The Invisible Lives of Amerasians

Just 10 years ago, Marianne Blank was perched atop the cause du jour.

As the director of the nation’s busiest Amerasian refugee program, she provided job training, English lessons and tutoring for children of American soldiers and Vietnamese women--living legacies, and pariahs, of the Vietnam War.

Congress wrote checks. Morley Safer came calling. The kids were on Oprah. “It was the sexy topic of the time,” Blank, now 68 and executive director of St. Anselm’s Cross-Cultural Community Center in Garden Grove, said with a weary smile.

Today, her relationship with those kids is a more somber affair: She testifies for their defense attorneys.

In letters to courts in California, Colorado and Texas, she pleads for leniency. It’s a form letter, though she expands it occasionally if the crime is particularly serious. And it’s an explanation, in a way, of why the kids she tried to save are stealing cars and breaking into people’s homes.

“The stigma and shame borne by these ‘children’ ... produced a group that had little chance of success in this country,” the letter reads. “The U.S. never did anything for these children, and they were expected to somehow adapt here as adults, even though they were taught to be ashamed of their existence.”

It’s remarkable how quickly a cause can fade, losing its funding and its moment in the public eye. This time, it has left Amerasians, in many ways, right back where they started--marginalized and forgotten.

In all, after the U.S. government formally took responsibility for them 12 years ago, as many as 30,000 Amerasians immigrated to the United States from Vietnam. Most arrived as teens in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, and now they’ve grown up. While the public perception is that they simply assimilated into everyday life, the truth is far darker, say social workers, activists and Amerasians themselves.

There are scattered success stories, but by most accounts, these children of war--more than 5,000 of whom came to Southern California--remain plagued.

“We came here because we thought we were coming home,” said Holly Do, a 31-year-old Amerasian who emigrated in 1989 and now lives in Orange. “And then we were abandoned all over again. Some couldn’t handle it. They just gave up.”

A Feeling He Was Doomed From Birth

Some days, My Nguyen thinks he might have been doomed from the start.

Born in the South Vietnamese town of Nha Trang, the son of an American GI whose name he never knew, he was left by his mother in a trash bin when he was an infant. She covered him with a piece of cardboard and left him to die.

Rescued by another family in the village, he was later beaten up at school so much that he quit when he was 9 and went to work hauling catfish and shrimp at the village dock.

Using a razor and ink made from burnt shoestrings, he scarred his arms with tattoos, one with his birth date, another bitterly recalling the slurs that were lobbed his way as a child. The other kids in the village kicked him away when he tried to join their games. Weary of villagers taunting his adopted mother for raising an Amerasian, he ran away from home at 17 and started living on the streets.

In 1990, at 21, his cursed ethnic makeup became his ticket out. Vietnamese had learned that immediate family members of Amerasians were allowed to enter with them, so thousands of Amerasians came to the United States at the expense of families posing as their own.

His “family” brought him to Little Saigon, where he began begging on the streets again. In 1997, he and two Amerasian friends were busted while stealing cigarettes from a Westminster store. He spent much of 1997 and 1998 in jail.

Behind bars, he learned he has terminal cancer. Now on probation, he has dropped to 100 pounds. A deep scar drops like a trench from his left ear into his neckline. One of his eyes is permanently closed, and there is a large dent in his skull, all because of a cancerous tumor doctors have battled intermittently.

He lives in a cramped Westminster apartment with his girlfriend and her three children. The kids sleep in the kitchen on thin mattresses scattered on the floor. Deep in a pile of welfare and other government papers that have documented his struggle, his life is boiled down in a social worker’s chicken scratch. Question No. 5 on one form reads: “What community, church, sports or social groups do you belong to?” The answer: “No social interaction.”

“I had nowhere to go in Vietnam,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything. So I came here. And now I can’t do anything or go anywhere here.”

Kicked Out of School and Kept From Jobs

Saigon fell in 1975, but in some ways, the war was only beginning for Amerasians.

In a patrilineal society where a child’s social status is passed down from his or her father, they had no father. Worse, most in Vietnam assumed that their mothers were prostitutes or bar girls--though studies suggest that less than a third of Amerasians’ mothers were prostitutes.

To the North Vietnamese, Amerasians were the enemy’s children. To the South Vietnamese, they were remnants of a lost war. They were taunted, called bui doi, “children of the dust,” and con lai-- “mixed-blood” or “half-breeds.” They were kicked out of schools. They were kept from jobs, forcing many to take to the streets.

In the United States, they were largely forgotten. Then, in 1986, a newspaper photographer clicked a shot of a 15-year-old boy in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. The boy was Amerasian, crippled and selling flowers crafted from the foil in empty cigarette packs.

A year later--13 years after Saigon fell--Congress approved the Amerasian Homecoming Act. The bill eliminated quotas on Amerasian immigration to the United States; Amerasians, it seemed, had a new lease on life. Congress billed it as the American Dream.

But Amerasians would find, upon reaching their “home,” that in some ways they were as unwanted here as they were in Vietnam.

There were 60 cluster sites established for them, including Blank’s in Garden Grove. The sites were quickly overwhelmed.

Amerasians typically received eight months of government benefits, including health care, as well as remedial English lessons and some job training, but many believe the government vastly underestimated the amount of assistance Amerasians would need.

Meanwhile, as the author Thomas Bass points out in his book, “Vietnamerica,” the government made no provisions to reunite Amerasians with their GI fathers. Indeed, the government told its workers that they should take necessary steps to “protect the veteran from ... embarrassing disclosures,” Bass writes.

Government funding for the cluster sites and all other assimilation programs began drying up in 1993 and ended in 1995. Today, even the success stories are hard to find.

Holly Do was one of the lucky ones. Like most Amerasians, Do was kicked out of school. But with rugged resolve, she quietly planted herself outside the village classroom, straining to hear the lessons being taught inside. She eventually taught herself to write.

“I would just cry and cry, but I didn’t want them to put me down and keep me down,” said Do, who came to the United States in 1989 and works in an optometrist’s office. “I knew that I was not what they said.”

She winces when asked about her father--a former Army truck driver she knows only as “Sgt. Foot.” They met once, in Vietnam when Do was 3. She has not seen him since, though she has searched persistently.

“These children had no identity,” Blank said. “In Vietnam, you need a father for an identity, and their fathers weren’t there. The culture said: ‘You are no one.’ ”

In Vietnam, ‘Everybody Hates Us’

Back in Vietnam, conditions are even worse.

One overcast morning in March, Amerasians gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Ho Chi Minh City. They meet there every day, even when they don’t have any business there, because its pocked, forbidding walls are their only hope.

A block away, the former Presidential Palace of South Vietnam is a tourist attraction--mostly because one of the North Vietnamese tanks that blasted through its gates is a permanent relic outside, its red star repainted occasionally when it starts to fade. It’s now called “Unification Palace,” to the chagrin of those still loyal to the old regime of the South.

That’s where Nguyen Huong can be found most afternoons. Born in 1972 to an American GI and a Vietnamese woman, she was left by her mother at an orphanage near Da Nang. Raised by nuns, she ran away from the orphanage when she turned 12 and has lived on her own, on the streets, ever since.

In 1993, a family offered to pay her way to the United States so they could escape. But after immigration officials discovered they were not related, the family withheld promised payment and even took her identification documents and paperwork.

Today, she sleeps in a former chicken coop behind a flower stand in a cramped market. She delivers coffee for a few hours each morning and helps sell flowers, making about 10,000 dong per day--about 70 cents. Her possessions--a blanket, a hat and a cardboard Buddhist shrine--are in the coop. Her belongings are stolen regularly. Currently, she’s down to two outfits.

“Everybody hates us,” she said. “We wander the street. We don’t have a place to be. We are nobody.”