Children of the Enemy

by Steven DeBonis

  After 1975, the VC don’t let me work. They steal my house, my car, my store, everything, money, too. I had three houses, they steal two. Everything in my house, my diamonds, all my gold, they steal all. They sent me to jail too [Lien is sobbing], because I married an American and had American babies . . . I’m sorry, I can’t talk anymore. [We pause for a few minutes. When Lien regains her composure, she continues her story. Her anger is apparent.]

  They took me to jail, and every morning they take me out to ask me questions. “What you do, why you stay with Americans?” I say I didn’t do nothing. I work, I took care of my babies, I opened store, I opened bar . . . that’s all.

  They say I love Americans, I don’t love the VC. They say I work for the Americans, I work for CID [Criminal Investigation Division of the U. S. Army]. That’s not true. I never work CID, but that’s what they say.

  I tell them that I didn’t do anything bad. I loved an American, lived with him, and took care of my children. They say, “Well, then you American too,” and they sent me to the mountain [the New Economic Zone].

  Lien’s daughter Snow

  My children were very young, they cry every day. There was no school there, very bad food. You know what we had to eat? ... Wet rice, rotten wet rice. VC steal all my money, my house. I don’t have nothing, and he gives me rotten rice. He wants to shoot me. I say, “Okay, shoot me, shoot my family too.” He put us on the mountain, it’s the same thing. He don’t care if we live or die.

  I could not stay in that place. After six months, I took my children back to Saigon. I want to put them in school, but the VC teacher told me that American babies can’t go to school. Before the VC, all can go. But now, if the parents worked with Americans, the children cannot go.

  Lien goes back to her sheaf of letters and pulls out a few from Johnny Price for me to look at. One letter states, “Tell that asshole that beat you not to come [to my house in California], he’s not welcome here.”

  I ask Lien who this “asshole” is.

  It’s my son, he’s no good. I was very sick, and he gives me rice to eat, but I couldn’t eat it. It was no good, it smelled. I tell him, “Okay, take these two kilos of rice and change for another rice. He don’t want to do that, he tells me, Du ma. In Vietnamese that’s the same as, “Fuck your mother, . . . mother fucker.” I’m very angry, I tell him, “Okay, you cannot live here with me, you talk number ten mouth. I take care of you since you were a baby, you never had a job, and now you talk very bad to me.” I say to him, “All right, now you get out of here.” He gets angry, and he wants to beat me. Now he moved. He left here about twenty days ago. I wrote my husband Johnny. I told him, “My son told me ‘Fuck your mother.’ Don’t sponsor him, don’t let him come to your house.”

  I never had any problem with my son in Vietnam, but now he is very bad. He has a wife here, and one baby in Vietnam. The baby was born after we made the paper to leave Vietnam, so he couldn’t come. He had to stay behind in Vietnam.

  When we were in Vietnam, they told us we were going to America, but they sent us here to the Philippines . . . Troi of [My God], bad food here. In Saigon I ate very good food. Here the food is so bad, I can’t eat it. The rice they give us stinks. The meat, fish, the eggs . . . they are very old, no good. Johnny sends money every month, and I go to the market and buy good food.

  When I go to America, I’ll ask Johnny what he has been doing, how many wives, how many girlfriends he has. He says he don’t have any, but I don’t know. But he’s a very good man, and I want him, nobody else. You know, his baby, my Snow, she’s eighteen years old. Since she was born, I didn’t have no boyfriends, no husband. I just wait to see Johnny again.

  Postscript: Several members of Lien’s family tested positive for tuberculosis in the PRPC and had to undergo a mandatory six-month treatment. In the spring of 1991, Lien’s married daughter Phuong gave birth to a baby girl. These events delayed the family’s departure for the United States by several months. In this period, Lien continued to receive letters from Johnny Price. As the date for her departure grew closer, the letters took on a more romantic nature, recalling their days in Vietnam and looking towards their future together. Lien, though eager to reunite with Price, was understandably nervous. “Eighteen years for me already,” she liked to joke. “Maybe I forget how.”

  Price also expressed concern for his daughter, Snow, especially since Snow’s older sister Mai had become pregnant from her Filipino boyfriend. Every letter admonished Lien not to “let any boys hang around Snow.”

  Lien and her family finally left for Long Beach, California, on July 8, 1991. After several months without any word from her, I attempted to call John Price. A recording indicated that his phone was no longer in service. Letters to him were returned with stamped post office messages indicating that he no longer resided at this address. In September, I met a girl who had received a letter from Lien’s daughter Mai. The information was scant but unhappy. Lien’s reunion with John Price had not gone smoothly. After a brief period together, they had separated and Lien and her family had moved to another location in California. Snow, Price’s daughter, remained with him.

  Hanh

  “People say to my daughter,

  ‘Your mother went with GI, she was a whore.’

  Hanh comes from southern Vietnam, from the region that once belonged to Cambodia and is still heavily populated by ethnic Khmers like herself Khmer is her native language; she didn’t learn to speak Vietnamese until her teenage years. At forty-nine, she is extremely slender for having given birth to eight children. Three of the five Amerasian children she has borne have died. One, a daughter in her early twenties, is with Hanh in the refugee camp. Her other surviving Amerasian child, a son, is still in Vietnam, caring for his grandmother. Hanh speaks in clear English, learned from the American GI with whom she lived for four years when she was a mess hall worker on the U. S. army base at Quy Nhon in central Vietnam.

  MY FATHER WAS a soldier for twenty-five years. When France is Vietnam, he serves in the French army. When the Americans come, he fights on their side. He was stationed in Vung Tau, near Bien Hoa.

  My father stays with the army in Vung Tau. I stay with my mother and brother and two sisters, in my place in Kien Giang. We have twenty cong [20,000 square meters] of rice fields there.

  I never go to school. When I am very young, the Viet Minh and French fight, and I run all the time, no have place to go to school. The French come to my village. They don’t know who is Viet Minh and who is not. They don’t care, they shoot anybody. The village was very small. We have to go hide in the fields or in the U Minh forest.

  When I am about twelve years old, my family moves up to Vung Tau, where my father stays. At this time, I cannot speak Vietnamese very well, only Khmer. One day, working in the rice field there, I met a man. He was a farmer like me, but he also was a soldier. He tells my friend to tell me that he loves me, and soon we get married. I was sixteen.

  We are married for four years, and I have two daughters with him. One morning he’s walking on the street in Bien Hoa, and there is some disturbance. He goes to see, and the VC shoot him dead.

  I go back to my father and mother, I feel very sad then. I have two children. I don’t know what I do, how I work and get money to care for them. My friend is going to Quy Nhon to work for the American army, and I go too.

  I work in the mess hall on the base there, that’s An Khe base, and there I meet Kerry. He was a cook. He tell me that he’s from California, and he has a big tattoo here [on the upper arm]. He’s first sergeant, a black man, and he speak sweet, so I like him.

  We live together outside the base about four years. I meet him in ’66, and he goes back to America in 1970. We have four children, three boys and a girl, but the three boys die. One die very young, he’s just a baby, one die just after the VC come, and the other, he die in the New Economic Zone. The VC sent me there. It’s very hot, and he got sick. We don’t have any doctor, any medicine, and he die.

&nbs
p; In 1970, Kerry goes back to America. He tells me that he will come back to Vietnam, but I don’t know. He stay in the army a long time already. He was a first sergeant, and I don’t think he will come back. I think maybe he’s telling me a lie. If GI, American, tell me lie, how can I know? Now I am old, so I can know, but before, I cannot tell. I think he lies, just the same as Vietnamese.

  So when Kerry goes back to America, I get another boyfriend, Gleason. He don’t live with me, he stays in the barracks. When he goes back to America, he don’t even tell me nothing. His friends say, “Oh, Gleason, he went back already.”

  But Kerry comes back to Vietnam, and he wants to take me to America. He comes to see me, and he says that his friend is making a party, and he will pick me up early, about ten o’clock. I just cry, I can’t say nothing. Before he comes to pick me up, I go hide, I’m very scared, because I’m pregnant with a baby from Gleason. I know that Kerry will kill me if he knows.

  I’m very sad because I wronged him. He is a very good man. He loved our daughter very much, and she looks just like him. His mother be very old. Every year she talked to me on the telephone, telling me to learn more English, to get ready to go to America. Kerry, he taught me to speak, he send me to school. He was a very good, very sweet man, but when he come back to take me to America, I hide. I don’t go, I don’t see him no more. I do wrong for him.

  After 1972, I move up to Dalat, in the mountains, and I work as a vendor. I marry with one Vietnamese man there; he drives a truck. He was married before and had six children. When the VC come, he can’t work anymore. The VC round up vendors, everybody, and they send us to the New Economic Zone at Bong Bo. My husband get sick, he can’t work, so I work for him. Eventually, I went back to Kien Giang. I tell my husband to wait for me, that I must make some money, and then I will come back for him. But he couldn’t wait for me. He got another girlfriend, so we are through.

  In Kien Giang, the VC didn’t bother me, but the people looked bad at me and my American children. When my children go to school, when they go around, people say “con lai [half-breed], you have twelve assholes” [from a popular derogatory rhyme about Amerasians]. My daughter didn’t want to go to school. She be shy because she is black. People say to her, “Your mother went with GI. She was a whore, she go for money, that is why you born black.” They look at me the same as a dog. My son wouldn’t stay in school, he got angry when they insulted him. So my children can’t read and write.

  Before 1975, nobody talk nothin’ to me . . . just behind my back, so I can’t hear. They don’t talk loud, but I know, they say that I have a GI friend. But after 1975 when I go back to my place, some people look at me the same as a dog. I be very angry, but I can’t say nothin’. I just go to work and come back and take care of my children. In 1979, I hear people say you can make a paper to go to America, but I don’t know, I think maybe somebody is lying. Anyway, I got no money. Then in 1983, my friend, she has money [to bribe Vietnamese officials] and she goes to America. Me, I got son and daughter, I got no money. I got to work, work hard. I do anything, help people, work in the field, anything. I keep my money, and I pay many money to VC to make my paper [application for exit visa from Vietnam]. I don’t eat. I keep that money to give VC. My son looks after water buffalo. When he gets paid he gives his salary to me. I pay to make paper in 1987, but I still wait five years to leave Vietnam.

  Postscript: Hanh and her daughter left the Philippine Refugee Processing Center for Dallas, Texas, in August of 1992.

  Chau

  “Why you had to marry with black people?”

  One afternoon in early February, as I was walking past the small clinic in neighborhood six of the PRPC, a black teenage Amerasian girl motioned to me from inside. Ngoc clearly had something to tell me, but she was unable to convey her message in English. With the aid of the nurse’s Vietnamese interpreter, I grasped that Ngoc had heard that I was gathering the stories of Amerasians and their mothers. She wanted me to meet her own mom, whom, she claimed, was “number 1” in English.

  Ngoc was certainly right about her mother. Chau rarely groped for words when we met a week later in Zar’s restaurant, a tiny Filipino eatery fronting the parking lot of the neighborhood five market in the PRPC. Although she claims that her English was learned in Vietnamese high school, the ease and fluidity with which she handles the language certainly came through her contact with Americans.

  Chau, forty-one, is herself of mixed blood, the dark-skinned offspring of a Vietnamese mother and a North African soldier who died fighting for France at Dienbienphu. She is the biological mother of two of her five children. Her first child, Ha, now a young man of twenty-four, was conceived through Chau’s liaison with a white American soldier when she was barely seventeen. Her youngest, Hong Van, a five-year-old boy, is the result of her marriage to a Vietnamese mail which ended in divorce in 1986.

  In between, Chau adopted three children. Son, whom she believes is half–Korean, and Ngoc came from an orphanage. The parents of Thu, Chau’s fourteen-year-old adopted daughter, were, like Chau and her family, sent by the government to work the New Economic Zone in Tay Ninh province. When Thu’s parents died, Chau became her caretaker. Apart from her own children, Chau’s billet in neighborhood two is often filled with unaccompanied Amerasian kids, who drop by for food, advice, or just to hang out. Many of them view her as a surrogate mother.

  I HAVE FIVE KIDS, three are Amerasian. Ha, my first son, he’s Amer-asian, and my last child, Hong Van, he’s only five years old. They are my only real children. All my other children I adopt.

  I never knew my father. I was four years old when he died, I only saw his picture. He was a soldier. He fought and he died in Dienbienphu, that’s all I know. I have one young brother with the same father. He is in New York now, he went there in 1990.

  I had many problems because I am black. In ’75 the Communists threw me out. They told me that all my family have to go up the mountain [the New Economic Zone] to be farmers. My children were very young, Ha only five years old. I stay for two years, then I go back to Saigon. My mother paid a bribe, and they don’t send me back to the mountain, but they don’t let me have paper, no ID card, no nothing. That’s why I couldn’t make paper to go to America, ’cause I don’t have ID card. My children the same . . . I can’t send them to school. They say for school is only for Vietnamese children. My children, black, white, they don’t let them study.

  When I was young, other children always call me “black, black,” they make me feel bad. I be very embarrassed, and I don’t want to study no more. My mother, she cry, and she say, “What can I do? I can’t do nothing.” I get angry with her. I say, “How come you don’t marry with white people?” She say, “What you say? What you talkin’ about?” I say, “Why you didn’t marry with white people? Even you marry Vietnamese, okay? Why you had to marry with black people?” I was very angry and very sad because all the children they don’t like me. All the time they call me “black, black.” I don’t like that. Now I understand my mother, but before I have my own children I can’t understand. She can’t change nothing.

  It was the same for my brother, he fight with other children every day. He stayed in school eight years only, but me, I finished high school. I learn English there. I knew I had to keep myself cool, I had to forget what they say to me.

  My mother got married again when I was four years old. My father died only two months before, and she got married again. My stepfather, he don’t want to take care of me and my brother, so they send us to my grandfather.

  My grandfather lived in Phan Thiet, about two hundred kilometers from Saigon. That’s where I went to school. I didn’t have any friends, the Vietnamese don’t like me. I feel this, so I stay by myself. I read books, sometimes go to the movies. When I went back to Saigon, after high school, then I had many friends. Some were Vietnamese, some were black like me, others white, you know. Their fathers were French. I had some Cambodian friends too. But when I be a young girl in Phan Thiet, I am alone. Th
ere were no other mixed race children, just me and my brother.

  Every six or seven months my mother would write my grandfather and tell him to send us to Saigon, and we’d go to stay with her for a week or two, or maybe a month, but I felt very angry at my mother for sending me away.

  My mother had five children with her Vietnamese husband. One died, and the others live in Saigon. My mother is still there, but my stepfather, he killed himself two years ago. I don’t know what happened to him, he just took too much medicine [poison] and died. We never liked each other anyway.

  After I finish high school, I go back to my mother’s house and take care of my mother’s children. But my stepfather, he fight with me many times. One day he beat me, he tells me I have a hard head. He tells me that if I don’t talk easy [be polite], I have to go out and never come back to his house no more. I feel very bad. I know he don’t want to put me out, you know, he just talkin’, but I feel very bad because when he say that, my mother was sittin’ right there, and she didn’t say anything. He say to me, “I tell you what, you got a hard head. You do anything you want to do, you don’t care about other people.” I say, “How come I have to care about what other people like? If I like, I do. If it’s no good, I don’t do. I never do nothing bad, I’m a good person.” So he say: “Don’t say anything else, or you have to get out. If you be here you have to talk easy with me, or else . . . “I wait, I don’t say anything. Then he ask me, “What you say now, what you do now?” I say, “I go out.” He say, “All right, but you better remember, if you go out, you never come back my house no more.” I say, “Okay,” but when I say that, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I just feel so angry, he hurt me very much. And I hate my mother, I think she is very, very weak. She didn’t say anything, she just sit quiet like that.