In their fathers' land
Left in Vietnam years ago, many children of U.S. soldiers are struggling to make new lives in America
Hong Lam landed in her father's country on April 6, 1994.
It was supposed to be the day of her rebirth. In the United States, she would bury the rejection, pain and hopelessness that had been life in her mother's country 13 time zones away.
"It's not your place here," Lam's grandmother had told her. "Your grandmother is getting old.
You need to take this chance."
They were living in a tiny house in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Lam knew nothing about the United States, except that it was paradise and that her deep brown skin and kinky hair -- the legacy of her soldier father -- gave her entree.
But finding a home in the United States has, in many ways, been as elusive as it was in Vietnam. Lam's exuberant optimism faded quickly into the reality that being accepted by American society, gaining U.S. citizenship and finding her father are probably fantasies.
Lam, 33, is one of thousands of children of U.S. servicemen who lead shadow lives, isolated from American life and the Vietnamese community by a chasm of illiteracy, language barriers, distrust and discrimination.
Drawn largely to one another and bound by their common past, these Vietnamese Amerasians cluster in neighborhoods scattered throughout the major cities of the United States. They work the long hours of the nation's underclass and attract little attention.
Most have had great difficulty adapting to American society. Few expect to attain citizenship because it requires a written test, which is almost impossible for them to comprehend. Those who know anything about their fathers are prohibited by law from trying to contact them.
To Dr. Robert McKelvey, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health and Science University, Vietnamese Amerasians represent everything he remembers from America's relationship with Vietnam -- the fleeting interest, the broken promises, the abandonment.
"These people are our children," said McKelvey, a Vietnam veteran. "They're intimately entwined genetically with us and our history. They came to their fathers' land, but they haven't been received like lost children. That was a hope that propelled many of them here.
"They're part of us, but we don't treat them that way any more than the Vietnamese did."
Left behind
When the last Americans lifted off in helicopters from the top of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in April 1975, tens of thousands of people with ties to the United States were left behind to fend for themselves as the enemy crashed in.
Some of them were tainted not because of anything they had done. They were my lai, half-breeds. Their eyes, hair color and height reminded people of the Americans and the war, and for that, they would suffer.
Most of them already knew abandonment. Their fathers had left them to return to America. In many cases, their mothers were gone, too, leaving them adrift in a country where family gives a person status and respect.
Few received much education. Many are illiterate in their native tongue.
Most lived their lives, from childhood on, working as field hands or housekeepers or begging on city streets, slaves to a caste system as oppressive as any in modern history.
In March 1988, the U.S. government began admitting them under the Amerasian Homecoming Act. About 26,000 Vietnamese Amerasians eventually immigrated to the United States, but most were already in their late teens and 20s.
About 65,000 family members came with them, although some were family only for convenience, "adopted" for the chance to come to America.
Only 100 could prove paternity, which entitled them to citizenship. The U.S. government gave the rest green cards, classifying them as immigrants.
They were admitted based on their appearance. The more Caucasian or black features they had, the more likely they were to be approved.
At the time, Lam had a thick Afro that framed round eyes and chocolate brown skin. In Vietnam, these African-American characteristics had branded her a my den, a racial epithet.
But they had also offered a way out.
She remembers when, as a young girl, a group of youngsters cruelly teased and threw rocks at her. An old woman in the village spoke up.
"Shut up, you fools! Look at her. One day she will leave this place."
A hard life
Lam's two-bedroom apartment is in a cluster of buildings on a narrow street near Hemphill Street in Fort Worth. Her boyfriend, also half-American, lives with her, and they share the place with another couple.
They are surrounded by Vietnamese Amerasians. English is almost never spoken except by children. Lam is better at understanding English than speaking it, so she speaks through an interpreter.
The walls are painted white, decorated with a few posters of Vietnamese pop stars. Friends donated the two couches in the living room, which is dominated by a large-screen television.
On the floor is a shrine where her boyfriend sometimes prays to the god of wealth and the god of the earth.
Monday through Friday, Lam leaves at 4:30 a.m. for work at a commercial refrigerator company on the city's north side. She learned to solder because it pays 75 cents more an hour than straight assembly work.
When she gets off work at 2:30 p.m., she either goes to her second job, in the kitchen of a nursing home in the Medical District, or to nail school. She is never home before 7 p.m., including on Saturdays.
But she isn't complaining.
"I like it here," she said. "I work hard over here, but not like in Vietnam, where I worked in the fields."
Lam told the stories of her life slowly, over weeks and months. Years of loneliness have made her quiet, and the painful memories serve as barriers to quick friendships and easy conversations.
She worries about being alone again, this time in a country she doesn't understand.
"The only person I have is my grandmother, and she is all the way in Vietnam," she said. "I'm scared sometimes. If something happens to me, I've got nobody."
Lam was born in Saigon on Jan. 28, 1970. She never asked how her parents met or what branch of the service her father was in.
Not that she had much of an opportunity. When she was a few weeks old, her mother left her on the sidewalk of a busy street.
Her great-aunt -- the woman she calls grandmother -- picked her up and is the only family she has known.
"I love my grandmother very much, so I didn't ask about my mom and dad," she said.
Lam's great-aunt feared for her life as the North Vietnamese army rolled south in March 1975, capturing Hue and Da Nang and Ban Me Thuot. On April 30, Saigon fell.
They listened for footsteps and watched for soldiers or government agents.
"She was afraid they would kill me," Lam said. "She hid me under the bed. Sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for half a day, I stayed there."
Living in such a big city, constantly worrying about Lam's safety, grew to be too much. In 1976 or '77, they moved to rural Binh Duong nearby.
There, Lam worked in the rice fields and in her great-aunt's garden, where they raised vegetables to sell.
They were so poor that they never had enough rice to fill a bowl. They would make rice soup instead because it went further.
At 13, Lam moved in with a middle-class family in a village near Can Tho. She baby-sat, cleaned house and cooked. On Sundays, her day off, she would visit her great-aunt.
The family treated her well, and she was paid a small amount during the four years of work. But Lam mostly remembers how alone she felt, how no one wanted to be her friend, how fear kept her close to the family's house.
She can't remember anything from her childhood that makes her smile.
"I only remember my grandmother holding me and feeding me," she said. "That's the best memory I have."
The Vietnamese government didn't prohibit Amerasians from going to school, but it could be a cruel place. Children jumped Lam before school and after school. They beat her, taunted her, refused to sit next to her.
"I felt insecure because of what they said," she said. "I'm a tiny little girl. I didn't want to go anymore."
So Lam quit school. She had attended for three days.
Years later, when she needed to sign her name to the official government documents that sent her to the United States, Lam wrote an X.
"I'm angry at me for not knowing how to read or write," she said. "I feel sorry for me."
It has been more than a decade since Lam raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth to the U.S. government official behind the table in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.
"How old are you?"
"I'm 19 years old."
"Who is your father?"
"I don't know."
"Where is your father?"
"My father is in America."
"Do you really want to go to America?"
"Yes, I want to go to America. It's my dad's country."
When Lam is alone, she sometimes wonders whether her father thinks about her, whether he remembers that he left behind a pregnant girlfriend. She especially wonders whether he would believe that his daughter lives in Texas now.
"I wonder what he looks like," she said. "But I have nothing from him, no papers, no pictures."
That alone keeps her from thinking too much about it. Where would she start anyway? It doesn't make her angry. She doesn't seem to be able to work up any anger at people she can't even visualize.
Ask about her future, and she will say that she wants to pay off her car, as if that might be it for her.
Ask her about further in her future, and she will say that she wants to be a U.S. citizen eventually. She wants it for many reasons, but none is more important than her wish to return to Vietnam to visit her great-aunt.
Without a U.S. passport, she won't set foot in that country.
Changing families
Hung Dang is 33, according to the U.S. government. But the birth date on his green card isn't right. His mother says it was February 1969, which would make him a year older. She doesn't remember what day.
Dang's father was a sergeant at the air base in Cam Ranh Bay, where squadrons of F-4s and C-7s were based. The wages were excellent at the huge Air Force and Navy facility, and Dang's mother worked there, taking out garbage and cleaning up.
The sergeant helped her get a job in the kitchen because the work was easier. He was a good man, kind and thoughtful. He gave her extra money so she could send it to her family. Dang's mother cared for him a great deal.
Two months after she got pregnant with Dang, she returned to her village to visit her parents. She was gone a month.
When she returned to Cam Ranh, the sergeant was gone. No one on the base would tell her where he went.
She kept Dang for five years, until she could do so no longer.
She had another half-American boy by then. His father had gone home, too.
One day in 1974, Dang's mother took the boys to a market in Phan Thiet. She was desperately poor, with the air base closed, and unable to regularly feed her sons.
She asked women all over the market if they wanted to adopt a little boy.
Nhieu Dang had only girls. She wanted a boy. She chose Dang.
"I was just a little kid. I didn't know anything. I just followed her," he said.
He doesn't remember crying. He doesn't remember much of the moment at all.
They went to Mui Ne, a coastal village several hours south of Cam Ranh. Dang had a new mother, a woman who owned a business selling corn and was relatively wealthy by Vietnamese standards.
"I missed my mom. I'm sad. But I don't know what to do," Dang said.
The communists made Nhieu Dang serve a year in prison for adopting Dang, and he stayed with her older daughters. Then, they sent her to do six months of "community service" on a state farm. Dang went with her.
They planted sweet potatoes and lived under a makeshift tent of coconut fronds. They ate potatoes every single day, every single meal. Dang knew it was because of him.
"I asked myself, 'Why do you have to be like yourself?' "
His mother came to get him before she escaped from Vietnam in 1978, one of hundreds of thousands of "boat people" who crossed the South China Sea or the Gulf of Thailand in rickety vessels.
His adoptive mother hid him. He thought it was because the communists were coming. He never knew that it was his mother who had come. She left without him, with his brothers.
"She just go because she doesn't want to miss the boat," he said.
When Dang was 14, he left, and walked to Phan Thiet, about seven miles from his home in Mui Ne.
"My stepmother was mean to me," he said. Her sons-in-law "beat up on me because they say I don't listen to her. I got tired of it."
Sometimes he begged for money. Sometimes he stole it. Sometimes he unloaded things for people or helped them with laundry.
At night, he slept on the street. When it rained, he found a shop with cover.
A year later, he and three friends jumped a train to Ho Chi Minh City, where he continued his life on the streets.
He washed dishes for restaurants and ate whatever the customers didn't finish. He bathed by jumping into a dirty lake.
His adoptive mother found him after three years. One day, Dang looked up and saw her with one of her daughters.
"I wanted to run away from them," he said. "I didn't want to go back. But she talked sweet to me. 'Why did you do this? I miss you.' So I went back with her. It felt nice to hear that."
Dang worked around the village for a few years, until his adoptive mother heard from villagers about the chance to move to the United States. The news traveled by word-of-mouth because the government never publicized it.
They completed the paperwork, waited months and months, then showed up for the interviews and were granted admission.
Sent abroad
They left Vietnam, bound, Dang thought, for the United States. But they went to the Philippines for a six-month stay in the jungles, in a camp set up by the U.S. government to ease the transition for all the immigrants.
The facility was Spartan, which made the heat and the rain seem all the more relentless. He attended school to learn English every morning and worked every afternoon in one of the camp's odd jobs, like repairing trucks or cleaning buildings.
In May 1992, Hung Dang, palms sweaty, heart racing, arrived at Los Angeles International Airport with his adoptive mother.
He walked into an air-conditioned Eden, with crowds of well-dressed people, kiosks with muffins and lattes and floors that were remarkably clean.
"Hung, this is America," he told himself.
He saw a man from a refugee agency holding a sign that said DANG, but after all that English training, he couldn't understand a word the man said. He just got in the car with him and they took off down a highway.
"There were five, six lanes," he said. "Cars were going everywhere. I saw tall buildings and big houses. In my mind, it was beautiful."
But Dang didn't want to stay. He knew his mother had ended up in Fort Worth. She had sent him letters in Vietnam and sent him American clothes, hoping to reconnect.
After three months in California, he moved to Fort Worth.
He couldn't remember the sound of his mother's voice.
When they met finally, at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, they couldn't talk. They just cried.
For months, too frightened to do anything else, he rode a bicycle to a place on Belknap Street to learn English.
After a year, he got a job at an electronics company, where he soldered and did some assembly work for $4.25 an hour. He worked with a lot of Vietnamese and a lot of Mexicans. His boss could speak to the Spanish speakers but not to Dang.
"I was fired because I didn't understand anything anybody said. The supervisor took me to his office and fired me. But I didn't know what he said," Dang remembers. "So I came back to work the next day."
His boss took pity on him and ordered one of the Vietnamese workers to help him.
"It's funny, I know," said Dang, who loves to tell the story now because his English is so much better.
He lives with his mother and two brothers in a 2-story apartment in Hurst, a stone's throw from L.D. Bell High School. It is furnished with sofas and a small dining room table and has an area where his mother prays every evening.
He drives a 24-foot commercial truck around the Metroplex, taking plumbing supplies to builders. When he's not at work, he's usually at home.
He likes it there. He feels safe.
"Sometimes I think about being homeless, and I look at where I am now, and I'm smiling," he said. "I know I've got a better life now. I will try to go back to Vietnam and show them who I am."
Dang has quite a few white friends, and his English, although heavily accented, is good. He calls himself "Mike." Friends made crude jokes about his real first name, so he switched. It doesn't bother him. They're just teasing, he said.
He doesn't know any black people, like his father. But he would like to. He may not know his father, but he would like to know his father's people.
Like Lam, he wants to be an American, and already considers himself mostly one. He doesn't want to be Vietnamese; nor does he want to be Vietnamese-American.
"Inside them, I know they think the same as the people in Vietnam," he said. "They never get over the fact that I'm Vietnamerican. They don't say it, but I know they think it."
It's why he doesn't date Vietnamese women, not that he thinks any of them would accept him anyway. He's self-conscious about his dark skin.
Recently, a Vietnamese boy rode up on his bicycle and told Dang that he was ugly.
"See?" he said, his point proven.
Ten years from now, after more than 20 years in America, he hopes to meet a nice girl, have a family, buy a house and make sure that his mother is taken care of.
But the girl has to be white, and an American, he said.
"I don't want my kids to look like me," he said.
Coming tomorrow
Bernard Nguyen of Dallas can't shake the memory of the Vietnamese children with American faces who crowded an orphanage near a huge U.S. military base. The images drive him as he tries to help the offspring of U.S. servicemen obtain citizenship.
By Chris Vaughn - Star Telegraph - November 09, 2003.
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