in Rochester, with her brother and sisters and her parents. Her brothers and sisters are Amerasian too, and her older brother, he was my best friend. He used to come over all the time. I met them when they first came to America. I was in school, and I already knew a lot of English, so I became a translator. Every time there was a new Vietnamese kid coming to the school, I was picked to help them out, to go to their house and translate, to bring them to classes, stuff like that. So I knew Julie for five or six years, and I always thought of her as my little sister. I never thought that she would be my wife. But after I broke up with my other girl friend, our families started talking, and they fixed us up together. Pretty soon we fell in love and got married. And she came out here to be with me.

  I regret now that I don’t have a chance to go back to school, because now I have a wife and kid, but if I was not in the military there would be no way for me to support them. So, I’m kind of sad that I’m not in school, but I’m kind of happy that I’m in the military, because now I can take care of them.

  In the air force, I work in Supply, I do paperwork there. After you join the military, you put down your preference for where you want to go. They have all kinds of bases, overseas and Stateside. I wanted to go overseas, and I put down Japan as my first choice. I been here three years, and I love it. I get along with everybody, including the Japanese. People are so tight here, because we work in a very close environment. Everybody knows each other, everyone helps each other. That’s why I like staying overseas.

  Tung Joe and Julie Nguyen

  I’m Amerasian, you know, but I’m no different then anybody. For me, living as an American is more like a family then living in Vietnam. I consider Vietnamese as my family, as my people too, but they don’t think of me the same way. They always think of me as a stranger, uneducated, with an uneducated mother . . . all stereotypes. So I’m kinda glad that I went to the States, to be who I am today, because if I didn’t go to the States, I don’t know what I would be right now.

  Julie Nguyen, now twenty-three, came to America in 1985, passing through the Philippine Refugee Processing Center. She arrived in America speaking no English, and unlike Joe, learned very little of the language in her five years there. She explains, “I was sixteen when I came over, and they put me in ninth grade. There was an ESL program, but I didn’t learn. The teacher would be trying to teach us English, but each group, Lao, Cambodian, and Vietnamese would stay in their own circle, talking their own language, so I was always talking in Vietnamese.” Ironically, in Japan, where she has lived for three years, she has found more opportunity to use English and has progressed to where she can easily hold a conversation in her new language. As we speak, when she can’t find a word, Joe fills in for her.

  Julie: My real mother asked my stepdad if she could come to my house and visit me. I was about nine, we lived in Ho Chi Minh City. I didn’t know who she was. She sat down and cut my nails, and she cry a lot. And I ask her why she cry, and she say, “It’s nothing, I just remember something sad.” I say, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to cry,” but she just can’t stop. She visited for about an hour, then she was gone.

  One day she come to my school and she want to talk to me. She says, “I want to visit you, I want to hug you, that’s all.” Another day, my family, they hit me, they yell at me a lot and I tell the lady, “I want to go with you. You don’t hit me, you don’t yell at me.” So she
took me with her for one week. It was like heaven, nothing happened [nobody beat me]. Then one day my [step]mom and my [step]dad come over, a lot of people come and take me away. I cry, “I don’t want to go home, I don’t want to go home. I want to stay with you.” My [step]dad is hitting her and beating her, and she runs to me and says, “One day when you are grown up I find you,” and she runs away. My [step]dad chased her, but he didn’t get her. They take me home, and my stepmom carries me like Joe carries our daughter [Joe is holding Kimberly over his shoulder]. She told the people around, “It was her daughter, but she gave her to me, and now she came and took her away again, she didn’t tell me nothing.” I remember, I say to myself, “Huh. I am adopted. I am not her daughter.” I cry a lot, and I know that other woman is really my mother.

  A lot of times she comes to visit me, and she gives me money, and she wants me to go with her, but I can’t go with her, because I am afraid that my [step]dad could find me anywhere. She comes to visit me when I am older and work in my [step]dad’s beauty shop. She would come see me, but she would hide, so my [step]dad couldn’t see her.

  My real mother didn’t have any other children, just me. She says that she miss me, she want me to come with her. One day, when I was fifteen, she comes with her friend, and she asks me to go with her. She says, “Now you grown up, you know everything [that I am your real mother], you come with me.”

  I say, “No, I can’t go with you [Julie is in tears]. My stepparents, they feed me, they raise me, and now that I grown up I run away? I can’t do that.” I say, “Maybe one year, we go to America. I write you, I send you money, please, just give me your address.” But she says, “I live anywhere, not one place. I move from one place to the next, I have no address.” So when I went to America, we lost contact.

  Joe: When Julie said that she was going to the States, her mom didn’t believe her. She said that there is no way for you to go there. So Julie left before they saw each other again, and she never got a place to write her mom. Now there is no way for her to locate her mother.

  Julie: I have trouble with my [step] dad two years ago. He says my mom sold me, not give me for adoption . . . sold me . . . [Julie becomes extremely emotional while recalling this.]

  Joe: Yeah, he wrote us a letter. When I joined the service, and I wanted to marry her, my family and hers got together and sat there and planned the wedding. Her [step]mother had died four years before, and her stepdad met another lady, who also had an Amerasian daughter. So they had four Amerasians living in the house, and two of them got married before us, in that same year. Somehow it came up that we couldn’t get married because he don’t want three of them to get married in the same year. He wanted us to wait until the following year. I didn’t agree with that, and neither did my mom. I had to leave for Japan with the military, and there was no way I could come back from there to get married with her.

  So they were fighting and arguing, my family and her family. My mom wants us to get married now, and they say wait until next year. Her [step]dad lost control. He took her upstairs and started beating on her. Her brother and I had left to go to the movies. When we left everything was going well, so we thought everything was fine. Meanwhile, back at home, her [step]father is beating her with his fists, and all the guests are downstairs. My mom ran upstairs and tried to break it up and told Julie to come home with her. Her stepdad told her that she had a choice, either to go with me or break up with me and stay home with them. That’s when she told her stepdad, “I’m sorry, but I choose him.” And he kicked her out of the house. He threw all of her stuff outside, and her sister took her to a friend’s house.

  She called me at home telling me that her [step]dad kicked her out, and I picked her up and brought her to my house, and we got married that same week. I left for Japan, and she stayed with my mom for seven weeks before joining me. When she was in my mom’s house, her stepdad wrote her a six-page letter explaining her life story, everything. He said that when she was a newborn, they went to the hospital and bought her. Her mom wanted money. He even gave the price that he bought her for. That’s how she found out that her real mom sold her and didn’t give her away, but we don’t know if that is true or not. We think that her [step] dad was just trying to hurt her emotionally, trying to tell her that he owns her, and that he felt betrayed that she left home and went with me. We think it was all written intentionally to hurt her.

  Julie: My real mom, she didn’t say “bought,” she said, “I didn’t have the money to feed you, to take care of you. That’s why I give you away.” And I got mad, I say, “Why, why you give me away? Even if you don’t have the money, why you give me away?” She said, “I thought this family be good for you. They have a lot of money, they can feed you, that’s why I gave you to them. I didn’t know that they would abuse you.”

  In Vietnam, I went to school up to the fourth grade. I didn’t have any close friends. Amerasians don’t have that. In my neighborhood, people see me and laugh, they do mean things to me. They throw stones at me, they say such bad things. They call me “American,” so I know I’m half-Ameri-can, but I don’t know who my father is. My sister and brother are Amer-asian too. My stepmother said she married American and that we are her children, but from different fathers, and that’s why me and my sister and my brother are not the same looking. But now we know that’s not true.

  My sister, she really was the child of my [step] dad’s sister. Because my stepdad’s sister in Vietnam wrote him in America and said, “Why you don’t give my daughter back so I can go to America?” So now she knows that she is adopted, but before she didn’t know.

  My stepparents love my brother a lot. Like when they give us a sweet, they give my brother a whole cookie, and me and my sister a quarter, or something like that.

  Joe: Her sister and her kind of share the same circumstances. The way she was telling me, when they have food they just give it to the brother, and whatever is left over, that he don’t want, they share between the two of them. Everything is the same way. He comes first, and they get the leftovers. Everything is for him, and the girls have to do everything the family wants—cooking, cleaning, go and make money—but the boy can go and do anything he wants. So, they think that he is the real son of the mother, because of the way she treats him.

  Julie: If I did something just a little bad or broke something, they yell for one or two days and hit me.

  Joe: She has all kinds of scars, on the head, on the hands, from being beaten. They physically abused the two of them, her and her sister, since they were little kids, and up to the day we were married, they were still abusing her. When we were married, she was still in high school. I took her into school and went to thank one of her teachers for teaching her English. That was the first time he met me, and he said, “Take care of her, because I know her family hit her, abused her. She comes to school with black eyes and bruises, everything.” She was fifteen or sixteen years old, going to school with bruises on her arm, on her face, and everywhere else. And when the teacher asked where she got them, she would say, “Oh, I fell, oh, I hurt myself.” But actually he knew that the parents were abusing her, but he could not prove it.

  She didn’t want to tell me this because she is so afraid. She thinks if she tells somebody she will probably be beaten more, and there is more danger for her than there is help, so she keeps her mouth shut. Her [step/dad was fistfighting her, beating her with elbows, fists, and kicking her. Even her older brother hit her.

  But it was that letter her stepdad wrote, that’s what really hurt her. She thought that they adopted her because they loved her, and then when they told her that they bought her . . . Well, she thought of them as parents, of him as a dad. That they would say something like that to make her feel bad, well that hurt her. That’s what hurt her the most.

  Julie: He cut my hair, he slapped my face. I hate them, but I still love them. I don’t know why, I still think of them.

  Manivong

  “How could I know what the government�
�s policy towards Amerasians would be in the future? This is why I decided to go to America.”

  Manivong is his Khmer name, and he is from the Mekong delta area of Vietnam. This region was once part of Cambodia, and is home to a large population of ethnic Cambodians known as Khmer Krom. Manivong’s mother belonged to this ethnic group; his father was an American soldier from Milwaukee, who gave him the name Robert. Like many Khmer Krom, Manivong has a Vietnamese name as well, Tran Xuan Thanh.

  Manivong spent eight years as a Buddhist monk, leaving the order in 1989 to marry. He is literate in the Sanskrit-based Khmer script, but not in Vietnamese or English, though he speaks Vietnamese fluently. We converse through an interpreter.

  He shows me some baby photos. In one, he is with his baby-sitter, seated in a rattan stroller. Another shot is of him as a toddler, posing near a living room bar. There are a number of snapshots of Manivong in the temple, wearing the flowing orange robes of his order.

  His most prized photo is a five-by-seven of his father, blonde, crewcut, peering through a pair of horn rimmed glasses. The resemblance he bears to his son is unmistakable; Manivong’s father was about the same age at the time the photo was taken as his son is now. Superimposed over the heart area is a small image of Manivong’s late mother. On the flip side is written a Milwaukee address, and the inscription: