Children of the Enemy

by Steven DeBonis

  My Vietnamese son, he also want to go to America, but he is thirty years old. That’s too old [the non–Amerasian children of applicants must be under twenty-one to accompany them]. I don’t let him lie about his age because of all the problems I had with my birth certificate. I was afraid to do that. But many people, they buy Amerasians in Vietnam, so they can leave to go to America with them. They not the real mother or husband. They just buy them and make the paper to leave. I think here in the PRPC, eight out of ten families bought their Amerasians. They not really the same family.

  I hope in the future my children will have a better life in America than in Vietnam. I don’t want to live in a Vietnamese neighborhood in America. The Vietnamese people, I hear, they see the new Vietnamese people come, they look down on them. I don’t like to stay together with Vietnamese people.

  The first person you meet walking into Sophie’s billet is her two-year-old daughter Linda. She grabs you by the knees and keeps you in limbo until her mother or grandmother lets out with a cease and desist order in Vietnamese. One afternoon in May, I noticed that Linda’s belly was terribly distended. Worms and other intestinal parasites are among the most common ailments of the refugees, as well as the local Filipinos, but neither the PRPC hospital nor the tiny farmacias in the nearby village of Morong carried any remedies.

  I called to a friend in Manila to send up a bottle of Quantrel, the standard treatment. After receiving a dose, Linda passed a quantity of worms, but her stomach never really seemed to lose its bloat.

  The walls of Sophie’s billet are hung with professionally shot photos of her in a variety of poses and costumes, remnants of the days she modeled for Tribeco cola, a popular Vietnamese soft drink. In a classic instance of typecasting, she received an offer to play an Amerasian in a Vietnamese movie production. Sophie was set to leave Vietnam at the time and could not accept.

  Sophie’s modeling career ended with her short term live-in relationship with a young Vietnamese man. He objected to Sophie posing before the camera. Sophie and her boyfriend soon separated, and shortly after he went to the United States, Linda was born of this relationship.

  In the PRPC, Sophie helps out at Community Family Services International, a counseling and mental health service for the refugees. She talks to new arrivals about stress management and gives them orientation to CFSI’s services. “Here I can introduce the program and do everything,” she says. “In Vietnam an Amerasian could not do that.”

  We speak without the aid of an interpreter. Frequently, Sophie and her mother confer in Vietnamese over meanings of difficult words before Sophie answers in English.

  Sophie: When I was about five or six years old, I had brown hair and brown eyes. When I went outside, many people called me My lai, My lai. That means Amerasian, but it’s very impolite.

  I asked my mother about that, and my mother told me that I had an American father, not Vietnamese. Then I realize that I have many differences between me and Vietnamese. When I go to school, I feel very different because all of the people have black hair, only me brown hair. Some of my classmates, sometimes they don’t like me because in the lesson the teacher teaches about the bad way of the Americans. After that, the people look at me and say, “Oh, she’s the daughter of an American. She’s not good because she has the same blood.”

  The lesson always says that Americans come to Vietnam and make many families fall down and cause many problems for the Vietnamese. Sometimes I disagree with my teacher and my friends because my mother tell me about my father, and I think my father is very good. I don’t think he is the same as what the teacher teaches about America.

  When I am growing up, I think the people around me are not good because they are always saying my father is bad. They always want to put me down. Sometimes I feel afraid to make friends with Vietnamese people.

  When I go to school, I always study very well, but my teacher discriminates against me. My Vietnamese classmates sometimes study not as well as me, but the teacher prefers them to me. Sometimes my school has a program, and my friends want me to introduce the program, but the teacher doesn’t agree. She works for the Communists, and if she puts an Amerasian up before many people, it’s not good for her. I always have many troubles in my class. I only have Vietnamese classmates, only I am Amer-asian. I have some friends, but not good friends, because when I am growing up I feel only I can understand myself. People don’t care about me, don’t understand me, so I don’t have a best friend.

  If I have a friend and I think she is my good friend, and I go to her house, sometimes her parents don’t want her to stay with me. They say, “Oh, if you are friends with Amerasians, you have many problems because Communists don’t like Amerasians.” I always hear that. And if I go to a friend’s house and I see her father, I am very sad because I don’t have father. So many times I just don’t like to go out.

  As a girl, I am always very busy. My mother teaches me English, and also I study in school. But the food is not enough for my family, so at night I must sell many things. Sometimes I sell cigarettes, and sometimes I sell cakes. Always, I feel very sad. My happiest time is only when I get a letter from my father.

  I went to school for nine years. In 1983 my father write me a letter, and he say he want me to go to America, so I stopped school and I start to study English. But I don’t go, because my father says he wants only me. He don’t want my younger sister, my younger brother, or my mother to go with me. I think that is wrong, because when I am growing up I have mother, younger sister, and younger brother. If I go to America, all my family must go too. I think it’s no good for me to go alone, so I don’t agree with my father. He don’t understand me when I say I want to take my brother or sister. He says, “Why? That’s no good for you.” He want me to go right away. I think he is very angry, and I wait from 1983 until now.

  When I get to America, I will contact him. I have his address, but he has many houses. When my father was living in Vietnam, he was very rich. He tells my mother that he wants me to be like Ngo Dinh Nhu, the first lady of Vietnam. He says, “If Ngo Dinh Nhu can do many things, than my daughter can do the same as her.”

  I know that my mother and my father have a problem. But I don’t worry, I think I can understand him. When I am growing up, I do many things. I can take care of myself, but I want to know him. I want to see him, I think I love him so much. Because when I am growing up, I never have a father. I think he is very kind, and I think he can love me too. I believe that.

  In Vietnam, I always have many problems and I am very sad, but I always believe that my future would be good. Vietnamese people were not kind with me, I don’t trust them. They always want to make me fall down. That’s why I want to go to America.

  In America, the first thing, I want to see my father. Then I want to study more. This is very important to me. After that, I want to have a good job. I would like to sell clothes because in Vietnam I have experience with that. I only hope my family will have a good future, that my younger sister and brother can go to school and have a good job, and my mother can have a good job too. And I hope we can help my two elder brothers, who are still in Vietnam.

  I was born in Vietnam, but Vietnam could not give me a good future, so I must go to the United States. I think I will have many problems because my English and my customs are different, but I try. I believe America will be very good for me. I have American blood, and I want to live there. But what’s good in Vietnamese culture, I keep, and what’s good in American culture I keep. I never ask myself if I am Vietnamese or American, I don’t worry about that.

  Postscript: On July 12, 1992, Lien and her family left the PRPC for Long Beach, California. For several months they stayed in the home of Lien’s sister, and in December they rented a house of their own in Garden Grove. Sophie quickly found work as a waitress in a Vietnamese nightclub. Lien is presently looking for a job. I asked Lien if she knew any of her neighbors. She replied, “No, I never see anyone. In California, every door is closed. “Her feelin
g, though, was one of optimism, “but anyway, the life in the U. S. is more better than Vietnam, because if we have job we can take care of the life.”

  Sophie’s search for her father ended in disappointment. She was able to make contact with her father’s sister, only to find out that Floyd Derault died several years ago, of an alcohol-related illness.

  MOTHERS

  I, like a river

  have been turned aside by this harsh age.

  Anna Akhmatova, “The Fifth”

  Nguyen Thi Lang

  “Then one day we heard that Amerasians can go to America ... My son, he says, ‘You say one day you write father. Mother, now you write.’”

  “You say you come, then you must. I wait for you, but you don’t come.” Lang spoke in a firm, gentle voice, and I was chastened. We had met in her English-as-a-Second-Language classroom a week before, and I had arranged to speak with her in her billet the following evening. Accustomed as I was to the Vietnamese’s relaxed sense of time, I thought it would cause no problem that I was unable to keep our appointment. I was mistaken. She had written a short paragraph indicating her disappointment over our missed meeting and showed it to me for correction. Lang, I was to discover, took every possible opportunity to improve her English.

  Despite her meager three years of schooling, Lang has a love of the written word. She told me that she had kept a diary in Vietnam and often handed me short pieces written for class, for my comment and correction. Her attitude towards learning the language was earnest. When we spoke, there invariably was an English-Vietnamese dictionary within reach, ready for consultation.

  At forty-seven years old, her eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses, her speech measured and thoughtful, Lang exudes a scholarly demeanor that belies a lifetime spent working in the fields. We were to meet regularly over a period of three months as she told her story. Our initial meetings were without benefit of an interpreter, and when the descriptions of her life went beyond her knowledge of the English language, Lang would patiently pause and refer to her dictionary. Our later discussions took place with the aid of a translator.

  Our first conversation took place on a very windy February day. Months had passed since the monsoon rains, and the gusts clawed on dry earth, depositing layers of grit in the refugee quarters. Outside Lang’s billet, children flew minuscule kites of used notebook paper and plastic bags. Several had wrapped around the power line and fluttered erratically in the wind. Just inside the billet hung a small wall altar on which rested a tin can laden with joss sticks. Hanging nearby was a likeness of Jesus. Lang is a follower of Cao Dai, a religious sect native to Vietnam. In its days of power in the 1940s, it counted over a million disciples and maintained an army which opposed both the Viet Minh and the French. The religion reverences both Jesus and Buddha and numerous secular figures as diverse as Sun Yat S en and Victor Hugo.

  As we spoke, the room filled up with neighborhood children. Occasionally one would be unable to resist the urge to explore my camera or push buttons on the cassette player, but would desist as soon as Lang issued a gentle reprimand. Several Amerasians dropped in just to meet “the American.” One young man, mistaking me for someone of authority, earnestly requested me to aid him in bringing his wife over from Vietnam.

  Lang has six children. Her oldest two, both sons, remain in Vietnam with their families, including all three of Lang’s grandchildren. In the PRPC with Lang are Minh Hanh, her twenty-three-year-old Amerasian son, and her two young daughters and youngest son, all under ten years old. The three younger children are from Lang’s marriage to a former ARVN soldier who had escaped from reeducation camp and settled in her town of Xuan Loc in Dong Nai province. Seven years after his escape, he was rearrested and held incommunicado. Two years later, Lang was to read of his execution in the newspaper. She was never informed.

  Standing about five feet ten inches, his hair and eyes brown, Minh Hanh, according to Lang, bears a strong resemblance to his father, Lloyd E. Grow. Lang and Lloyd had met and fallen in love when Lang worked as a housekeeper at the Bien Hoa army base, where Lloyd was stationed. He left Vietnam when Lang was five months pregnant, and Minh Hanh never met his father.

  Aware that Amerasians were being resettled in the United States through the Orderly Departure Program, Minh Hanh wanted to go. He asked his mother to try to contact his father, but Lang was hesitant. She worried that the Vietnamese government would persecute them for writing to America. She says, “I wait until 1990 to write him. I wait because I am scared of the VC. In 1990, I see many people write letters to America, so I write too. ”

  Lang wrote to the address Grow had given her seventeen years before. Remarkably, he still lived there. Grow immediately agreed to sponsor Lang and her family, and they will be going to his home in Minnesota.

  Grow was able to enlist the aid of his congressman in expediting Lang’s departure from Vietnam. In a recent letter to Lang he writes of plans being made for her arrival: “There will be a party for you on May 23 to meet the family. Among the invited will be Congressman Vin Weber, without whose help you may have never made it out of Vietnam.”

  I WAS BORN on Jan 24, 1945, in Lai Nguyen village, Ben Cat district in Song Be province, about fifty kilometers from Saigon. I am the last of five children by my father. He was killed shortly after I was born. My mother remarried three years after his death and had five more children.

  Lai Nguyen was a farming village of between three and four hundred families. There was no electricity in the village, and a few lambrettas provided the village transportation. We had a small battery radio we would listen to, and sometimes some people from the city would come and show a movie at the village, an action movie.

  Our family, like most in the village, followed the Cao Dai religion. We lived in a wooden house with a thatch roof and got our water from a well outside. We had our own fields and grew coffee, rice, corn, and mung bean. When I was a girl, my day was like this: I would wake up, feed the animals, prepare the breakfast for the family, take care of my younger brothers and sisters, prepare lunch, feed the animals again, take care of the children, and then make dinner. Sometimes I would help out in the fields, planting while my parents turned the soil. This was my routine. I only went to school for three years.

  This is the story I was told of my father’s death. When I was only twelve days old, the French army took control of our village and we moved to another one. My father, who bought and sold tobacco, was not there when the French came, he was away buying tobacco. The Viet Minh were suspicious of him. They believed that he was out of the village because he knew that the French were going to come, and they accused him of being a spy for the French. One day, almost a year later, they waited for my father to return from the market. They took him to the forest and shot him.

  My uncle had secretly followed them and saw what happened. He then took my family through the forest and across the river to the Cao Dai army post. The Cao Dai had an army made up of followers of the religion, and they opposed the Viet Minh. We went to their village stronghold and settled there.

  My uncle attempted to avenge my father’s death. A year after my father was killed, my uncle saw my father’s executioner going into the forest to defecate and followed him. My uncle attacked my father’s killer with a machete, but he only succeeded in slicing off the man’s ear.

  I was married when I was eighteen. The marriage was arranged by my family and that of my future husband. His family consulted with my uncle, who acted as a go-between and contacted my parents. I had known my future husband for years, we had worked in the fields together. My mother asked me my opinion of him, so I had a little say in the matter, but very little. I told my mother that since I knew him already and liked him, he seemed suitable but that the final decision should be the parents’. In Vietnam, children don’t marry for love. It’s the parents’ responsibility to chose a suitable partner.

  The members of my future husband’s family came to meet my family.

  Nguyen Thi Lang<
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  They brought two bottles of wine, two bags of tea, and four pieces of betel and four leaves. On the engagement date they repeated these gifts, but added earrings and a ring and some money to help my family prepare for the engagement. My uncle, who was skilled in astrology and palm reading, asked our birthdates, read my palm, and chose an appropriate wedding date.

  On the wedding day the groom’s family came to my house, brought jewelry, gold chains, and bracelets, and took us to their house for the wedding. Once we married we stayed with my husband’s family, as is the Vietnamese custom.

  In 1968 my husband got sick and died. One day he lay down, and he could not get up. He never got up again, and in six months he was dead. We went to the doctor three times, but then we could not go again. We had no more money, we were poor farmers. We had one son, and I was six months pregnant with another when he died.

  After my husband’s death, I went back to my village to live with my parents. At this time there were problems in the village with the Viet Cong. The Thieu government controlled the village in the day, but by night it belonged to the VC. Anyone the VC suspected of collaborating with the government would be taken away. These people were never seen again. [The Vietnamese had a slang term for these areas controlled by both the VC and the government—“vung xoi dau,” sticky rice with bean—the idea being that you can’t separate the sticky rice from the bean, i.e. the government from the VC.]

  The VC didn’t show itself as a large unit. They worked in small groups, hid in the daytime, and entered villages at night to get food. Often at night they would force the villagers to construct barricades made of earth and stones on the road two kilometers from the village. In the daytime, government troops would come and force us to tear down the barricades we built the night before. It went on like this, several nights a week, for about a year.