When the Baby Falls

When the Baby Falls
By Lakin Ariel Wolf


During the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of children were fathered by American servicemen in Vietnam. They are the human legacy of war and sometimes of love. A generation conceived in conflict and born under two flags, they struggle, not only for survival but also for a sense of identity and value while living as pariahs in their mothers’ land or strangers in their fathers’. These are the god-children of the Vietnam War. They are called the Amerasians.
The Amerasians were born between 1962 and 1975 to Vietnamese mothers and American fathers under a battery of conditions almost as varied as their parents themselves. Occasionally their parents were formally married, a practice discouraged by the American authorities. Far more often they lived together in long-term, informal relationships effectively as husband and wife until the man was transferred or sent home. Sometimes the children were the products of one nights stands, the offspring of virtual strangers, the sons and daughters of lonely young GIs and young bar-girls just trying to make a living in the eye of turbulence and want.
The Amerasians were fatherless from almost the very beginning. Some were born months after their fathers had dissolved back into the fog of war, and most of those who actually met their fathers were far too young to remember it. When the Americans were ordered home they left their Vietnamese girlfriends and children behind. To minimize the discomfort of departure, some soldiers simply moved on without saying goodbye. Others wanted to take their war-born families home with them but couldn’t because of wives and children they already had in the States, the tangled red-tape of immigration policy, or because their girlfriends were unwilling to leave their native land and tightknit families to become foreigners on the far side of the earth.
Left alone with their half-white or half-black babies, some mothers gave their infants away to orphanages or relatives or simply abandoned them, while others cherished their children and raised them as best they could. Many women took new GI boyfriends, gave birth to more Amerasian children, became separated from the children’s fathers and started the cycle again.
In April 1975, as the Communist troops swarmed over the South, the last Americans evacuated Vietnam leaving tens of thousands of their children behind. The Amerasians became “the Children of the Enemy” overnight. Frantic mothers burned or buried the evidence of their involvement with the Americans; love letters, photographs, and the documentation of their children’s births dissolved into smoke or disappeared into the earth. Many women, afraid of being caught with the ultimate evidence of collusion with the “enemy”, abandoned their half-American children. Others tried to disguise the foreignness of their children, but in a homogenous country like Vietnam where a slight build, straight black hair and dark almond eyes are the norm, disguising alien parentage was virtually impossible.
Though there was no official policy of discrimination as many had feared there would be, abuse of Amerasians and their mothers was widespread after the reunification of the country under Communism. A number of mothers were arrested and sent to work camps in the jungle. Families were forced to relocate to isolated tracts of land called New Economic Zones where they struggled to survive in the face of hunger and tropical diseases. Children were taunted in the streets called Con Lai (half-breed) or My Den (Black American), and beaten by pure Vietnamese kids. Often it was the dark-skinned and curly-headed children of African American soldiers that suffered the most.
In the years following the war a vast number of Amerasian children ended up on the streets. Some had been abandoned; others had been driven away from home by abusive foster or step-parents; some ran away. They slept where they could- on the streets and in the markets, in bus-stations and disused Buddhist temples. They subsisted by shining shoes, selling cigarettes and soft drinks, pedaling papers or washing dishes. Some became beggars; some became thieves; almost all became proficient liars. In a world set firmly against them, they learned how to survive. Existing on the fringe of society, mistrusted, mistreated and confused, they came to identify themselves as Americans, children of invisible fathers that they would find someday.
For over a decade after the war, immigration to America was practically impossible for Amerasians. But in 1987, with the passing of a bill called the Amerasian Homecoming Act (AHA), Amerasians and their Vietnamese relatives were allowed to apply for immigration to the United States. Those thousands that applied and were accepted were then sent to the Philippines Refugee Processing Center (PRPC) where they were, ostensibly, prepared for life in the United States.
Suddenly the forgein features that had marked them as outcasts their whole lives became not only their tickets “home”, but also a magnet for Vietnamese people desperate to get out of the country themselves. Those Vietnamese who could convince an Amerasian to claim them as relatives could come along. On the surface the fraudulent partnership seemed to offer a fair enough trade- the false relatives supplied the money necessary to expidite the emigration process and the Amerasians provided the magic carpet of their identity. But once out of Vietnam, it didn’t take long for the relationships between many Amerasians and their “families of convenience” to spiral into enmity and loathing.
In the first few years after the passing of the AHA, thousands of Amerasians immigrated to the United States. And they found themselves strangers. All their lives they had been told to just “go home”; at last they had, but… this place was strange, unfamiliar, forgein. Culturally and linguistically, they were Vietnamese. It seemed the physical qualities that had made them American in Vietnam were not enough to make them American in America.
Settled by the American government in cluster sites around the U.S., the Amerasians struggled to adapt to a reality much harsher than they had expected. Generally poor and uneducated, they seldom had any contact with or support from family in the States. Alcohol abuse, self-harm, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental issues, domestic abuse and crime clung to many of the young immigrants. The automatic sense of belonging they expected to find in their fathers’ country simply did not exist. But in spite of it all, many Amerasians managed to adapt, get an education, raise families of their own and become successful.
And where were their fathers? A study conducted by Ohio State University found that 76% of Amerasians want to meet their American fathers. Only 3% ever have. About 30% of Amerasians know their fathers’ names, but even when they can be located, many men have moved on, raised their American-born kids and don’t want their lives disrupted by illegitimate children left behind in the cradle of war. Other men, wracked with guilt and longing, search for sons and daughters they may have never met and will probably never find.
As of 2009, an estimated 25,000 Amerasians have immigrated to the United States. Only a few thousand are thought to still live in Vietnam, many of whom wish to remain there. The “children of the enemy” are no longer children; the youngest are now forty-one years old; the oldest, fifty-four. They are parents and grandparents now. And yet it seems the word “children” echoes around them still, unfortunate children of the war, ostracized children of Vietnam, forgotten and then remembered children of America. Born into a war that was never declared, their lives have been one long battle of attrition against the world. Some have won; some have lost. All are still at war.





References
Tucker, Spencer C. Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.Inc, 1998. Print
Yarbrough, Trin. Surviving Twice. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005. Print
Nguyen, Kien. The Unwanted. Boston, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001. Print
Fulghum, David; Dougan, Clark and Editors of Boston Publishing Company. The Vietnam Experience- The Fall of the South. Boston: Boston Publishing Company. 1985. Print
Doyle, Edward; Weiss, Stephen and the Editors of Boston Publishing Company. The Vietnam Experience- A Collision of Cultures. Boston: Boston Publishing Company. 1984. Print
Fischer, Julene; Stone, Robert. Images of War. Boston: Boston Publishing Company. 1986. Print
Muller, Karin. Hitchhiking Vietnam. Old Saybrook: The Globe Pequot Press. 1998. Print
McLeod, Mark W.; Thi Dieu, Nguyen. Cultures and Customs of Vietnam. Westport: Greenwood Press. 2001. Print
DeBonis, Steven. Children of the Enemy. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc. 1995. Print
Hoobler, Dorothy and Thomas. Vietnam, Why We Fought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1995. Print
Burrows, Larry. Larry Burrows Vietnam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2002. Print
Denenberg, Barry. Voices from Vietnam. New York: Scholastic Inc. 1995. Print