Children of the Enemy

by Steven DeBonis

  To Sapim, you are the number one girl of my life. I love you and want you so much

  Love always,

  Lt. Ballman (Batman)

  I WAS BORN in a small village in Hau Giang, in the Mekong Delta region, and I lived there all my life. Like most of the people in my village, I am Khmer, as is my wife.

  According to what my grandparents told me, my mother went from Hau Giang to Bien Hoa to learn how to be a seamstress. She met my father there, and they got married. My father was in the air force [according to his documents, Manivong’s father was in the army]. He left Vietnam in 1970. I was born before he left, and he named me Robert.

  My mother was suffering from cancer at the time my father was to leave Vietnam. He wanted her to go to America for treatment, but she would not leave Vietnam and her parents. My father returned to America without her.

  When my father got the news of my mother’s death in 1971, he came back to Vietnam and made a funeral ceremony for her, in accordance with Buddhist tradition. He wanted to take me back to America with him, but my grandparents wouldn’t let me leave. My father wrote to my grandparents until 1975, but I have not heard from him since then.

  I lived with my grandparents in a small hut made of coconut leaves. I went to school for a very short time, but I had to stop. It’s very difficult for Amerasians to stay in school. Within a few years the Communists had taken over, and both my grandparents died. I was on my own.

  I went to live at the Khmer Buddhist temple. At this time, the local authorities were restless, and the townspeople were afraid that the Communists would destroy the temple if an Amerasian novice stayed there. A monk in the temple tried to protect me. He told the people that I was an orphan and needed help. But after one month, I had to leave the pagoda.

  For a few years I worked tending water buffalo for people in the village. Many other Amerasians in the town had a similar situation, no homes, working odd jobs to survive. I had no house. At night I slept in the cemetery, sometimes on top of the flat concrete slabs they build over the grave. [I ask if Manivong if he was afraid, as many Khmer and Vietnamese are, of ghosts and spirits. He laughs and says he was not.]

  I entered the temple again about two years later, when I was about twelve. This time they accepted me, because the attitude of the local authorities had changed a little, and there was no longer a problem for an Amerasian to stay there. In my province, there are one hundred and eighteen temples, and I visited many of them. I studied in the temple, Vietnamese and Khmer language, Pali [the language of the Buddhist prayers], and Buddhism. I also worked in the field and in the garden.

  I felt comfortable in the temple, free in spirit. I felt that since I was a monk, no one would disturb me. But I could not be at ease because government attitudes often changed. How could I know what the government’s policy towards Amerasians would be in the future? This is why I decided to go to America.

  In Vietnam I could not have real freedom, I could not change my life for the better. In the temple, I was accepted by the other monks. There was no problem that I was Amerasian, but outside, it was different, there was discrimination. When I went out, I often told people that I was a different race, Chinese for example. This made it easier.

  Manivong in his neighborhood of the Philippine Refugee Processing Center

  When I get to America, I want to go to school. I hope to be an inventor, to invent electronic things, but now I worry that I won’t even be able to afford to pay rent. I am a free case. I have no one to sponsor me in the United States, but I want to go and live in Wisconsin. That is where my father is from. I wrote him sixteen registered letters from Vietnam. I think someone received them because they were not sent back, but I never got a reply. I believe he is still alive, and I will find him.

  My

  “I hit the streets, and survived by begging....”

  The monsoon in Bataan usually runs its course by the end of September. On this October eighth, however, the skies have opened with a vengeance, turning the road leading to the PRPC jail into a muddy quagmire. Inside the detention facility, refugees are incarcerated for the usual variety of crimes and infractions: unauthorized transfer of billet, gambling, frustrated homicide. My is in for the most common offenses, violation of the refugee camp liquor ban and “slight physical injury.” In plain language, he got drunk and got into a fight.

  This is not My’s first time in detention. He spent four years in a labor camp in Vietnam. My feels that the flimsy charges of theft and “moving without the proper documents” that sent him there would not have merited this sentence had he not been Amerasian.

  My’s legs and left arm are a mass of scars from self-inflicted knife wounds. His left forearm is unmarked, but above the elbow, the scars are uncountable, one leading into the next, forming a solid mass of tissue which almost encircles the biceps. His legs are almost completely covered with scar tissue from razor slashes. This carnage was done under the influence of “pills,” at a time when My was “depressed and suffering.”

  My interpreter, himself an Amerasian, knows My from Vietnam. He is, in fact, the one who made out My’s application for the Orderly Departure Program. He informs me that My disappeared before his interview, going back to the province in order to bring his family to Ho Chi Minh City to register for ODP as well. This necessitated starting the application process over again from the beginning.

  My knows nothing of his biological parents, having been abandoned at a market in Da Nang as an infant and picked up there by the woman who was to become his stepmother. His fair skin and Western features, though, give testament to his heredity; he is obviously Amerasian.

  My, twenty-one, is in the PRPC with his stepmother and her family. His girlfriend and baby son are still in Vietnam.

  I DON’T REALLY KNOW where I come from or who my parents are. I was abandoned at the Da Nang market when I was a newborn and picked up there by a lady who had a stall selling fabric. She says that I was about three days old when she found me.

  She is here in camp with me now, her sister and her nephew, and my black Amerasian stepsister and her husband and child.

  This lady picked me up and took me home, and I stayed with her and her family. She was good to me, but her sister, my aunt, and my aunt’s husband, they hated me. They were jealous that my stepmother loved me. They despised me because I was Amerasian. They made my life miserable, and finally I ran away when I was still pretty young.

  I hit the streets and survived by begging and odd jobs—selling cigarettes, soft drinks. I would sleep at the market, I was just a street kid. I guess it was about three years after I left my stepmother’s house that I heard that she was sick, so I went back home to see her.

  I stayed there for a while to spend time with her, but I got into some trouble with my uncle. He called the police and claimed that I had stolen some things from my stepmother. He also complained that I had left the house without permission. You know, in Vietnam you can’t transfer from one place to another without informing the local authorities. It is a crime against the Communist government’s rules. The police came to arrest me. My stepmother defended me. She told them that I had not stolen anything, that I had not done anything wrong, but they took me away anyway. They hate Amerasians.

  They brought me out to the provincial jail for about six months, and then they sent me out to a labor camp and it was four years before they let me out. I had to work, but they also let me study. First year I studied in the day and worked in the afternoon and evening. The second year I worked in the day and studied in the evening. They taught me how to read and write in Vietnamese, how to do some math, and their history, about how the Communists defeated the Americans and the French.

  Most of the work I did was farm work. You know, all the guards are Vietnamese, and they don’t like Amerasians. The worst work, the hardest jobs, the heaviest loads, they save for the Amerasians. Everyone is part of a work team, and each team has the team leader. The team leaders, they also don’t like Amerasians, and
they discriminate against them.

  When I was about about eighteen, they released me, and I went back to my stepmother’s place in Da Nang. I was on probation. I was supposed to stay there, not go out, not move around. But after two months I left. I just was fed up with the people around there, always talking down on me because I am Amerasian, looking down on me, thinking they are better than me.

  So I went down to Saigon and was sleeping in the bus station and selling some soft drinks to make a little money when I met this woman. Her idea was that I should marry her, and she would help me make the papers to go to the United States. See, this way she could go too. So I said okay, and we tried that. But when we made the application, the local officials questioned my residence. They said that it was not correct, and they wouldn’t complete the paperwork. So, I was out of there and on the street again.

  At that point I went back to my stepmother’s house and asked to borrow some money to buy some tools. She gave it to me, and I set up a little stall on the street, fixing bicycles. At night I slept in front of a shop that sold firewood. After a while I was working for the owner of the firewood place, delivering loads of wood in a pedicab. I was still living on the street. I couldn’t sleep in my stepmother’s house. I still couldn’t get along with my aunt.

  In ’89 I saw a lot of Amerasians were going to America, and people were asking me, “Hey, why don’t you do that?” I went back to Saigon, down to Amerasian Park. I stayed there in the park, and I applied to go to America through the Amerasian program. But I went back to Da Nang, and I missed my interview and had to apply all over again.

  I came back to Saigon again, and my family waited in Da Nang. I was waiting for the interview for the second time, but I fell in love with a Vietnamese girl, and she became pregnant. My family and I were interviewed and accepted, but my girlfriend was three months pregnant, and I refused to go at that time. I didn’t want to leave her. So I missed the flight here and had to wait again. I couldn’t take her with me because all the paperwork had been completed already. She is still in Vietnam with my son.

  I got in some trouble a few weeks ago, that’s why I am here in the monkey house. I was down by the stream near neighborhood four, drinking with some friends. Later, when I was back in the neighborhood, I got into a fight with four Khmer Amerasians. Security came, and they ran away. The security guards said that I smelled of liquor, so they arrested me. So they put me in here for violation of the liquor ban, for one week. One week passed, and I asked about getting released. Now they tell me that I am also charged with fighting and have to stay here in the monkey house longer. When I get out of jail this time, I am just going to stay home and go to school. I’m not going to hang out with friends anymore.

  It’s not easy here. They let me out in the morning to do work credit and in the afternoon to study English. After class, I have to come back to the lock-up. My girlfriend from neighborhood ten brought me some rice, but they say that I came back from school late, and they never gave it to me.

  You want to know about these scars on my arms and legs? Well, in Vietnam I was suffering and depressed, and I would take some pills and take a razor blade and just cut myself. I was just feeling sad and disappointed. But I haven’t done this for a year now.

  My

  When I get to the States, I’m going to try and bring my girlfriend and son over from Vietnam. I want to be with her, I don’t want to stay with my stepmother’s family.

  I don’t know what nationality I am. I’m Amerasian. I don’t want to live with Vietnamese in America. I don’t want to live with Amerasians either. They know me too well already. I just want to live in a place where there are no Vietnamese.

  I’d like to get some vocational training in America, maybe learn how to fix motorcycles. Yes, that’s what I’d like to do, motorcycle repair.

  Kerry

  “While I was in the hospital, Vietnam fell to the Communists, and we were trapped. We never got back to my father.”

  Mr. Thanh, a young Vietnamese refugee who had been acting as my interpreter, informed me that there was an Amerasian in his neighborhood who had been born in the United States and carried an American passport.

  I went with him to check it out and met Kerry, a twenty-year-old white Amerasian. Kerry, speaking not a word of English, produced a sheaf of papers, including xeroxes of his birth certificate, U. S passport, his and his mother’s U. S. army medical cards, as well as an original resident alien card issued to his mother, Thu Thi Sturgess.

  His documents show that he was born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on lune 30, 1971. He and his mother lived there for several years with Kerry’s American father, who was stationed on the base.

  In 1975 Kerry and his mother returned to Vietnam for a visit. Although they held return air tickets to the United States, the Communist takeover left them trapped.

  Kerry’s wife is in the PRPC with him, as is his mother, Thu Thi Sturgess. Sturgess is hearing and speech impaired, but her son seems to communicate easily with her.

  MY FATHER WAS an American soldier in Vietnam. He married my mother there and brought her back to the United States. That’s where I was born and lived until I was about three years old. In 1975, my mother took me back to Vietnam, just for a trip, but things went wrong, and we were never able to return to the United States.

  My mother is deaf, and she can barely speak. The neighbors cannot understand her, but I lived with her all my life, and I understand what she says. This is the story she told me, of how we got caught in Vietnam:

  My father was stationed in Da Nang. My mother sold beer and soft drinks on the base there. They met, fell in love, and got married. When my father took my mother to America, she was already pregnant with me. I was born there, in Oklahoma, in 1971.

  My father usually went to work in the morning and came home late at night. One time my mother was waiting for him to come home. It was very late. She looked out the window and saw my father kissing another woman. When she saw that, she took off her wedding ring and threw it out the window. She resolved to become a Buddhist nun and shaved off all her hair, in the tradition of women entering the Buddhist order. She demanded to go back to Vietnam.

  Now, my father was very sorry, he didn’t want us to go. My mother insisted, and they compromised. The plan was that she and I would go for a short time and then return to the States. My father bought a wig for my mother, and he bought us round-trip tickets from America to Vietnam. Since she was living in the United States as an alien, she needed papers to reenter the United States. My father got those for her.

  We were supposed to stay in Vietnam for two months, visit relatives, and come back to Oklahoma. But I got very sick in Vietnam, and I was in the hospital for two months, and we missed our plane back to America. While I was in the hospital, Vietnam fell to the Communists, and we were trapped. We never got back to my father.

  We received two money orders from my father, and then we didn’t hear from him anymore. How could my mother contact him? She cannot hear or speak. She cannot read or write, not even Vietnamese. So there is nothing she could do.

  I was only four years old when the Communists came. But I remember at that time, my mother wept every day.

  I didn’t go to school in Vietnam. I didn’t have any Vietnamese documents, and the government would not accept my American papers. I can barely read and write Vietnamese. When I was about ten, I got a job on a boat that delivered blocks of ice to restaurants and shops.

  My mother remarried, with a Vietnamese man. She didn’t have any more children, but he had many from his first wife, and they came to live with him and my mother. So I left home and mostly slept on the boat. I would go back to see my mother once in a while, maybe every seven or eight months. These were my happiest times. When my stepfather died, I came to see her more often.

  I had very few friends. I was working on the boat. I couldn’t go to school, and many people didn’t like me because I was part American. When I was a boy, many people would taunt me. Some even hi
t me. They called me “American, son of the imperialists.” They shouted, “Go home to America.”

  Kerry

  A few years ago I met a Vietnamese woman. She was living in America but came back to Vietnam for a visit. This is the card she gave me. [It says, “Jake Bloom, commercial pilot.” There is a U.S. address.] She asked about my situation, and I told her that I was born in America and was trying to get back there. She asked me to give her my original documents and told me that she would bring them to America and help me go to the United States. She said she would come back to Vietnam in about eight months. We waited the eight months, but she didn’t return. We were worried, so I went with my wife and my mother, and we applied for the Orderly Departure Program. In about a year, the woman came back, and she took me to the U.S. office in charge of the Amerasian cases. I was accepted to go, but only me, not my mother or my wife. I would not leave them, I refused to go alone. We reapplied, and eventually I was accepted along with my mother and wife.

  I never understood about that woman, who she was or why she tried to help me.

  The Orderly Departure Program told me that because I was born in the United States, I am an American citizen, and I have the right to go directly to America. When we left Vietnam, they first took us to Thailand. When we got there, they told us that because I was over eighteen, I would have to go to the Philippines to study first. We were very disappointed, we left Vietnam thinking that we were going straight to America.