My Tien Huynh

May 12, 2011

AY 492- Prof. Winifred Tate

“I was born right in the period of war. We were in the midst of freedom,  and then Vietnamese communism stepped in, took over. And then we faced complications, lost our freedom. And then we had a hard time adjusting to the new government. It ruined the lives of many people. They struggled and lost hope. As for me, at that time I did not know too much about the situation, but those who were older, told me a lot. Just hearing them speak, I am already overwhelmed.” Thao Kieu, 39.

Oral Histories of the Black Amerasian Population in Portland, Maine

        Methodology

        While the cold, northeastern state of Maine is rather known for its white homogeneity, a substantial population of approximately 3000 Vietnamese reside in its southern regions. Many southern Vietnamese families began arriving in the small city of Portland and the Greater Portland area in the early 1990s, and through a shared language and cultural upbringing began creating a community and forming bonds with one another. The majority were supported by Catholic Charities Maine, a charity and sponsorship program which helped to provide government assistance, housing, and work to new immigrant and refugee families in addition to placing adults into English Language Learner Programs and their children into the city’s public schools (Chuong, Le: 1994, oral histories: 2011). While concrete statistics were not found, within this population resides a substantial number of Vietnamese Amerasians, children born to U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese women, who immigrated to Maine with their families. My father, Dung Anh Huynh, himself a Vietnamese Amerasian knew of at least two dozen of such individuals who I could interview. There were three Amerasians within my own family. Through his close connections with several members of the Vietnamese community in Portland, I was able to conduct five interviews within the time constraints of one week, and another interview during a later date in spring 2011. Four of the individuals I interviewed were Vietnamese Amerasians who had immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s, and two were mothers to a Vietnamese Amerasian child.

        There were typically three individuals in the vicinity during the interview process: myself, the interviewee, and my father who often filmed the interviews and assisted in the interpretation of tricky words and phrases. The interviews, by in large, were conducted in Vietnamese and took approximately an hour each. While I feared that the filming process might create discomfort for the interviewees and lead to filtered answers; most interviewees directly faced me as we conversed, and were able to provide genuine answers to a number of sensitive questions concerning race, ethnicity, impoverishment, and abandonment. The Amerasians I interviewed seemed to be well integrated into the fabric of their American life. They work full time jobs in factories and nail salons, and all had a spouse and children. They share a continuing experience of being Black Amerasian, and for many years, the men have been close, if not best friends, often caught reminiscing with one another about their childhood and adolescent struggles. The exception is Aunt Son, an Amerasian woman married to Dung’s half-brother. A 5’6 woman with brown skin and a medium build, it is not her kind eyes and inviting smile that makes her stand out from most petite Vietnamese women.

        The information she and my male informants offered me about their experience growing up as a Black Amerasian and their immigration and assimilation process provides the bulk of this study. Texts and research papers on the history of Vietnamese Amerasians are used to supplement these interviews. I also interviewed Nhung Nguyen, the mother to a Latino Amerasian, and Khe Huynh, Dung’s mother, to gauge a real life understanding of how the Vietnamese people treated women who had formed relationships with and had children by American servicemen. In general, the interviewees and I spoke openly on a wide range of topics, focusing on following sub-topics in particular:

1. The aftermath of interracial relationships between Vietnamese women and American servicemen after the Fall of Sai Gon
2. The history of interracial relationships between Amerasians and the Vietnamese populace in Viet Nam
3.  Their experience of the immigration and acculturation process in the United States
4.  The interracial relationships between Amerasians and U.S. Americans
5. The interracial relationship between Amerasians and Vietnamese Americans
6. Amerasians’ perceptions of their fathers and mothers in the United States today
7.  Amerasians’ understanding of their dual identity and dual citizenship.

This project was difficult to embark on considering my parents’ views that Anthropology is an impractical concentration only useful for one’s own emotional growth rather than an applicable discipline used for financial security or structural change. In addition, the politeness and stoicism that exemplify Vietnamese mores is disagreeable with a project that is simultaneously historical and painfully reflective. Hence, I approached this work with much apprehension. “Well mom, I’m doing a project on Con Lai^[1] in the United States,” I said to my mother while she and my father were driving me down to Portland from Colby College after my car had broken down. “And, I’m thinking that I should do some interviews to get a better account (of their experience) after I’ve read all of these books.” My hesitance came from wondering if my father, himself an Amerasian and a prideful man, would be sensitive to me conducting research for such a project without first approaching him for his permission and advice. Suddenly, I was asking for his assistance non-directly by speaking to my mother, who had previously known about the subject matter, while he was in the car. Growing up, I had always noticed the title “black” added to his name when elders or other friends would address him, literally Dung den (black Dung). The title indicated that although he was raised by a single Vietnamese mother with strict Vietnamese values, that black race and American ethnicity still played a large role in how the greater Vietnamese community defines him. My combined interest in the role race and ethnicity played during the peculiar period of the Viet Nam War in both the United States and Viet Nam along with my understanding of the continual preference for whiteness in Vietnamese society augmented my interest in studying Vietnamese Amerasians. Additionally, discernible global discrimination against blackness, through the understanding that Africa is the dark continent, led me to pursue the experience of Black Amerasians in more depth. The authors who provided background information for these oral histories often also focused on the disproportionate level of harassment black Amerasians faced in comparison to white or light-skinned Amerasians. Nonetheless, race was a subject that was rarely broached within my ethnically and racially mixed household or by the number of black Amerasian friends of my family. The durable relationships among black Amerasians within my parents’ inner circle, however, suggest that a common experience of growing up black and being associated with Americans in Viet Nam may have helped to create and sustain these bonds. As I began the search for my interviews, I was open to ideally getting a variety of perspectives and voices from different Amerasians in Portland, whether, white, black, Asian, or Latino. While my predominant interest remains with the black Amerasian experience, I believed the information provided by other races of Amerasians may supplement my understanding of the overall Amerasian hardships in Viet Nam and the United States. The fact that I ended up speaking with only black Amerasians spoke to the prominence of their stories and the strength of their relationship to one another in Portland. While riding in my parents’ car, I had moderately expected that my indirect plea for assistance from my father would be ignored or dismissed for its lack of consideration and for its cultural insensitivity.

To my utter disbelief, however, both parents began listing names of people I could interview, my father offering his name first and foremost. They additionally asked when I wanted to conduct the interviews and whether I would need an interpreter. This information would help them to provide me with names and numbers of contacts. Always thirsting to know more about my father’s upbringing, this project was a justified reason for me to ask him candid questions on account of the understanding that the knowledge he provides would benefit my academic growth. His willingness to discuss what I had gathered was a painful history took me by surprise and I was uncertain about whether the Vietnamese Amerasian population in Portland, long removed from the painful impoverishment and discrimination they faced in Viet Nam, would be willing to open up these old wounds for a curious student doing a semester long anthropology project about a history she did not experience and could not, in any respect, attempt to capture.

Having been interested in ethnic and racial relations since childhood, I have had informal conversations with my mother for years about the definition of mixed races, her experience being married to a poor black man in Viet Nam, the nation’s sense of racism against blackness, and the palpable anger Vietnamese elders still felt about the ways Americans had used and abandoned them during the war. While these mother-daughter conversations came about with ease, I wholeheartedly expected that the stoic nature of most Vietnamese Amerasians, particularly the men I knew, would eliminate the prospect of being able to talk with the majority of them about growing up as Amerasian before the project could even begin. Fortunately, my cynical view of the situation proved to be highly unrealistic. Like my father, the interviewees I was matched with were genuine, eager, and open when it came to being interviewed. They agreed to be taped and no subject, no matter how personal, was off limits.

        Black Amerasians in Portland, Maine

        “One day, my mom gets ready to go the hospital for delivering me and he left. You know, he got called, ordered, so he had to leave. He had to go. And from then, he never came back.” Thao Kieu recalls of his American father’s permanent disappearance one week before he was born in the small central Vietnamese province of Quang Nam in 1971. Uncle Thao’s^[2] father, an American medic during the Viet Nam War, had formed a relationship with Thao’s mother in 1969. Longing for her partner, Thao’s mother imagined him standing by her bedside three days after she gave birth to the child he would never meet.

        Forty years after his disappearance, the longing for Uncle Thao’s father continues. “Every time I speak about my old man, I get sad man. I get sad.”

        Uncle Thao’s story, although heartbreaking, is the rule rather than an anomaly during the Viet Nam War. He is one of approximately 100,000 children born to U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese women during the War. As a person of mixed nationalities, Uncle Thao symbolizes the macro relationship between global superpowers and their gambits within a period of history marked by an arms race between democracy and communism. Inconsequential and undeveloped countries like Korea and Viet Nam, were the battlefields, and people like Thao Kieu were the unintended after effects of global greed. While the relationship that led to Uncle Thao’s birth represents affection between the United States and Viet Nam, his subsequent sense of rejection in his motherland can be attributed to Viet Nam’s bitterness toward the United States. During his early adulthood, Uncle Thao is repatriated to the United States. Regardless of who was initially responsible for the war and the devastation following it, the act of allowing repatriation paints the United States as a martyr for rescuing Uncle Thao out of Viet Nam’s desperation and deep seated racism.

        Uncle Thao’s light brown skin, curly black hair, and tall stature, distinctively sets him apart from most Vietnamese men, but his upbringing in Viet Nam, alongside his accent and cultural beliefs, make it difficult for Uncle Thao to be fully integrated into mainstream U.S. American society after repatriation. The experience of Vietnamese Amerasians, particularly Vietnamese black Amerasians, who embody this dual identity, alongside its joys and consequences, are the subject of my study. With my small collection of oral histories interviews from individuals like Uncle Thao in Portland, I illustrate in through their narrations that these individuals’ unique tri-partid identities, as black, mixed racial, and multi- ethnic, were a source of immense pain beyond that which could be felt by possessing only one of any of those identities, but it is also a great source of resiliency. Through their support systems at home and within the Portland, Maine community, these Black Vietnamese Amerasians are adapting well to their second homes in the United States.

        Historical Background

April 30, 1975 marked the end of the Viet Nam War. From differing perspectives, Viet Nam either experienced reunification or the southern capital of Sai Gon fell to Communist North Viet Nam after two decades of war. Although symbolic, April 30, 1975 marked not the end, but rather the beginning of an overwhelming struggle for Vietnamese Amerasians. Vietnamese Amerasians are individuals “born of American servicemen and Vietnamese women”(Nwadoria and Mcadoo: 1996) during the period of American involvement in the Viet Nam War between 1961 and 1975. A year after Vietnamese nationalists, led by communist leader Ho Chi Minh, defeated French imperialists in the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu to regain control of North Viet Nam, a campaign was waged to reunify North and South Viet Nam. North Viet Nam’s efforts to overtake South Viet Nam in the midst of the Cold War prompted the United States to intervene and defend global democracy against forces of communism^[3]. The United States had already funded approximately 80 percent of France’s war against Vietnamese communism to accept defeat and the possibility of the resultant domino effect in favor of communism (Brewer: 183-184). While the war was fought on a relatively small scale between 1955 and 1960, the involvement of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops beginning in 1961 escalated media attention and propaganda in the west and brought it to the forefront of international limelight. The resultant defeat of the United States and South Viet Nam after an especially bloody war has overtaken the discourse and literature concerning that period. A subject rarely discussed, however, are the relationships between American servicemen and Vietnamese women over those 14 years, relationships which resulted in the birth of over 100,000 children of mixed racial and ethnic identities and ideologies. The identities and survival stories of these Amerasians, literally half Vietnamese, half American, is the focus of this paper.

        While there are differing viewpoints on whether the Viet Nam War was won or lost in Viet Nam, there is little argument concerning the devastating conditions of post-war reconstruction. The cataclysm is enhanced for Vietnamese Amerasian children, many of whom were treated as scapegoats for having American fathers responsible for the killing of thousands of troops and citizens, men who were also responsible for abandoning and betraying the Republic of Viet Nam when it was evident that the north would overtake the South in its reunification efforts. In addition to the impoverishment and hunger many Vietnamese faced during the period, Vietnamese Amerasians additionally faced prejudice and discrimination on account of their race. A disproportionate number were abandoned or given to orphanages, and still others were teased mercilessly in school for being Amerasian. The situation was worst if the children were black. They faced a crisis of identity being mixed-blood in a largely homogenous society which values purity and whiteness (Yarborough: 88). Their mothers were labeled as prostitutes and traders. Growing up, some longed to be repatriated to their fatherland.

        Shortly before the fall of Sai Gon, the United States had made efforts to airlift 2000 Vietnamese orphans out of the country and bring them to adopted families in the United States^[4]. Other Vietnamese with connections to the United States were also able to escape during the first wave of immigration. By in large, however, Amerasians and other Vietnamese refugees seeking asylum would have to wait until the creation of the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) in 1979 to be given the opportunity to immigrate to the United States or one of thirty nine other receiving countries. However, the strained relationship between the United States and Viet Nam still stifled the process for most anxious Amerasians. Even with the passage of the Amerasian Immigration Act in 1982, allowing specifically Amerasians throughout Southeast Asia to immigrate to the United States, with the lack of U.S. officials allowed into Viet Nam to conduct their departure interviews, Vietnamese Amerasians remained in limbo within Viet Nam until the passage of the Amerasian Homecoming Act in December 1987. The Homecoming Act allowed Amerasians and members of their immediate family to immigrate to the United States on account of their U.S. American descent. Although original funding allotted for the repatriation efforts were meant to last until 1990, the majority of immigration to the United States took place between 1989 and 1993 when federal funding for Vietnamese Amerasian resettlement ended (Elrick: 1989) The number of overall Amerasians and their families who settled in the United States through the active phase of the Homecoming Act that is recorded range from 70,000 to 100,000, although a small number of Vietnamese Amerasians continue to immigrate to the United States annually (Yarborough)         

The Relationship Between Vietnamese Women and American Servicemen

        The legacy of the Vietnamese Amerasian began when Vietnamese women came in contact with American servicemen in the early 1960s. Nhung Nguyen (Ba^[5] Hai) and Khe Huynh (Ba Noi) are but two among thousands of women to become a mother to an Amerasian child between 1961 and 1975. During the war, thousands of Vietnamese women traveled from cities and villages alike to become secretaries, maids, bar girls, seamstresses, and laundresses near American bases. Once there, many encountered young American men. Vietnamese women’s relations to American men range from rapes, blow-jobs, and one-night stands^[6] to tender relationships which span the period of the American’s deployment in Viet Nam, or in extremely rare cases, beyond (Yarborough: 17). As a consequence of their relations to Americans however, thousands of women who merely sought to earn a living on and near the bases, were left with unwanted pregnancies. The situation for mothers who decided to keep their Amerasian children was equally as bleak as their children’s realities. As the cessation of the war drew near, the majority of their American husbands or boyfriends had disappeared, died, or returned to the United States, leaving these women single with a child by the American enemy.        

        The 72-year-old mother of Phuc, a Latino Amerasian, Ba Hai was expelled from her family when she became pregnant. “They did not accept me. So I became a wanderer, living with friends and (I) sold things in the market to make enough money to buy food,” she paused to grab a tissue as the emotions came streaming back. Ba Hai had always been a humorous, yet stoic woman, known for her straight-forward approach, regardless of how injurious the truth that she tells may be to her audience. Sentimentality is a trait rarely used to describe her, yet intense emotions surfaced easily when she spoke about the exclusion and disapproval she faced because of her love for an American that resulted in the birth of an Amerasian child. After her lover had finished his term of service, Ba Hai was left on her own, pregnant with his child. “I was wandering bearing a child. […] I came back to my home village to give birth. And afterwards, I kept wandering. No one helped me.” Particularly after the end of the war, American sympathizers were dismissed and harassed because of their betrayal to the Vietnamese sense of patriotism. Similar to Ba Hai, my Ba Noi and the 72 year-old mother of Dung Huynh, was one of the women who faced disapproval from her family and neighbors. After situating herself comfortably on her son’s couch, she begins narrating the story of her life as it pertains to the Viet Nam War and her mixed children with barely any prompting. Ba Noi has much to share and many memories to release and soon she not only covers all the bases for my project but would also direct her story toward what she imagines for her children and grandchildren after decades of her own struggles with family, society, and relationships in Viet Nam.

        After leaving her first husband, whom she had lived with for seven years and born a daughter by because his family wanted him to take another wife, Ba Noi traveled with her friends to Sai Gon where she worked near the American bases. There she met Scott^[7], a tall African American army sergeant who would become Dung’s father. Scott rented a home for Khe to live and supported her with a monthly allowance. She would send much of this money home to help support her parents and her daughter but her affiliation with Scott consisted of more than a monetary agreement. Ba Noi describes their relationship as both tender and sporadic. She communicated with Scott using the Vietnamese dictionary. And Scott, a meticulously neat and pure individual, taught Ba Noi about the healthy hygiene habits he had been raised with in the United States. Khe fondly recalls the affectionate moments when she would sit as Scott washed her hair. Nonetheless, Scott came in and out of the picture, being sent to assignments in different areas of the country. Finally, when his son was three months old, Scott was deployed back to the United States. Although he would re-enlist^[8], Khe found herself unable to support herself and her child and took another partner in his absence.

        In 1968, while working as a seamstress at the American bases in Sai Gon, she met and moved in with white American marine. Their relationship resulted in Khe giving birth to twin boys in 1969^[9]. During her first trimester, the marine was deployed back to the United States, unaware of the fact that he would become the father of two children whom he would never meet. Unlike the thousands of Vietnamese women who abandoned their children because of societal disapproval or abject poverty, Khe chose to raise all three of her Amerasian boys. Her son, Dung, admires the strength of women like his mother, who were stuck bearing the complete burden of raising children which two adults were liable for producing. “I’m going to be honest, people meet each other and have fun and during the time of my mom and dad back then, there was no method of birth control. They would meet each other. The women would get pregnant and the men would disappear. They had no responsibility.” Modern forms of birth control were only introduced in the United States itself during the 1960s and 1970s, and servicemen were unwilling to be confined to using condoms with Vietnamese women (Yarborough: 19). The machismo of American military culture can be partially to blame for the sexual perversion that led to the spread venereal diseases and thousands of unwanted pregnancies of Amerasian children (Yarborough: 18-19).

        While young fathers could escape back to the United States after their tours of service, young women like Nhung Nguyen and Khe Huynh were left to fend for themselves and the children they chose to keep. Luckily for Ba Noi, after the departure of her twins’ father back to the United States, Scott continued to visit her and their infant son monthly and provide her with money to raise their child. But their relationship would not be a permanent one. One day Scott sent word to Khe’s village that he was sick, and asked a friend to continue bringing money to her and Dung. It was the last time she would hear from him. Ba Noi remains uncertain of whether Scott was simply deployed home to the United States or died from illness or battle during the war. Similar to her other relations with men in the war, however, Scott too would follow the pattern of disappearing from her life. As the mother to Amerasian children, Ba Noi and other mothers would have to raise her children in a climate of racial and ethnic prejudice or live permanently with decision to abandon them.

        The support and commitment American men provided to the mothers of their children, however, were often fleeting at best. The limited ability for Vietnamese women to communicate with American partners alongside the acceptance of the provisional nature of service diminishes any prospect that fathers would be in their children’s lives. Understanding this, Ba Noi remains fond of Scott nearly 40 years after the end of their relationship. “He cared for me so I cared for him. So much so that I was jealous,” Scott had had a wife and daughter back in the United States, “but I couldn’t speak the language so how could I argue, what could I say? When he departed for the United States (after his first tour was over), I cried quite a bit.” Ba Noi recalls that Scott searched her village and requested to bring Dung over to the United States with him when Dung was little because he wanted to raise a son, but, according to Khe, he was too young to be brought along with his father and she wanted Dung around to help raise his younger siblings. My father vaguely remembers being three or four years of age when his father disappeared, too young to have formed accurate memories about him.

        Although Ba Noi’s relationships were short and fleeting, she was nonetheless among the percentage of fortunate women who did not work as bar girls and prostitutes for American soldiers. “I knew a few girls who married^[10] American men, but for the most part, there were more bar girls, and there was a percentage of women who had husbands but snuck around at American bases.” To be able to maintain relationships with American men after they had completed their tours of service was a rare feat. No future seemed to be possible for the young men and women who resided in different worlds. While some men attempted to keep in contact with their Vietnamese partners, sending back letters and money, a number of servicemen had existing families they were coming back to in the United States. After Sai Gon fell, communication between members of the two nations became prohibited and women were financially and emotionally cut off from this partnership. The newly in power Communist government would treat U.S. sympathizers subordinately. With no love lost from the American side, the United States would place an embargo against Viet Nam prohibiting Americans from sending money, mail, or humanitarian aid over to its newly formed enemy nation. The embargo nearly guaranteed that Amerasian children would be orphaned or be supported by a single mother.

        Ba Hai was one of these women. After receiving letters and photos over the mail for two years, she lost contact with Phuc’s father in 1975. “I had letters and things, we were still communicating, but after re-unification, my younger brother was so afraid that he told me to burn it all. Then I didn’t have anything left. I no longer had (items to remember him by). So now that we’ve come over here, we don’t have anything.” Among the papers she threw away were a marriage certificate and a request to sponsor her and Phuc to the United States to build a family with her lover. But the fear most Vietnamese women had about the possible repercussions of having affiliations to the United States in the post-war period was immense, “at that time, I threw it all away. I was so dumb. I didn’t keep a single thing.”  Ba Noi, like thousands of other mothers to Amerasians, also knew the consequences of being associated with American imperialism (Yarborough: 138).  Women would burn all documents including photographs and addresses from American men. When she came to the United States decades later, she had no foundational information that could be used to guide her in her search for Scott. While definitive numbers do not exist, Ba Noi and Ba Hai may be amongst the exception for choosing to keep and raise their children. A number of mothers did not keep their children long enough to be faced with the dilemma of whether or not to search for their former lovers. Approximately 58 percent of Amerasians know nothing about their fathers, including his name and an additional 33 percent knew only very little about him (Yarborough: 138). A part of the conflict may be that mothers do not know who the fathers of their children are or had too much trouble with English to fully communicate with him. Much of the Amerasians’ unfamiliarity about their fathers stems, however, indubitably stems from being unwanted children who were not raised by their mothers.

        Uncle Thanh and his Amerasian sister grew up in a temple, where they were only visited by their mother once or twice a year depending on her income, because she lacked the ability to support them financially. Similarly, Aunt Son’s mother left her when she was five to go back to her home village and begin a new life with a Vietnamese man. Her relationship with her mother, as well as her relationship to other villagers in her town of birth remains strained. While Uncle Thanh and Aunt Son were given no information about their fathers growing up, they nonetheless had no choice but to accept that the skin color and features they had inherited from him were the underlying causes behind their daily bouts with being teased and harassed.

        Impoverishment and societal disapprovals largely explains the reason thousands of mothers to Amerasians had abandoned their children. In 1980, while in Viet Nam studying the effects of Agent Orange, journalist Bill Kurtis alarmingly reported seeing thousands of homeless Vietnamese Amerasian children begging for food on the streets (Kurtis: March 1980). These young mothers themselves had been abandoned by their lovers, and the men responsible for creating the births of Vietnamese Amerasians in a fragile, war-torn nation, that was left in that shape by Americans. For women who kept their children after the deployment or death of their lovers, their abandonment did not gain them compassion from family.

        On the contrary, societal disapprovals of raising an Amerasian child were often mirrored inside these women’s homes. Ba Noi’s two older brothers, who chose to fight on the side of Vietnamese nationalists during the war, requested that she raise her Amerasian children away from their parents’ home^[11]. Being cast as a child who brought shame to the family, my father would hide out of sight whenever his uncles’ friends visited their home.  “When they returned from battle, my mother faced hardships because they said ‘you have an Amerasian child […] you’re tainting our reputation.’ When their friends would come to visit, they would comment, “ ‘oh you have a sister with an American husband,’ and it upset her. She usually avoided the situation. She didn’t want to discuss that type of thing […] but they did not treat my mother well. That’s the truth.” Years later, Ba Noi, revealed to me that she felt she needed to leave the intolerant climate of her village life for the United States. While neighbors adored her second son for his good looks and white skin, because she had Dung, she felt unloved and ridiculed within her own home. “There was no way I could still live there. […] (From) My biological siblings, there was no love. My sisters-in-law didn’t have any love (for my child).” While being white allowed Amerasians and their mothers to bypass certain forms of racial discrimination, black Amerasians were harassed because of both their ethnicity (part U.S. American), and race (Black).

        Being Black Amerasian during Viet Nam’s Post-War Reconstruction

The information provided to me by my Amerasian interviewees about racism and impoverishment echoed that of Ba Noi’s opinions and the available research on the discriminatory attitudes against blackness in Viet Nam. I began each interview asking Amerasians about their memories prior to the end of the Viet Nam War, which were few and lacked detail when they were expressed. Because American involvement in the War lasted between 1961 and 1975, most of my interviewees were very young children at the war’s end. These interviewees, born between 1967 and 1971, were able to recall vivid memories from their later childhood days. Their stories elucidate the discrimination and impoverishment that marked their early life.

“Coming over to a friend’s house to play, their parents would be afraid that I would steal their things. (When I was) playing with their children; they would be afraid that I would spoil them,” recalls my aunt, Son, a black Amerasian woman of 42. Unlike the light-hearted and objective aura that the Amerasian men I interviewed demonstrated, the pain of my aunt’s childhood appears on her face and voice as recounts her hardships growing up as a black Amerasian individual in Viet Nam.

When Aunt Son was five, her mother, no longer able to support her, left Aunt Son to be raised by relatives. Never knowing her father, or provided with any information about him, Aunt Son became fatherless and motherless. Aunt Son had already been living in abject poverty, owning a mere two pairs of clothes and one pair of sandals, when she began enduring the additional torment of being teased by other school children. Like thousands of black Amerasians who were called American and “Vietnamese nigger,” Son’s school mates would tease that Amerasians have twelve assholes. Reminiscing on the remaining perception of Amerasians in Viet Nam, Aunt Son’s childhood signaled to her that if she had not reached the United States, she would remain comparable to a homeless and wandering person because she was Amerasian. “No one loves us. No one likes us.”

        Aunt Son’s story about facing discrimination because of her race echoes that of my other interviewees and literature on Amerasians. Robert S. McKelvey’s book, Dust of Life, alludes to the fact that Amerasian children were termed “bui doi,” literally meaning “dust of life (157).” Black Amerasians, including all of my interviewees were called “Black” by other Vietnamese, a derogatory term in Viet Nam that can be roughly translated to the terms nigger or a savage in English (McKelvey: 87, 85). The harassment was heaviest in school.

        Uncle Thao recalls that, “They (school children) treat me friendly sometimes. Sometimes they call me, you know, black boy, Vietnamese nigger.” The 39-year-old laughs bitterly about the way classmates and other children treated him growing up, “When you’re younger, you know, you get angry because you’ve got a name and they call you Vietnamese nigger or American boy. It makes me don’t feel comfortable […] Now that I’m older, I don’t care anymore. I’m old enough, so I let it go. But during that period of transition in history, first we were poor, second we had no food, and then in addition, we had to deal with the fact that we were Amerasian. Food and shelter was one kind of struggle, (a) physical struggle, but being Amerasian, it affects your mindset. For example, I went to school, and people kept calling me names, then I couldn’t go to school. There are days when I didn’t go to school because of that. Why go to a place that’s not comfortable? I couldn’t learn. That really affected me. I mean, if you go to school and they call you a Vietnamese nigger, and you don’t retaliate, they’ll keep calling you a Vietnamese nigger.” Uncle Thao’s account of how facing intolerance and bullying from other children deterred him from his studies illustrate how discrimination perpetuates poverty and low performance amongst Amerasians, particularly black Amerasians. According to McKelvey, Amerasians dropped out of school in alarming rates because of the unfair treatment they received from classmates and teachers. This created a culture of illiteracy and homelessness among Amerasians which perpetuated their existing disenfranchisement and feelings of inferiority.

        Although Aunt Son believes that one’s ethnicity as Amerasian is a greater determining factor for his or her poor treatment, my other interviewees believed that racism against blacks was disproportionately harsh. Whiteness in Viet Nam has long been associated divinity and considered angelic, while blackness represents impurity or tanned peasants from the lower class who dwelled all day in the sun (McKelvey: 88). While my father reminisced with Uncle Thao about their childhoods as I finished up my shoot, my father comments,

“The Black Amerasians like us, the pure Vietnamese, they don’t accept us. Yeah, if they love us […] like our biological uncles and things like that than sure. But if we’re talking about society (as a whole), they don’t accept us. Amerasians, sure, white Amerasians are also mixed but they’re still white [...] If a pair of brothers and sisters go out in the street, than they would choose the sister if she were white. That’s the complete truth. You can’t argue that. (March 2011)”

        Viet Nam had been traditionally been an overwhelmingly homogenous nation before wars with the United States and the French introduced White, Latino, and Black foreigners to the country. Unlike the Amerasian experience however, the majority of Vietnamese Euroasians were immediately evaluated to France where they received French citizenship after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu (Bass: 85). Thus, the introduction of American men marked the beginning of strong and overtly discriminatory attitudes from Vietnamese citizens who valued ethnic purity. Nonetheless, the introduction of different races also caused the creation segregation and racial hierarchies. Bars serving American soldiers in Viet Nam were separated into those which served black soldiers versus those which served white soldiers. Women serving in primarily black bars were belittled and discriminated against to a greater extent than other women, including prostitutes working in white bars (Yarborough: 17). The treatment of Vietnamese women associated with black soldiers unsurprisingly followed the patterns of the American military’s discriminatory treatment of black soldiers in the war. White men often held more prestigious positions in the military, while black men were disproportionately placed into more dangerous and less desirable combat zones, where they were arguably used as cannon fodder (David and Krane: 1971). While the Cold War marked the beginning of military desegregation in the U.S. military, it also coincided with a period of strong racial unrest and uprising within the United States as a nation. The Viet Nam War occurred during a period marked by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements where African Americans were fighting for equal rights within the United States. Unfortunately, sentiments about black inferiority were transnational. The differentiation between the Vietnamese treatment of people associated with African Americans compared to those with associations to white Americans extended most potently to their treatment of white Amerasian children in comparison to black Amerasians.

        “Your uncle was very privileged growing up, unlike your father^[12],” my mother comments about her perception on the unequal treatment of her husband Dung, and Dung’s half brother, a white Amerasian. “Everyone in the neighborhood thought he was very white and handsome. He was valued.” According to Yarborough, mothers of white Amerasian children often conversely gain status for bearing a white child (25). Although my father strayed from addressing his feelings on the differential treatments between him and his white Amerasian brother, Ba Noi was not so measured in her analysis of the obvious difference. “My black child, I don’t think people cared for him so I kept him close to me. So much so that it wasn’t until reunification that I took him home to his grandmother. To be honest, when I took him home to my aunts and the neighborhood women, they did not show love and compassion to my child.”

        My father, however, did open up about school, believing that although was valued by some people, education was insurmountably more difficult because he was teased daily. “Sometimes they called me Amerasian, black American. The truth was that it was daily, every day. You hear it and you get angry, angry and then sad, but what can I do? That was the truth. So fine, I let it go. If they want to keep calling me that, then so be it. I’m studying, so I keep studying.” But his resilience did not always come naturally as he was often tempted to skip school, just as Uncle Thao was, to avoid the constant harassment. Although Uncle Thao and my father did not face overt discrimination from educators, by many accounts education was made more difficult for Amerasians because they were given harder tests, provided with less teacher attention, and on a whole had fewer materials to work with (Yarborough: 86). Black Amerasians who stood out most phenotypically and were associated with Americans were embarrassingly taught songs and history lessons about communist triumphs and American evil (Yarborough: 85). My father jokes that school was used for brainwashing in Viet Nam, but accepted the perspectives of why such harassment and brainwashing occurred, “not everyone hated me. There was a percentage who valued me. But the percentage who did not like me was greater because it was the immediate after war period. And reunification had just happened, and back then people said, ‘Americans were evil and I was a child, half of my blood was American so I wasn’t treated with much kindness and compassion.” He and all authors writing about Vietnamese Amerasians noted that Amerasians, particularly Black Amerasians, rarely went to high school, and they were virtually banned from college, a situation that almost entirely extinguishes any goals these Amerasians, reminders of capitalist greed and imperialism, may have for future upward mobility.

        Fortunately for my father and my other interviewees, they received enough education and had a strong enough support system to avoid becoming a begger or gang member whom McKelvey and other authors have documented in their research. While Uncle Thao and my father were spared from violent attacks of racism in their neighborhoods because their villages were small enough and everyone knew one another well enough, that if I child screamed, villagers would notice, not all Vietnamese Amerasians were this fortunate. A wealthy Vietnamese man Trin Yarborough interviewed during her research recalls:

“All the Amerasians were very poor, and on the street (they) would be kicked and beaten, and their mothers called whores—worse if the kid was black. Some tried to deny they were mixed—they’d say, ‘Oh no, I just have darker skin (61).”

        While all Amerasian children in southern Viet Nam bore the face of the American enemy and represented a war lost, black Amerasians who stood out most notably with their curly hair and dark skin bore the brunt of the harassment.

        Amerasian children faced a climate of uncertainty immediately after the war in addition to their impoverishment and daily bouts with racism. While many ARVN^[13] soldiers and American sympathizers were placed into re-education camps and New Economic Zones (NEZ)^[14], rumors circulated that the Communist government would round up and murder anyone who was affiliated with the United States (Yarborough: 40). Bearing undeniable resemblance to their American roots, Uncle Thao and my father confronted these rumors daily. Uncle Thao recalls, “We kept hearing that sooner or later Amerasians would be thrown into the ocean. I was scared. […] Every time you make a little (bit) of trouble, they say, ‘hey, watch out we’re going to put you in a bag and throw you in the ocean.” According Uncle Thao and my father, growing up in a climate of war and impoverishment in their own nation and neighboring Cambodia, meant that no rumor, no matter how monstrous, could be ruled out. “To be honest, as hard as we had it, we were fortunate that they didn’t come and round us up and bash our heads in like the Khmer Rouge,” my father said, “I really thought that was a possibility.”

        Dreaming of the U.S.

        In Viet Nam, my interviewee’s experiences were saturated with stories about a struggle for daily survival, riddled with anecdotes about a reality of hunger, illness, teasing, racism, discrimination, heartbreak, and long days of work as children and women. They needed to escape with the belief that their lives had more potential than the stifled reality of poverty and prejudice they faced on a daily occasion in Viet Nam.  Says Uncle Thao, “I knew that over there, America, I wasn’t really sure where that is […] but every time I looked out in the ocean, I knew that one day, I would go out of this region (Viet Nam), […] Every time I see the sun rise and the sun set and looked at the ocean and see that, I have a solemn feeling.[…] I think to myself, I don’t know when I’ll be able to go the United States because every day I would hear people talk about how great the United States is and around here we eat kho mi (fried noodles) and rice only, who would want to stay?”         

        As a poor child, Uncle Thao romanticized about the possibilities the United States would bring him. However, as a young adult, unlike other Amerasians who had struggled with poverty all their lives, Uncle Thao did not have unrealistic expectations that a move to the United States would signal his ticket into a world of prosperity. He only hoped to escape the reality of having to literally dig through dirt at the American bases near his home in order to get a taste of the old sticks of butter and snacks which the Americans had left buried in the dirt after the war. Through his desperation, the food Uncle Thao dug up came to represent the possibility of American sweetness. “(I) found American things, like butter, they buried in the ground. We could dig it up […] and it was still edible and still good. Because American food is good, and we were so hungry and we wanted to eat American food to see what American food tastes like because we never had the opportunity to eat it before. (I) had to dig it up, and (I) could eat, so (I) ate it.”

        Hopes and expectations for the United States may have been higher in the Amerasian population because the anxiety, bitterness, and desperation which has come to exemplify the post-war period was higher for Amerasians or those associated with Amerasians than other Vietnamese. When the Orderly Departure Program (ODP), an alternative program allowing impoverished and politically oppressed individuals to immigrate to one of forty receiving nations, Ba Hai explained that she and Phuc^[15] had no choice but to leave. “Phuc is already Amerasian. Right now, if we stayed over there, we face the problem of people judging and talking about us. They gossip about this and that. Saying Americans aren’t good [...] (if you were a) girl who worked for Americans and worked at bars, they don’t like that. So I had to go away from there. I had to apply for the papers and go. Like if we return here (the United States), this country was already his father’s.”  And despite its distance and illusiveness, the Amerasians and their mothers dreamed that the nation would treat them with more compassion than Viet Nam had during their lifetimes. The United States was Phuc’s fatherland and their second home, according to Ba Hai.

        While the mothers and Amerasians I spoke to were not homeless beggers, and brought along at least one relative to the United States, this was not the case for the thousands of Amerasian children ended up as street children after being tossed away and given to orphanages after their births. A number of Amerasian children were born despite their mothers’ efforts to perform self-abortions (Yarborough: 30). The process of immigrating with intact families likely plays a role in the successful assimilation process of these Amerasians in Portland, Maine. Homeless Amerasians who were brought by fraudulent families experienced a second bout of abandonment and depression once they had reached the U.S. and continued to face racial exclusion from those who were meant to act as a support system to help them build a new life (Yarborough: 171-172). With measured expectations and adequate support however, Amerasians who reached Portland with some family, were able mostly able to achieve moderate upward mobility.

        Similar to Uncle Thao, Aunt Son did not expect the United States to give her immediate prosperity but rather, an opportunity to move beyond the meager conditions of her childhood. Despite attaining few material possessions and working manual labor jobs for a number of years after arriving in the United States, considering the alternative, Aunt Son was both thankful and content. She acutely recalls a story of buying flip flops after a going a year without being able to afford a pair in Viet Nam, only to realize that the woman at the market had cheated her by giving her two flip flops for the same foot. When she attempted to exchange, the woman did not allow her to. Aunt Son’s story exemplifies what she calls a lack of kindness shown toward her by the Vietnamese public. “If I were in Viet Nam, I would have no opportunities. I would be like a homeless person.”

 My Tien: “Because you’re Amerasian?”

Aunt Son: “Yes, because I’m Amerasian.”

        My interviewees perceived that though the United States made no promises concerning unearned luxury, they were at least given the opportunity to improve upon their circumstances through their own hard work and volition.  As Aunt Son noted, “I heard that the United States had equality and fairness. They did not differentiate between black people and white people. That’s one point. And, coming over here, if you work hard, then you’ll be able to make a living.”  Before she could validate these statements, however, she and other Amerasians had to first endure a grueling and long-winded process involving paperwork, interviews, delays, and period at the Philippines Refugee Processing Center (PRPC) before they were able to begin their lives in the United States. Faltering relations between the United States and Viet Nam left many Amerasians and their families anxious and uncertain about the possibility of making it into the United States. My father, Uncle Thanh, Uncle Thao, and Aunt Son had filed paperwork with the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) after hearing about an act that allowed Amerasians to immigrate to the United States in the early 1980s. There, a waiting game began. It would be six to ten years filled with dashed hopes, rumors, and anxiety, while the U.S. and Viet Nam worked to hash out their differences, before Amerasians and their families would be put through their three minute interviews for U.S. immigration^[16]. Because the level of fraud was so high, interviewees had one opportunity to prove their status as Amerasian or legitimate relatives to Amerasians. If they passed, a ticket to Bataan, Philippines awaited them. If they failed, however, they would be sent home, and prohibited from an opportunity to retest^[17]. Real family members were often denied passage during the latter stages of the Homecoming Act. Uncle Thanh’s birth mother, who did not raise him, stumbled over her answers during the interview process in 1989, and as a consequence, both she and Uncle Thanh’s two half brothers remain in Viet Nam today. Uncle Thanh and his Amerasian sister, both having distinct African American features, passed through the interview process with relative ease. When they arrived in the Philippines, adult Amerasians and their families were taught basic English skills, and were provided with cultural orientation (CO) and work orientation (WO) for six months before a resettlement site and sponsor or sponsorship program was secured for them^[18].                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

The United States, Race, Language, Assimilation

        Language was mentioned without fail when I asked the Amerasians and mothers about their biggest obstacle in the United States. For Amerasians, who have prominent American features, the inability to speak and understand the language of a people who resemble them, stifled their ability to develop strong relationships with Americans outside of their workplaces. Nonetheless, they were grateful living in small apartments, working in food production factories and as plumbers, dishwashers, and as the grill cook at McDonalds. My father put what I would label as the effects of social marginalization of refugees and Amerasians, who lived in the lowest sector of American society, during the early 1990s, into perspective.

My Tien: “Before you came to the United States, didn’t you hear that you could live well and become rich? And now you’re living in this small apartment, were you disappointed?”

Dung Huynh: “No because in Viet Nam, the house wasn’t sturdy. If it rained, it was wet on the inside. So after we came over here, to be honest, at that time, we were just happy being able to go and didn’t think about being rich and having material items because I knew that if we could immigrate, it would be better than the place where we were currently living at that time. At that time, we were poor, extremely poor. We did not have enough rice to eat. Just rice, not even the food to go with it […] I only had two outfits. Growing up, 15-16, working for others […] like traveling from town to town. I only had one pair of clothes, then when I got there, I changed into my one pair of work clothes. And when it got dirty from work, I would go home and wash it at night after I changed back into my normal clothes, and in the morning I’d change back into my work clothes. Sometimes it was windy and rainy and the clothes didn’t dry so I had to wear it wet and cold. So when they told us, we could immigrate, it was great. We didn’t think about being rich or poor. The apartment, if you compare it to (the house we’re living in) now, is small but at that time, it was huge […] All of a sudden, I had a fridge and a stovetop. Over in Viet Nam, we were peasants, we were farmers. We didn’t have that stuff. We cooked using fire and gas. We did not have electricity…Over here, we have everything. Me and my next brother down worked for two years (in Viet Nam) but didn’t have enough money to buy a used bicycle, just used. Over here, we’re living like this. There’s nothing sad about it.”

        But the job positions and lack of literacy skills did force Vietnamese Amerasians to seek support and form relationships with the Vietnamese American community rather than encourage them to form relationships with others outside their community. While their literacy has improved and most have attained better jobs, these Amerasians were relatively secluded to the Vietnamese American community. The desire to feel accepted as an individual who belongs in their fathers’ country, is a struggle Aunt Son and other Vietnamese Amerasians continue to face.

        Any outsider looking in on her life would say that she lives well. She owns a spacious medium-sized home in the Portland suburbs with her husband of eighteen years, and together, they have three beautiful children. No longer working manual labor, she and husband Thanh Huynh, are owners of a successful nail salon. They reside within driving distance of her maternal family, his maternal family, and a small yet vibrant Vietnamese American community, a far cry from the conditions she faced as a young person in Viet Nam. I interviewed Aunt Son inside her room where a closet full of clothes, and in particular, nice shoes she could have never imagined affording back in Viet Nam, filled the background. But it takes more than upward mobility and material possessions to please Aunt Son. As an Amerasian woman, she continues to struggle with her mixed identity and society’s perception of her.

In Viet Nam, people would call you Con Lai. And after coming over to the United States, then Americans (would) say you’re Vietnamese. That situation makes Amerasians very sad. It is already the case that we do not have mothers and fathers. (So) coming to the United States, I thought, the United States is my fatherland but in the end the American people do not have that mindset. They think we are Vietnamese. That’s the saddest reality of Amerasian people.

        Aunt Son’s mixed race partially excludes her from both ethnic communities which she belongs in the United States as well as in Viet Nam. Her cultural upbringing, Vietnamese belief system, and accent, excludes her from mainstream American society, while her appearance, particularly dark skin, and curly hair continues to cause discrimination against her when she visits Viet Nam. “My friends and relatives would call me by my name, but the Vietnamese general public, they still comment that the Amerasian’s coming back, the black Amerasian is visiting.” Although the Black Amerasians I interviewed for this project have all experienced upward mobility within the United States, echoes about how race continues to negatively affect their lives and belief systems persist within their narratives. Showing unconscious yet prominent beliefs in prevalent and lasting stereotypes about blackness in Viet Nam, Ba Noi expressed to me that she was surprised that Scott was as neat and meticulous as he was. Catching me with a bit of surprise and disappointment, she said “true, he was black but he was so neat and careful.” Genuinely sensing nothing wrong with her heartfelt narrative, at another point, Ba Noi insists that she had to protect Dung more than her white Amerasian son as a child because he was not as good looking. Similarly, during her narrative, Ba Hai half-heartedly jokes that her son caused so much mischief because was he was Amerasian. Considering that these were among the most tolerant women to minority men during the Viet Nam War period, these sentiments showcase how securely ideas about race have been ingrained in Vietnamese upbringings. They also demonstrate how profound the struggle and resilience of black Amerasians in Viet Nam, and to a lesser extent, the United States, have been during the past four decades.  

Conclusion

        Contact between American servicemen and Vietnamese women beginning with American involvement in the Viet Nam War in the early 1960’s generated the birth of approximately 100,000 Amerasians. More than just mixed-raced individuals, Amerasians embody a period in history that was defined by an international competition between communist and capitalist superpowers. In the larger scheme, underdeveloped nations like Viet Nam were where these competitions took place and Vietnamese Amerasians represented the relationships between the U.S. superpower and its puppet nation. The surprising resultant defeat of the United States to North Viet Nam led the children American servicemen to become scapegoats to Vietnamese anger. Amerasians represented the face of the enemy in addition to  the stolen chastity of women who were not supposed to engage in sexual activity before marriage or with outsiders. The prominent features of black Amerasians as well as a global sense of discrimination against blackness made their struggle more difficult. My interviewees showed that they were able to endure prejudice against their ethnicity, race, and overall mixed identity, to a build a successful life for themselves in the United States.

Works Cited

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Brewer, Susan. 2009. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to

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Jana K. Lipman. ""The Face Is the Road Map": Vietnamese Amerasians in U.S. Political and

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McKelvey, Robert. The Dust of Life: America's Children Abandoned in Vietnam. 1999.

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Yarborough, Trin. Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War. 2006.

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DeBonis, Steven. Children of the Enemy: Oral Histories of Vietnamese Amerasians and Their

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U.S. General Accounting Office. "Vietnamese Amerasian Resettlement: Education,

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