Children of the Enemy

by Steven DeBonis

  I was born in 1919, so I was already thirty-four when I went to Da Nang in ’54. I migrated under President Diem’s policy of northerners going south. I had married in the north, and of course my wife came with me. We originally went to Saigon, where I applied for a job with the Ministry of Information. They posted me to Da Nang. My wife opened a stall in the market selling bicycle parts and tools. When the VC came in ’75, they confiscated the shop, and she opened another one, this time selling copper altars.

  Before ’75, my job with the government was the family’s main source of income, but after ’75, I was looked on as a traitor by the new government and was denied access to any kind of employment, so I just helped my wife in her shop. When my wife died in ’83, I took over the shop.

  You can see by the stream of refugees leaving the country what a failure the North Vietnamese government is. They issue food cards, and if you have one, they supply you with cheap food. But these cards are only for the Communist employees. Most people like myself don’t receive them. We have to buy at the market, and the food prices there are very high. As a former South Vietnamese official and the stepfather of two Amerasians, I had to continually suffer rumors, backbiting, and discrimination both from the government and from the neighbors. Now I am taking my children to the United States, so they, especially Bich Dung, can meet their fathers.

  In ’72 we adopted Bich Dung and in ’73 Dung. We had a daughter of our own, and she loved her stepbrother and stepsister so much. [Mr. Loi breaks down at this point, remembering his daughter, who was brutally murdered. We pause, and he begins again.]

  Bich Dung’s mother was a friend of my wife. When she gave birth to Bich Dung, she didn’t want to keep an American baby, so my wife took her. There is a lady who I knew in Vietnam who has now resettled in Massachusetts. She has some information about Bich Dung’s father. He was not black, but Hispanic, and he wore a Red Cross arm band, so I suppose he must have been a medic. Bich Dung hopes that she can talk to this lady when we get to America, and perhaps her information can lead Bich Dung to her father.

  We got Dung a year after Bich Dung. Somebody came over to my house and said that there was a baby out by the hospital gate. My wife went to see. She came back with a woman who was carrying a little red baby. When my real daughter saw him, she was so happy and wanted us to keep him. The woman was crying, but she left Dung. He was inside a little bamboo basket. Inside the basket were also a few toys and, wrapped in plastic, the marine medallion. That is the medal that Dung wears now.

  In ’75 when the Communists came, we had to make family books, so I wrote down that I had two adopted Amerasian children. They looked down upon me because of that and because I was a former employee of the South Vietnamese government. But I was already old, and they didn’t give me too much trouble. Bich Dung didn’t have too many problems. She didn’t really look American, and she is so good-natured a girl.

  Mr. Loi with Nguyen Thi Bich Dung and her oldest son

  Bich Dung: I first realized that I was Amerasian in the seventh grade, when classmates called me “My lai, My lai.” In 1985 when we applied for the Amerasian program, my father first told me that I was Amerasian. I really didn’t believe it. I was always small. Most Amerasians are big and tall, not like me.

  Mr. Loi: Dung though, is black skinned, obviously Amerasian. They teased him with the nasty rhyme about “My lai,” the one that says that the Amerasians have twelve assholes, and if you plug up one, gas and shit comes out the others. He would fight every time they said that. He always had problems with the police, he always hated and fought them, I don’t know why. When Dung was in Saigon, I got a letter from the police saying that he was in prison for breaking the light on a police car, and I had to pay three hundred thousand dong to get him out of Chi Hoa prison.

  In 1990 the Communists made a plan to arrest “undesirables.” They had a list at the police station, and Dung was on it. On November 20, 1990, they went from house to house, looking for people on the list. When they came to mine, they asked for Dung. He was asleep on the floor, it was the middle of the night. They pulled him in and sent him to Tien Lath prison for five or six months. I visited him a number of times and so did his brother-in-law. It is a very hard life there. Dung came down with malaria, and they brought him back to Da Nang and gave him back to the family. We got medicine for him on the black market and treated him ourselves. Dung told you that they sent him to the hospital and he escaped, but that is not the time he escaped. When the police had him in jail waiting to be sent to Tien Lanh, he did escape, but he was caught very quickly.

  Dung was very good at home. Sometimes he drank wine, but he was still good to the family. But when he moved to Saigon and lived with the Amerasians in Dam Sen Center, he became bad. There were many criminals in there, and their influence turned him bad. At home, he is still nice. He is very good with his sister and the family, but I am very sad at the problems that he has.

  My family is a free case, I have no relatives in the United States. Dung has a wife there, he married her before she left Vietnam. I held a wedding in Da Nang for them. She is in Arizona now. About two months ago, she wrote Dung a letter saying she doesn’t want him anymore. Something has changed in her life, but I really don’t know the details. Dung hid the letter and doesn’t want to talk about it. Of course he is very sad . . . she has his baby.

  So Dung’s wife won’t sponsor us anymore. I don’t know when we can leave here. Can you help us to go to America soon?

  Postscript: In July, Bich Dung gave birth to a healthy baby boy. In August, Mr. Loi and Bich Dung and her family were resettled in the United States. Although his infractions of the often onerous Philippine Refugee Processing Center rules were minor, Dung has been placed on administrative hold and was not permitted to accompany his family. Dejectedly, he waits to be allowed to join them in America.

  Loan, Be, and Dung

  “Now that we are here ... these three look down on us and treat us like dirt. If it weren’t for us, they couldn’t have gotten out of Vietnam.”

  Loan, twenty-five, and Be, twenty-three, are sisters. Dung, their brother, is twenty-two. All three are black Amerasians from the same father. Unlike most Amerasians, they lived together with their father when they were infants, though they can no longer remember him. The three are tall and sturdy, much larger than the average Vietnamese. All have the dark skin of their father, though only Be has his curly hair. Dung, the brother, is almost Indian in appearance.

  Be is caring for her tiny newborn, just three days old, fanning him intermittently against the oppressive heat and the omnipresent flies. Loan’s four-year-old daughter eyes my cassette recorder, entranced. Neighbors file in and out of their billet in neighborhood two, curious about why an American has come to spend so much time talking to the three siblings.

  Carved into Dung’s right arm are a series of tiny marks, roughly in the shape of an “S. “These, along with much smaller markings behind each ear, were made by his American father, he says, so that in the event of separation his father could identify him.

  They have several family photos. One, of their mother, shows a very pretty long-haired young lady standing by a living room bar and a tiny Christmas tree. A few of the photos include their father, but he cannot be seen clearly. There is one terribly faded black and white of him, but all that can be made out is that he is a black man. On the back of the snapshot is written “V. N.”

  There are a few shots of their father’s family from the States. One is entitled “Eugene and his Christmas toys.” It is uncertain if the young boy pictured is their father’s nephew or a son from his American wife. Their father, like many Americans who fathered children with Vietnamese women, had a wife and child in the United States. Along with the photos is a yellowing strip of paper upon which is typewritten the father’s name, Sgt. Robert Lowry.

  The siblings had applied to leave Vietnam in 1984, but like so many applicants unable to pay off Vietnamese officials, their applications were “lost.�
� Frustrated with the delay and unable to pay the necessary bribes to speed up the process, they were approached by a third party who claimed he had the means to expedite their departure. All the three had to do was to claim three strangers on their documents as their spouses, affording them passage out of Vietnam. This meant leaving their real spouses behind, which they had no recourse but to do.

  All is not well between the three Amerasians and their partners of convenience. Be speaks forthrightly of what the sisters consider to be the patronizing attitudes of their “husbands” and how the “husbands” look down on them now that they are out of Vietnam. Be’s bogus husband happened into the billet as we spoke and eventually walked out in disgust at Be’s strong words.

  Loan: When I was young, we lived with my father, but I can’t remember him. My mother told me that he was in the army, and he went to the United States in ’72 for treatment of a heart ailment. He returned in ’74 and left again in ’75. We couldn’t go because he had another wife and family in America.

  Be: I remember that we lived with him in Vietnam, but I can’t picture his face. He wrote us some letters after he went back to the States, but only my mother read them. We don’t know where he is now. I want to find him, but how can we do that?

  Dung: He marked me on the ears and on the arm. He told my mother that if we ever got separated, he could identify me from these marks. And those pictures he sent from the States . . . my mother told us that he said to print those pictures in a newspaper, and he would find us.

  Be: We had an apartment in a four-story building in Saigon. My mother worked for the U.S. Army. That’s where she met my father. In 1975, the VC came to Saigon, and they knew my mother had worked for the Americans. They demanded papers, documents, but my mother had already burned them all, all the documents my father left behind. We have only a few photos left, and I still have his ID card.

  The VC took our apartment. We had no money or food and no place in Saigon to stay. My mother worried that the government would send our family to the New Economic Zone or that she would be sent to reeducation camp, so she took us to her home village, Dai Ngai village, in Long Phu district, Hau Giang province. This was the place of her mother and father, a farming village, flat with rice fields, about twenty kilometers from the main market town.

  We lived in a tiny hut made of coconut leaf. We had some land, and if our harvest was good, we didn’t sell it. We just paid our percentage to the government and kept the rest to eat. If the harvest was poor though, we were in trouble. We also would work for other farmers to make extra money, but there were difficulties. We were the only Amerasians in the village, and many farmers would not hire us. Life was severe, but it was better than being sent to the New Economic zone. In Hau Giang, we worked our land, and we worked for other people. In the New Economic Zone, you worked for the government, so you were not free.

  Our relatives despised us because we were black. We kept away from them, but they taunted and insulted my mother. They were jealous. One time my mother was sick, and she asked my aunt for a loan of some money to buy medicine. My aunt told her, “You had an American boyfriend and plenty of money. Did you help us then? So why should I give you anything now?” After that, my mother didn’t want anything to do with that aunt or our cousins. We moved to our own house, far from the rest of the family.

  Loan: Before we moved to Hau Giang, we all went to school in Saigon. Be and I went about three years and Dung two years. The Vietnamese students all made fun of us because we are black. When we first got to Hau Giang, there was no school in the village. A few years after we got there, they opened a small school. We went for a short time, but again, the students teased us. They didn’t want anything to do with us.

  Be: Life was hard in Hau Giang, food was sometimes scarce. Even when we were children, we worked. There was very little time to play, and not many people to play with. No Amerasians lived near us. Often people would shout at us, make fun of us, not only children, even adults. We didn’t say anything, we just ignored them.

  Dung: Even though we are large in size, we are few in friends, so people feel free to harass us. One time there was a festival in town, and there was a boxing contest. I entered, and I knocked out my Vietnamese opponent. I guess he felt shamed, being beaten by an Amerasian, because that night he came to my house looking for me with a group of his friends. I had to run away, and luckily I was able to escape.

  It was hard for me to get work. People wouldn’t hire me to work in the fields if they could get Vietnamese, and there were plenty of Vietnamese available. It was easier to work as a fisherman, because there were not as many who had that skill. The village was near the end of the river, not far from the sea. I learned how to fish the river first, in a small boat, and then some friends took me to sea to learn ocean fishing. I learned to fish and pilot the boat, and I liked that better than farming. Unlike the farmers, the fishermen treated me fairly.

  Be: I applied for a job at a local canteen run by the government. They told me that all positions were filled. Then they hired people who applied after me. They just didn’t want to hire a black Amerasian.

  Dung: At seventeen, people must do forced labor for the government. They don’t pay you anything. All the men have to do this, but the government gives the Amerasians the worst jobs, the heaviest work. The Vietnamese do the easy work.

  Loan and Be with their children, and their brother Dung

  Whenever I used to go out, people would taunt me, but over the last two years, that hasn’t happened. Amerasians are valuable now, they are a ticket to America. Now everyone wants us.

  Be: We applied to leave Vietnam in 1984, but our papers were “lost.” We had no money to bribe the officials, so we waited for years and nothing happened. Finally, our neighbor asked us to claim three people as our spouses, so they could go to America with us. He said that in return, he would take care of all the arrangements to get us out of Vietnam. We didn’t know these people, they are no relation to us, but we did what he said. He must have paid the necessary bribes, because after that, we left Vietnam quickly. Now that we are here in the PRPC, these three look down on us and treat us like dirt. If it weren’t for us, they couldn’t have gotten out of Vietnam. We are the Amerasians. We are the only ones who really are supposed to be here. We don’t want to stay with these people anymore. We want them to go to a separate billet, and we want to split the case, so we don’t go to America together.

  Our real spouses are in still in Vietnam. We had to leave them behind in order to get out of Vietnam, but we hope that we can sponsor them when we get to the United States.

  [I ask about the burn marks on Dung’s arm.]

  Dung: These bum marks? Well, a friend teased me. He said that Amerasians were timid, that they couldn’t take pain. I bet him that I could stand a burning cigarette on my skin. You can see that I won.

  Loan: Our mother died two years ago this month. She started complaining of back pain, then elbow pain, and finally half her body became paralyzed. There was a small clinic nearby, and we sent her there, but there was nothing they could do. In two years she was dead.

  Be: We believe in ancestor worship. Every week we get an invitation from the church to attend services, but we don’t go, we keep our own religion. We feel it is most important to revere our dead relatives. [Be shows me a picture of her family standing around her mother’s gravesite, a barren mound of cracked mud. There are joss sticks and offerings of fruit.] I hope we can make money in America to send back to have a nice gravesite made for my mother. It’s the most important thing for us. That and finding our father. Maybe if we put the pictures he gave us in a magazine, he will recognize them and contact us.

  When I see my father, I am afraid he will not understand me, because I speak Vietnamese. But I will ask him, “Do you love me, did you miss me, because for a long time we have not seen each other.”

  Phuong

  “They loved the Amerasian when they needed to leave Vietnam, but now they despise me.”
>
  Phuong spotted me before I reached the door of her billet. She motioned for me to wait where I was and walked out without a word to any of the people seated inside. “I don’t want them to know I’m talking to you,” she told me through my interpreter. “They’ll only make trouble for me when I get back.”

  Phuong was “bought” in Vietnam by the family who now shares her billet. As an Amerasian, she and her family qualify for resettlement in the United States. Like so many families desperate to leave Vietnam, Phuong’s “family” sought an Amerasian who would be willing to claim them as legitimate relations. They paid the necessary bribes to Vietnamese bureaucrats and did the requisite paper work to expedite departure via the Orderly Departure Program. All Phuong had to do was claim them as bona fide mother, father, and siblings, and they were accepted for immigration to the United States as the family of an Amerasian.

  Invariably, once a bogus family has been accepted for resettlement and no longer needs the Amerasian, the relationship turns nasty. Phuong’s case is no exception. She complains that her “family” torments her emotionally and physically. She wants to move to another billet, but under the authoritarian and capricious rules of the Philippine Refugee Processing Center, unauthorized change of billet is an offence punishable by incarceration in the local rehabilitation center. So Phuong must continue to share quarters with people who despise her.