Children of the Enemy

by Steven DeBonis

  De’s English, despite years of disuse, comes easily and smoothly, though she is frustrated by the occasional word that slips her memory. She is in the Philippine Refugee Processing Center along with her twenty-year-old daughter.

  MY PARENTS LIVED in the north of Vietnam, where they had a tailor shop. My father died before I was born. He was murdered by the French. The Viet Minh had attacked a French ship, and many Frenchmen were killed. My father spoke French and tried to explain to the French soldiers that no one in the town was responsible for the attack, that there were no Viet Minh sympathizers in the town. While he was talking, one of the French soldiers knifed him. My mother, at thirty-eight, was left a widow with four children and me in her stomach.

  In 1954 my mother went to the South with her five children. She was able to support us by doing embroidery. She was very skillful and was known for her work. We lived in a bamboo house. It was not fancy; there was no running water or indoor plumbing.

  I went to high school in Bien Hoa. I studied English there and at the Vietnamese-American Association. Because of my skill in English, I was able to get a job at Long Binh base after my graduation. At first I worked as a secretary. There was an American man there, he kept telling me he could get me a better position, one where I’d make more money. My mother always warned me that American men would trick girls into prostitution, so at first, I did not trust him, but he was honest and got me a job managing a tailor shop on base, supervising ten workers. I worked there from 1968 to 1971. Then I transferred to Tan Son Nhut air base in Saigon, doing the same job. It was there that I met Rick.

  He was an air force man, about twenty-five years old. He always came around when I was working and stared at me. Finally one day I asked him what he was staring at. “Oh, nothing,” he said, “I’m just looking for a friend.” Later, when he became my boyfriend, he admitted that he really came there to look at me. He was from Alabama. His parents were divorced, and he was brought up by his grandmother. He was very poor. I was a virgin when I met him, and he couldn’t believe that. We were supposed to get married, but he was sent back to the States early. We didn’t know when he left Vietnam that I was pregnant.

  I got three or four letters a week from Rick. Before he left he bought me a cassette player, and we sent tapes back and forth to each other. He used to send me Elvis Presley tapes, Elvis was his favorite. When he found out that I was pregnant, he wanted me to make the papers to come to America. He said he would send money for my plane ticket. Then he wrote and said he didn’t have the money yet, so I knew something had changed. After all, six hundred dollars was not so much to get, even in 1972.

  That’s when I stopped writing to him. I did contact him when our daughter was born, and he wrote me a few times after that, but I never answered. I just forgot about him and concentrated on being a good mother. Being a mother made me feel strong. I never doubted that I could take care of myself and my daughter.

  In 1975 my mother buried all of his pictures, fearing the Communists, so my daughter never saw a picture of her father. I told her, “Just like me, I never saw my father.” I really never wanted to know anything about him, and my daughter doesn’t seem interested in knowing anything about her father. She once told me that her family is complete, her grandmother, her mother, and herself is enough. She is a good girl, she never caused me any problems. But since we came to this camp, she is getting very fat. I told her that in America it is not good for a young girl to be fat, but this doesn’t seem to bother her.

  In 1974, I opened up a bookstore in Bien Hoa. It did very well. I traveled to Saigon a lot to buy things for the store. It was there I met my other boyfriend. He was a civilian working for the 3M company, I met him at the country club pool. I was young, beautiful, and very stuck-up, the way young rich Vietnamese girls act. He wanted to take me traveling, but I never went. I had my daughter and my own business to take care of. Also, my mother told me that I had made a mistake once, I shouldn’t do it again. I had a good business and could take care of myself, and I liked that.

  On April 1, 1975, he had to go to Hong Kong on business. He knew that Vietnam would soon fall. He called one of his Filipino employers and told him to make papers for me and for everyone in the company. I and many others from his company went to the airport on April 27. We were supposed to go to Guam, but the plane never showed up and we were stranded. By April 30, Saigon had fallen.

  On May 5 he sent a telegram to his own house, I saw it there. He was asking about me, asking if I could get out of the country and how. One of the employees in the company told me not to answer, that he might be involved with the CIA. I was afraid of what the Communists might do if I answered, so I didn’t reply.

  A year later the woman who was his secretary got a letter asking where I was. He still wanted to find me. She got in trouble with the VC for receiving that letter, a letter from an American. Later on that woman went to America, and she saw my boyfriend. He asked about me, but she had her own reasons for not telling him how to contact me. She was in America having an affair with my brother-in-law and didn’t want his wife, my sister to know. She figured if my boyfriend got in touch with me, somehow my sister would find out, so she didn’t tell my boyfriend anything about me. I found all this out many years later, but it didn’t matter, I felt I didn’t have to depend on anyone, I would get out of Vietnam myself and arrange my own reunion with my boyfriend.

  In 1975 I had to sell my bookstore, and I became a vendor, selling things right in front of my house. I had put away lots of gold from my more successful days, though I lost a chunk of it on an attempted escape from Vietnam. It was a set-up. They took my money, but the boat never came.

  In 1980 I opened up an illegal billiard hall. The VC tried to make me go to the New Economic Zone with my mother and daughter, but each time they bothered me I paid them off. If you can bribe them, they leave you alone.

  My daughter went to school for seven years, but finally quit because she couldn’t take the teasing that most Amerasian children get. She studied English at home and helped me at the billiard hall.

  So now we are going to the United States, but I am afraid to contact my boyfriend. Maybe he is married. That would make me sad, and I don’t want to hurt his wife. After a few years when I am well established, then I’ll contact him. I don’t want to be dependent on him. In the United States I want to open up my own business, see my daughter get married, and then return to Vietnam to visit my mother. I have a nest-egg, I still have five thousand dollars. Just before I left Vietnam, I sold my house to someone who had relatives in America, and the money is waiting for me there in the United States.

  Postscript: De and her daughter were resettled in Westminster, California, in August of 1992.

  Mai

  “I was a country girl, not the same as many girls in Saigon.”

  Mai, thirty-eight, is a self-described “country girl” from Thu Duc, formerly on the outskirts of Saigon, now a part of Ho Chi Minh City. She is in the Philippine Refugee Processing Center with her Vietnamese husband and her six children, including her Amerasian son. She speaks good-naturedly about her former relationship with an American navy man, which ended in a long distance divorce; she chalks it up to youthful naivete. Mai told her story in competent English, without the aid of a translator.

  MY FAMILY WERE farmers in Thu Duc, and I lived there all my life. In 1965, I went to work in a restaurant, that’s where I met my husband. He came to eat in the restaurant; many Americans ate there. We served French food, but the owner was Indian. I washed dishes from ’65 to ’68, and in ’69 and ’70, I carried food for the people to eat, what do you call this, . . . waitress.

  He was in the navy, Seabee [naval construction worker] 10-6004. I lived with him for three or four months in 1970, and then he went back to America. He came back to Vietnam in ’71 and worked as a mechanic in Saigon. A month after he came back, our son was born. He saw my baby, and he made a marriage paper with me. On April 2, 1972, my husband went back to America, a
nd because he was in the military, I couldn’t go with him. He said that when he finished the navy, maybe I could be with him. I was so young, maybe only twenty. I was a country girl, not the same as many girls in Saigon, who work in a bar, understand everything. I was country, I didn’t understand nothing.

  My husband was very nice, but he didn’t give me . . . I didn’t have clothes, nothing. I just liked him. I loved him. I wasn’t the same as the girls in Saigon. If they have an American, if he has money, they stay, if not, they go. No, I loved him. My husband said he only had little money, titi money. I lived with my family. My father had rice, I could eat, I could feed my family. He didn’t have to take care of me and baby.

  Every week he called me and took me to where he lived. I’d stay with him Saturday night, Sunday, and then Monday morning I’d go back home. We didn’t have a house, we didn’t live together. He said he didn’t have money to rent a house, because of the navy, but I know he had many, many girlfriends. I was very sad about that, but I didn’t know how to talk with him. I was too young. He was thirty-eight, I was only twenty. When he got married with me, I was his fourth wife. He got one wife, divorced, another one, divorced, another one, divorced, then me. In 1972 he went home, and he divorced me too, and he got another one. By now, I don’t know how many wives he’s had.

  After my husband left Vietnam in 1972, he wrote only one letter, no, maybe two or three letters, that’s all. The last one, he wrote me and said, “I have another wife, I can’t come to Vietnam.”

  He gave money to a lawyer, and the lawyer sent me a paper from Guam. I don’t have it here. If I had it, I’d show it to you. I lost it in Vietnam. I couldn’t understand the letter when I got it, so I gave it to another man to read to me. It said “divorce.” I was very sad. I was waiting for him . . . and I had his baby.

  You know, when I worked as a waitress, many people liked me, loved me, many, but I said, “No, I have a husband.” When he went to America, I had his baby, but many people liked me. They say, “I want to sleep with you,” but I said, “No, I have a husband, I wait for him.” When I got the letter that said “divorce,” I was very sad, but I didn’t know how to write a letter and ask him, “What did I do wrong to you?” I didn’t know, I didn’t understand.

  In 1975 the VC came. That year, everybody, all Vietnam, had American children, and some people threw their babies away. Some people told their [Amerasian] children, “Go out.” I was scared, you know, because I had an American baby, so I thought I’d get one more husband, and he’d take care of me and my baby. I got a husband, but when his family heard that I had an American baby, they said, “No, no, that’s no good,” and they took my husband away from me. In 1980 I got married again. This husband doesn’t care that I have an American baby; he says, “I love you, I love baby too.”

  Lien

  “I call my bar ‘Simone,’ that’s my French name.”

  It’s easy to imagine Lien as an entrepreneur; she has that kind of energy. Indeed, she was the owner and “mama-san” of her own bar in Saigon. For several years, her boyfriend and helper in the bar was Johnny Price, a black American from California. They have remained in almost continuous contact since he left Vietnam in 1972. Despite a recent automobile accident that left him walking with the aid of a cane, Price is sponsoring Lien and her family; they will shortly be joining him in the United States. Lien is one of the very few women I’ve spoken to who will be reuniting with an American boyfriend or husband. Her family includes children from various liaisons; her eldest son, fathered by a French paratrooper, was resettled in France in 1978. Her daughter from a soldier from Ohio, and her son and daughter from a Hawaiian merchant marine are all with her in the PRPC and are bound for California, as is Tuyet, who is also called by the English translation of her name, “Snow.” She is Johnny Price’s daughter.

  Lien laughs as she recites her litany of boyfriends. As is common, all are referred to as husbands, irrespective of qualifying documents. Price, she says, was her last and most lasting husband, and Lien claims that she hasn’t thought of another man since he left. As the topic changes, and she recounts the indignities she suffered after the fall of Saigon, her mood changes from levity to bitterness.

  As we speak, several members of her family drop into her billet, sit for a while, and wander on. On the tiny concrete strip in front of her billet, several Filipinos, probably part-time workers at the camp, engage in a card game. Little kids come by to check out the oddity of an American with a tape recorder in the billet.

  Lien, at fifty-five, has never learned to read or write in any language, though she has no trouble expressing herself in English or French, in addition to her native Vietnamese. She speaks easily and confidently without the aid of a translator.

  YOU KNOW JAPAN? Japan killed my father in the war. He was half–French, half–Vietnamese. He was in the army before, working as an interpreter for the French in Hanoi. After he finished the army, he opened a fruit and vegetable store. When the Japanese came to Hanoi, father told me and my mother, “Get out of Hanoi, go to the jungle, go to Quang Tri.” When we went back to Hanoi after the war, my father was dead. Japan told my father, “Hands up.” He no hands up, so they shot him, his brother and his two sisters. They threw them in a big grave with many people.

  After the war, my mother owned a restaurant. She sold meat, she sold potatoes, all kinds of food. I went to school only two or three years. My mother said, “Lien, you go study,” but I was very lazy, so I stayed home. That’s why I can read and write Vietnamese only a little, not too much.

  After 1954, after Dienbienphu, many Vietnamese people went south to Saigon. I go too, with my boyfriend. He was a Frenchman, a paratrooper. My mother had a new husband and two children, and she stayed in Hanoi. I never saw her again. She got sick one night, there was no medicine, and she died.

  My boyfriend went back to France, he had a wife there, and I stayed in Saigon. I have one son from him, he went to France in 1978. [Lien pulls out a sheaf of photos of her son and his wife, sent in letters from France.] The French government took him, the same as the American government takes Amerasians.

  In Saigon, I opened a bar, a cafe, near Tan Son Nhut airport. We had food, and music, coffee, whiskey, scotch, beer . . . and girls. I open it as an American bar, you understand, not a Vietnamese bar. Many GIs come there. I have two policemen stand outside. They take care of my bar, make sure there is no trouble and no bombs. One come to work with me in the morning and we check everybody, all the girls that come to work there. If I like her, I let her work. If I don’t like her, she doesn’t work. I call my bar “Simone,” that’s my French name.

  A very attractive black Amerasian walks into Lien’s billet, and takes a seat near us. Lien introduces her as her daughter “Snow.” Snow’s entry turns Lien to talking about her children.

  So, I have one French son, he is in France now, and I have three girls and one boy, from three different American husbands. One white man, his name was Georgie, he was army, from Ohio I think. I had a baby girl from him, three months old, when he went back to the States. He go back, and he never wrote me.

  Then I have one Hawaiian husband. He worked on a ship, you know, like merchant marine. He only comes to Saigon two times in one year, but he always bring many things when he comes. I have two babies with him, one boy and one girl. You know, I just get a letter from him. He tell me he wants to come here [to the PRPC] and see me, but I don’t care about him anymore.

  Lien in her billet in the PRPC

  After he left, I met Johnny Price, a very nice boy. I miss him now. For eighteen years now, since he left, I never get married, didn’t have no boyfriends, nothing. I stayed with Johnny from ’69 to ’72. He helped me run my bar. In ’72 he go Arab [Saudi Arabia] to work, and he send me money every month. I was two months pregnant with his daughter Snow when he left, so he never saw her, but he always wrote me, until 1975, when the VC came. Even now, I still get letters from him, he never forgot me. He will sponsor my family. We are go
ing to his house in California, he is waiting for us. Look, he is very kilo [fat] now.

  Lien goes back into her sheaf of papers and photos and takes out a recently received letter and pictures from John Price of Long Beach, California. Price is the father of Snow, who is also called “Diamond.” He is a very large black man, walking with a cane in one picture and drinking with a friend in another.

  My wife Simone and daughters, Diamond, Mai, and Phuong,

  From my accident I walk with a walking cane. I’m still not well. I hope to be well soon so I can take care of my beautiful family. Now I weigh 250 lbs., more of me to love. I love you to the bone. Get well soon.

  Big Daddy Price

  P.S. I’m an old man now.

  When VC come in ’75, I burn my letters, around midnight, but I hid two. I don’t know what will happen. Maybe they kill me, maybe kill all my daughters. I don’t want them to see any letters from Americans.

  When they come, all letters from Johnny stop. Then, about two years later, in 1977, the VC say that we can write and receive letters from America. That’s when I start to get letters from Johnny again. After 1977 Johnny sent money to the bank. The American bank sends money to the VC bank [Lien laughs at the irony]. He wrote me a letter, he said, “Honey, I sent you money.” I say okay, and I go to the bank, and I see the check. I get many letters from him. He says that he wants me and my daughter, his wife and children from Saigon, that’s all. He say he don’t have no American wife, no American girlfriend. I don’t know, I don’t see, I only read his letters. I want just him, that’s all. I don’t have nobody, don’t have no boyfriend, just me and my children, that’s all.