Children of the Enemy

by Steven DeBonis

  I try to escape one time, but they catch me. Me and three other people. Twelve o’clock at night we go, but we don’t know the way. Five o’clock in the morning we wind up in the same place where we leave from. We get very lost. This happens many times. Sometime people go in the forest and two or three days later they wind up back. When you are in the jungle, you cannot see anything, you just walking.

  The guards, they know the area, but we don’t know. They know where the prisoners go when they escape. It’s very easy for them to get you. They catch us, but my friend, she tell us, “I don’t have baby, if they beat me all right; if they kill me, all right. But you have a baby, you must live.” So she tell the guards that she is the one who made us go. We say, “Don’t do that,” but she do it anyway. So for us it’s not so bad, but for her, the guards beat her very bad. They hit her so much, and I worry that she die. She don’t die, but when they let me go home, they still keep her there in the prison camp.

  My mother in Saigon, she get very sick. My babies, they don’t have nothing to eat, no house to live. The guard he call me and tell me that I can go home, but he say that when my mother is finish sick, I have to go back to monkey house again.

  [I ask how the police could know that her mother was sick.]

  The police that took me to the monkey house, he know. How he don’t know? The police in Vietnam, they know everything you do. They tell me I have to go back to jail when my mother finish being sick, but she don’t finish. She never get well, and I never go back. But when I leave monkey house, the police don’t give me no paper to live in Saigon, so I always be afraid.

  I go back to Saigon, and I try to sell things, but I don’t have money to buy rice to sell. If you have money, you can buy and then sell. But if you don’t have money, you cannot. So what can I do? I have to go sleep with Vietnamese man to get money. I don’t have no house. I don’t have no money to pay for a house, so I go out and live on the street with my mother and my two babies.

  See, before, when I be young, I come to Saigon from Hanoi with my mother. We don’t have house. We live with my aunt, my mother’s younger sister. Later, when I be working, I have so much money, she love my baby very much. I am the only one to make money, and I look after all my family, twenty-two people. But when I go to the monkey house for two years, I don’t have money, and my aunt speak no good to my baby. She don’t want an American baby in the house, she afraid of trouble with the VC. My mother took my babies to see me in jail. They very skinny. My mother say that she don’t want to live with my aunt anymore, so she went out to live on the street. When I have money, my aunt, she love my babies. When I go to jail and I’m broke, she throws them out on the street.

  From 1976, till I came here to PRPC, I live on the street. Not many people there, just me and my family. If it rains, we go to a house of a friend and wait. Rain stop, we go back on the street. We sleep on the street, cook on the street. My mother got sick, she go blind. She was sick for five years. She lay down on the street, died on the street too. No good, my life.

  You know, my brother, he’s married, he live far from Saigon. When my mother get sick, she wants him. She can’t see anymore, she’s blind, but she wants to touch him, hear his voice. Six years my mother don’t see him, she says, “Please go get him.” So I borrow money and send my son to get him. My brother come, but he stay only two days, then he go back. The next week my mother die. After my mother die, I don’t say anything to him. I never see him again because I feel very angry at him. All the time my mother be sick, he never look after her. Only I take care of her. He’s no good, I don’t like him.

  When I work bar, and I born baby son, my mother come to see me. My brother don’t come because I have baby, but no husband. He don’t like that I work bar, he say I be whore. So one year, I have so much money, I go to see him, but he still be angry. He don’t want to see me. I don’t care, he’s no good.

  We live on the street, my family. There was water not too far away. I wash up there and bring my babies to wash. I cook on the street. We sleep on the street. Sometime at night, a man see my daughter sleeping, he come up and bother her, touch her. My daughter get very upset and she cry.

  I sell fish to make money, I make love to man for money, but I never have enough money. But still, I send my babies to school, I want my babies to go to school. My daughter went to school six years, my boy eight years. My son is white, he don’t have too many problems. Some he have, but not too many. My daughter, she black, and she have trouble. My daughter had fights three or four times. They say, “You black, you dirty.” She not dirty, but they say that, and she be angry, you know. I tell her if you don’t say nothing, it’s all right. You keep in school, it’s good for you. So many times, she don’t want to go because someone say something to her, and she be shy. But I say, go back to school. She study only six years, then she has to work, get money. When my mother get sick, I can’t do anything, I have to take care of her. So my babies have to go to work and can’t finish school.

  My children went looking for jobs, but people see they are American, and they don’t let them work. Finally they get jobs. My son Phi, he go to work as a porter. My daughter makes handles for teapots in a small factory. The work be very hard, and the money very little, maybe six thousand dong one day. She get sick all the time, and we have no money for doctor.

  Phi couldn’t come with us to the PRPC. He got sick a month before I left. He smoke too much. One week before we come here, he go to doctor. The doctor says he’s sick, his lungs are bad. He have to stay in Vietnam and take medicine. Every day he go to the Orderly Departure Program doctor, but don’t pay money. I hope he will finish taking medicine and come here soon.

  He’s twenty-one, he’s sick, and he have to live outside on the street again. He can’t go to the Amerasian center in Dam Sen because that’s only for people who live far from Saigon. If you are from Saigon, you cannot live there.

  Now my son can’t work nothing. Before he work very hard, he can lift sixty kilos, even a hundred kilos. But now he don’t work, he can’t. Sometime I can’t sleep, I can’t study. I think about my baby, sick, with no money, living on the street.

  I never got married again [after the Americans left Vietnam]. I be very scared. What if I have Vietnamese husband and I have more children? What they think of my black baby girl? You see, if you love me, you must love my baby. I don’t want to make no problem for my baby. If I have no husband, it’s all right.

  It’s harder for black than white in Vietnam. I have black baby and white baby, so I know. I think your country be same. Before, when I go work bar, if too many blacks come to American bar, no whites come. If too many whites come, the blacks don’t come. They go to a different bar. I think in your country be same.

  I had black husband and white husband. I think they be same, good men. My black husband, he know I have [white] baby son, right? He still live with me, it don’t mean nothing. He love my baby so much. When he come, every Saturday, he bring many things for baby. He’s good man. He see I have a white baby, but he love me and my baby too. If he don’t like my baby, I don’t live with him.

  My two American babies, they had many problems before, but now no. Before, Vietnamese say, “You go back to America, you dirty American, go back to America. You lose the war already, go back.” They say like that many times to my daughter, ’cause she is black. My son is white, not so many problems. Now Amerasian children can go America, so Vietnamese like Amerasians. Before, nobody likes Amerasian babies. Now everybody wants to stay with Amerasian so they can go to America too.

  My daughter is black, but not so dark. Her father, Lee, had a black father, but his mother was white. One day here in the PRPC, she come home from school very sad, she don’t eat. I say how come you don’t eat. She say she upset because teacher tell her that America same as Vietnam, they don’t like black people. She think that when she go to America, things change. She don’t hear “black, black” anymore. But no, teacher say America be same as Vietnam, people t
hink that black is no good. Now she worry that American people won’t like her because she is black, just like in Vietnam.

  Before, she say to me, “How come you have black husband, why couldn’t you have white husband, so my skin not be black?” When she say like that, I feel very sad because I love my daughter very much.

  In 1984, I make the paper for my family to go to America through ODP. But they [Vietnamese government officials] make me wait for a long time because I don’t have any money to pay bribe. My daughter, she work so hard, but she only make six thousand dong a day. My mother, she’s sick, we live on the street, no money for a house. In 1990, we be waiting six or seven years already. A man come, he tell me, “I know someone who can help you pay money to go to America.” I wait seven years already, so I say okay. So one man, he come, he pay the money for bribe, and we write on our papers that he is my daughter’s husband. But he’s really not, he just pay the money so we say that.

  So he come here with us, and he live here with us, but he’s not really my daughter’s husband. When we go to America we will not stay together.

  My daughter wants to go to America very quick because she don’t like living in the house with this man. She knows he have money, but he don’t want to buy anything for the house. She don’t like to look at him. When he be home, she goes out. When we eat, we never eat together. She don’t like him, she don’t like to look his face.

  The food they give us here is very bad. Sometime I cannot eat it, it makes me sick. But when we have to buy something, he say he don’t have any money, and my daughter be very angry.

  Here in the PRPC, we go to school every day, but sometime in school I can’t think. I worry about my son in Vietnam. I worry about what I do in the United States. I don’t know where I go in America, I don’t know what I do in your country. I just don’t know. When I get there, if I can, I go to work. I just want to have a job, make money and live together with my children, take care of them. If I have a job, any job, it’s all right.

  Loan is Hoa’s nineteen-year-old black Amerasian daughter. Her complexion is “cafe con leche,” her long hair thick and curly, pulled back and held with a barrette. She is painfully shy and soft spoken, and I hesitated to tape our conversations until we had developed an easy rapport.

  Loan told her story with the aid of an interpreter. There were moments of painful remembrance: her extreme poverty, her mother being taken away with no word. The edge of these memories sometimes overcame her, and I would back away at reopening unhealed wounds.

  As in the case of other interviews I conducted with mothers and their children, in certain areas Loan and Hoa’s stories did not completely coincide. One such area involves her mother Hoa’s release from labor camp. Hoa maintains that she was given a temporary release because her own mother was ill and unable to care for Hoa’s children. Loan, on the other hand, relates an almost supernatural tale of her mother escaping from the camp, one which she says was told to her Hoa herself When I inquired about the discrepancy, Hoa told me that her daughter was very young when she returned from prison and had confused the story of Hoa’s release with the details of her unsuccessful escape attempt. Hoa did, however, confirm the supernatural aspects of the near escape. Vietnamese in general have an abiding belief in the spirit realm and often attribute unusual or inexplicable occurrences to mystical intervention. My Vietnamese interpreter found nothing unusual in Loan’s story of a one-legged apparition aiding her mother to pass through the gates of the prison camp; he only said that it “gave him the goose bumps.”

  Loan: I first realized that I was not Vietnamese when I was about seven, when I first went to school. Some people would call me names and taunt me because of my dark skin and American blood, but others treated me kindly. I always tried to be respectful to everyone, even the people who made fun of me, but my brother would fight if anyone called him My lai [Amerasian].

  I was always very polite to my teachers. They knew that we were very poor and lived on the street, and they let me study in grammar school, even when I had no money. In secondary school, we were not able to do that. When we had no money, I could not study there. We were so poor, I felt embarrassed making friends, socializing with people. I was ashamed of our poverty.

  I never lived in a house until I came here. I spent my whole life on the street. We lived by the steps of an apartment building on Ngo Gia Tu street in Ho Chi Minh City, my mother, my brother, my old grandmother, and me. My aunt, she was my grandmother’s sister, had an apartment in the building. I would shower and get water there. My aunt had more than ten children, so the apartment was very crowded. She was a drinker. When she didn’t drink she was okay, but when she got drunk she became very mean, and there would be arguments. There was always trouble between her and my mother. One time my mother brought my grandmother, who was blind, to the apartment to shower. My aunt was drunk, and she yelled, “Get that blind woman out of my apartment. You are bringing me bad luck.” We waited for my aunt to fall asleep, and then we went back to get water to wash my grandmother. When my aunt was sober, she was all right to us, but when she was drunk, she was terrible, and she was drunk a lot. My mother would help pay for the electricity when she could, when she had work; but when she had no work she could not do that. We all had to scrape together the money any way we could.

  It rains from May to October. If it started to rain while we slept, we would have to wake up, gather our belongings, and stand under an overhang. We’d put mats on our heads to keep off the rain and wait for it to stop. Then we would clean off our spot on the street as best we could and try to go back to sleep. If it rained in the day, we would go to the aunt’s house, but at night we had to wait it out on the street. If it rained all night, we had to stand under the overhang all night. If it was just rain, it was not so bad, but if there was wind as well, we would get soaked. There was nothing we could do.

  When things were okay between my mother and my aunt, we could cook in my aunt’s apartment. But when they were arguing, we had to cook on the street. We were so poor, sometimes we had no rice, nothing to cook. Most of the people in my aunt’s apartment building knew us, and sometimes they would help us out with some food. They knew what our situation was. But sometimes bad people would steal food or our things when we were on the street. We lived on the street so long that eventually we got used to it.

  In 1982 my mother went to prison camp. One time she received a summons to go to the police station, and she didn’t come back. They didn’t tell us where she was, for months we didn’t know. I was just a young girl then. [Loan begins to weep at the memory of these difficult times, and we pause until she is able to go on.] We just stayed in Saigon, my grandmother and my brother and me.

  After a few years, my mother escaped from the labor camp. This is the story she told me. There was a man with one leg who died in the labor camp. Sometimes he would appear, and he had the power to make the prisoners invisible. They could pass through the gates and not be seen by the guards. So my mother saw this apparition, and she was able to pass through the gates without being seen by the guards. My mother and her friend were running through the forest, and they stopped to rest. They got separated from the rest of the group. All of a sudden there was a loud noise, and they didn’t know what had happened. They never saw the people in the front again. My mother and her friend prayed very hard, you have to pray in that forest because it is populated by many ghosts, ghosts of prisoners killed while trying to escape. You have to propitiate the spirits. Maybe the people in front of my mother did not pray hard enough, because nobody knows what happened to them.

  When my mother was sent to labor camp, they rubbed her name out of the family book. Without that, you cannot legally live or work in Saigon, so she was very scared about being arrested again, and she tried to be very careful. She tried to work buying and selling, but it was hard to make any money.

  I worked in a small place that made aluminum handles for tea kettles. I carried sacks of handles up a ladder to the second floor
of the house and used a machine to smooth the handles. It was very hard work, and the money was bad. I worked seven to eleven-thirty in the morning and one to four in the afternoon. Saturday was a half day. The boss was okay, but his wife was out of her mind. She was the one who paid us, and sometimes she would go into a rage, and we couldn’t get paid. We would have to come back later to get our salary. Sometime the owner would be short and we wouldn’t get paid on time, though he always eventually made good. After three years I quit, the pay was just too low. Just after I quit, the place went out of business, and they had to sell off all their tools and machines.

  We made our application in 1984 to come to America. The government lost it, and we made it again in 1990. This man, who is here as my “husband,” came to us and said, “You have been waiting a long time to go to America. I can help you go faster if you take me with you. I will bribe the officials to let us go quickly.”

  He gave some gold to my family in Vietnam, and he paid the bribe and took care of everything. After that, we were able to leave Vietnam very quickly. So we got married, but just for him to come to America and pay the bribes to the Vietnamese officials. He is not really my husband.

  My grandmother was sick, and in 1991 she died on the patch of street where we lived. We made a service on the street. She was buried in Ba Giao cemetery. [Loan takes out some photos of her grandmother’s funeral and describes them.] My mother wore a white cloth around her head, a sign of mourning. The women wearing a white headband with a red dot in the middle, they are nieces of the dead. Nieces and nephews wear a white headband with a red dot. The man wearing a white hat, he is the nephew, taking the place of the son who was not there. There are offerings of fruit and joss sticks. We have paper money for the dead so they have something to spend, and musicians play the dan gao [a Vietnamese stringed instrument].