Misplaced Baggage

“Experiencing social injustices and political corruption during my high school career sparked my interest in investigative reporting,” she said.
- Venus Lee in Người Việt Online -

Sometime in 2007 Venus Lee, a graduate of the University of Southern California (broadcast journalism and social sciences), became the first recipient of the YenDo Vietnam Fellowship, given by the Orange County newspaper Người Việt. She will have received a $5000 stipend because of this accomplishment. It’s also worth mentioning that Lee’s fellowship project is a “study of adoptions from Vietnam”.

Back in December 2007 Lee authored a four-part series on adoptions from Vietnam, which is still online for you to read:

1. A New Family
2. Preparing and Waiting
3. Across the Miles
4. Aftermath of adoption: adjusting to the culture

Now, if Người Việt had been playing some elaborate joke on the public by publishing these articles under the guise of “professional journalism”, then it couldn’t have picked a better candidate than Venus Lee to act the fool and merry prankster. Because, in my discriminating opinion, the series was a travesty of journalistic objectivity and ethics. It is beyond me that the editors of Người Việt could have allowed such pedantic and cloying reporting represent their well-established news organization.

With respect to Venus Lee, I would have loved to have asked her what her definition of “investigative reporting” is, since her articles demonstrate none of the standards of that distinguished practice. It’s obvious that her writing lacks a variety of sources, a penchant for serious research, comprehension of the subject at hand and will to go deeper than surface appearances. If I had been the editor assigned to oversee her work, I would have had serious reservations about publishing any of it until she demonstrated some of those “investigative reporting” skills she supposedly so admires.

Considering that Lee received a fellowship and two Hearst Journalism Awards (!), one would assume that she would attempt to meet the expectations inherent in such distinctions and prove her worth among her peers. Being given responsibility to write a four-part series in the biggest Vietnamese-American newspaper in the country showed that they had put a lot of faith in her up-and-coming status. However, based on the weak, and very skewed, content of the series I would have to venture a guess that Lee underestimated the complexity of the subject matter and overestimated her talent to tackle it.

For years, China has been the Asian superpower when it comes to adoptions, but Vietnam is becoming a viable option for Americans seeking to adopt a child. Today, Người Việt 2 begins a four-part series looking at the history of Vietnamese adoptions, at the cost and the waiting time of the process, the experience of traveling to Vietnam to pick up a child, and then how the youngsters assimilate into American culture.

Above is the preamble to each of the four articles. In my mind, this implied that the series is going to take a comprehensive look at the history and present situation of adoption from Vietnam and the adoptees themselves. Plus, the fact that Người Việt decided to do a four-part series on adoption from Vietnam made me believe that a lot of information and point-of-views were going to be covered, and that the articles were going to contain a lot of things for their readers to consider.

I was sorely mistaken, as the following three quotes demonstrate:

“I looked into the face of my own daughter and realized how lucky she was that we were rescuing her from a life of poverty and enormous need, unlike most of her orphan mates who may never have their basic medical, nutritional, educational and individualized attention needs met.” [Robert Kalatschan]

Người Việt Online, A New Family, Thur., December 20, 2007, by Venus Lee

“You don’t understand. My daughter’s waiting for me,” she said. [Catherine Nelson]

Người Việt Online, Across the Miles, Wed., January 3, 2008, by Venus Lee

“…For us, it’s a bedtime story that children grow in your heart and not in your tummy.” [Karen Calvert]

Người Việt Online, Aftermath of adoption: adjusting to the culture, Fri., January 11, 2008, by Venus Lee

These quotes represent a major hurdle in facilitating the equitable distribution of voices that should add color to the bigger adoption picture. As I see it, too much deference is shown to adoptive parents, including their interests, their needs and their troubles. As long as the media only focus on one group within the adoption community, the public will remain unaware of the myriad stories out there and start believing that only certain people have anything to say about adoption.

The series is replete with basic information on the process of adopting infants from overseas. The virtual checklists at the end of each article resemble brochures seen in adoption agencies. Thus, Venus Lee created a paradox: by spreading out this information catering to P/APs throughout three of the four articles, she narrowed the subject matter so much that she (perhaps unintentionally) overlooked so many topics that could have elevated the debate on international adoption within Người Việt’s pages. That’s not to say that the information on the adoption process isn’t useful; but, to provide this information to the exclusion of other equally valuable information that would have given the topic of adoption some weight and much needed context seems unnecessarily conspiratorial to me.

If one wanted more proof that the series was stacked in favor of P/APs, then it should be noted that Venus Lee interviewed mainly just five families: the Hacks, the Calverts, the Kalatschans, the Franks and the Noltes. The writing had more to do with these families and their experiences adopting their children rather than adoption itself, with all its logistical and emotional complexities.

The lack of representation in this series presents a serious flaw in its original mission to inform the public about the state and progress of adoptions from Vietnam. Without input from different interested parties, the appearance of favoritism looms large and makes calls of unfairness all the more credible. In fact, so egregious is the pandering to P/APs’ self-interest that the serious ongoing concerns about alleged corruption in the facilitation of adoption of children from Vietnam are glossed over, even though the topic is addressed directly, like so:

Since there were growing concerns of purchased or stolen babies, officials at the USCIS took some time to investigate inconsistencies in the circumstances surrounding the Calvert child before issuing her a visa.

First, unlike most adopted children who are filtered through an orphanage, Ally was transferred directly from a hospital to her new parents’ open arms. Second, the entire adoption process for this child was unusually brisk - a mere six months from start to finish.

The Calverts are not sure how they finally received clearance, but they don’t ask.

Người Việt Online, Across the Miles, Wed., January 3, 2008, by Venus Lee

The failure of Lee to follow up on this extraordinary revelation of likely malfeasance in the adoption of this family’s daughter and the figurative sweeping under the rug of the USCIS’ suspicions speaks unflatteringly of the newspaper’s quality of reporting. Worse, such an omission of alternative (i.e., differing) viewpoints does a disservice to the reading public’s ability to come to its own conclusions about an admittedly confusing (and conflicting) situation.

For me, the most significant example of the series’ attempt to manipulate public opinion in favor of one side over another is the last installment that deals with the adopted children once they arrive in the United States. Lee focuses on the Hack family who, in 2005, took their three children, all adopted from Vietnam, back to their country of birth for, ostensibly, a visit, but which appears to have evolved into a compare-and-contrast missionary junket.

The author singles out Emily Hack because she had the opportunity to meet her biological parents while visiting Vietnam. Her adoptive mother, Theresa Hack, soon sets a gratitude trap for her daughter that will more than likely have her thrashing in agony for quite a long time:

“I think she saw the poverty her birth family lived in and realized her mother gave her up for adoption to give her a better chance at life,” Theresa Hack said.

Người Việt Online, Aftermath of adoption: adjusting to the culture, Fri., January 11, 2008, by Venus Lee

Suffice it to say that the inclusion of the voices of adult Vietnamese adoptees would have provided a more realistic perspective about the turmoil and triumph inherent in return visits to their country of origin, especially if contact with the natural parents is made. If Lee had taken the initiative to do a simple search on the Internet for “adult Vietnamese adoptees”, she would have been able to find a plethora of information on the websites of organizations like Vietnamese Adoptee Network (VAN), Adopted Vietnamese International (AVI) and Operation Reunite. She could have contacted representatives of these organizations and conducted interviews with them, and these contacts could have provided her with even more contacts within the community.

If Lee had done her job properly and expanded her list of primary sources, she could have avoided the following unfortunate passage altogether:

The difference in lifestyle and opportunity was evident by comparing Emily to her twin sister who resided with her birth family. Emily enjoys hearty meals, a generously-sized wardrobe, a good education and the chance to join in extracurricular activities such as dance, choir and sports. In contrast, her sibling lived with parents toiling to buy enough clothes for everyone in the family and put food on the table.

Người Việt Online, Aftermath of adoption: adjusting to the culture, Fri., January 11, 2008, by Venus Lee

This callous comparison of real-life situations between Emily Hack and her biological sister begs an experienced editor’s red pen to cross out the offending text. Lee’s juxtaposition of the girls’ current lifestyles could constitute a form of child abuse because it is a sucker punch to each of the girls’ heads that unwittingly injures any sense of autonomy and dignity that they both possess. To elevate the hegemonic perception of material wealth over the rudimentary stereotypes of poverty serves to oversimplify and then negate any real loss that both girls will eventually have to come to terms with.

The ironic omission of any adult adoptee or first parent voice within the realm of adoption typifies many media outlets’ simplistic dealings with the topic and how little regard they show to people who could possibly have a point of view that upsets the status quo. The Vietnamese diaspora following the Vietnam War not only included the regular cast of characters, but also the thousands of infants and children who were rushed out of the decaying nation-state of the Republic of South Vietnam. To have not included any of our opinions or stories constitutes gross negligence from where I sit. Did not someone on Người Việt’s editorial staff inform Venus Lee that P/APs are not the be-all and end-all in the totality of adoption?

As far as journalistic integrity goes, it’s a foregone conclusion in my mind that Người Việt had the obligation to be all inclusive in its treatment of Vietnamese adoption because it affects so many people and deserves more than just a preoccupation with how to get a child, how to travel to get the child and which culture camp to put the child in when he/she is feeling lonely and needs friends.

Due to Người Việt’s lackluster four-part series, four of us adult Vietnamese adoptees decided to draft a letter to the editor in order to lodge a complaint against the series’ content in order to hold the paper’s feet to the fire and make our presence felt among our peers within the adoption community. The complete letter appears below:

To the Editor of Người Việt2 Online:

When we saw that Người Việt2 was featuring a 4-part series on adoption from Vietnam, we were more than a little intrigued because of our background as adult Vietnamese adoptees. We are just a few of many members of the first generation of Vietnamese adoptees who were flown out of the country to join families around the world during and at the end of the Vietnam War. So, it was with much anticipation that we wanted to read what a Vietnamese-American publication had to say about adoption from Vietnam. Unfortunately, the articles fell far short of any wide-ranging examination of both the history and continued practice of adoption from Vietnam.

Người Việt2 had an extraordinary opportunity to inform the public about issues surrounding international adoption, specifically from the point of view of birth parents, adoptive parents and the adoptees themselves. The series on adoption could have sparked lively and constructive debate about the social, economic and political factors that drive international adoption between Vietnam and the United States, as well as the far-reaching consequences felt by birth families, adoptive families and society at large.

Apparently, Người Việt2 has simply allowed an easy-to-use guide for prospective adoptive parents to be published. As superficial as the content is, it is even more disturbing that the overall message of the series is that Vietnamese children are commodities on the store shelves waiting for American consumers to pick out and purchase. It is regrettable that the author sought no comment or opinion from Vietnamese government officials in charge of adoptions, birth parents or their relatives, social workers or officials from child welfare agencies, or even any adult Vietnamese adoptees. For if she had, a more complex and comprehensive picture of the process and its effects on everyone involved could have painted. The series could have gone beyond the traditionally narrow focus of “orphan” and “savior”.

Although the series mentioned allegations of official corruption and the selling of infants on the black market, which forced the Vietnamese and American governments to briefly halt adoptions from Vietnam a few years ago, the articles appear to treat these crimes as nuisances by highlighting the prospective adoptive parents’ anxiety and anguish as they were forced to put their adoption plans on hold. To seemingly sweep these charges under the rug and forget about them is an offense to journalism.

Perhaps when Người Việt2 chooses to report on adoption again, the editor will keep in mind that its audience will be comprised of many diverse members from the adoption community, and they will expect to be informed rather than ignored.

Soon after we submitted the letter, the former editor of Người Việt, Anh Do, responded and in her own letter to the readers hinted at further constructive dialogue with adult Vietnamese adoptees in order to address just one of many gaps in the series.

Fortuitously, Anh Do personally contacted me by phone and expressed great interest in interviewing me and the three other signatories of the letter for a follow-up piece. To say the least, I was impressed with Anh Do’s act of reaching out to our aggrieved party and seeking to make amends by bringing balance to the discussion on adoption from Vietnam. Each of us were notified that Anh Do was going to contact us with prepared questions and conduct a brief interview with each of us. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, Anh Do stepped down as editor of Người Việt and handed the editorship to a long-time reporter at the paper named Jami Farkas.

And, this is when the goodwill gesture turns into farce. For a detailed recounting of events, both past and present, that have led to unexpected silence from Người Việt’s end, please stay tuned…

My two mothers are arguing again right over me. I’ve awoken to their bickering. I lie here waiting for them to stop. My first mother is to my right and my second mother is to my left. They’re annoying me with the same old argument.

My first mother questions my second mother as to why I smell like potatoes and butter all the time. My second mother accuses my first mother of wanting me to smell like fish and sweat.

My first mother crosses her thin, brown arms and huffs about how ignorant I am of classic Vietnamese poetry and songs about my people’s origins, and is sad that I still do not know how to answer her in my dreams in Vietnamese. My second mother crosses her arms too and raises and lowers herself on the balls of her feet, signifying agitation. She accuses my first mother of giving birth to me in a crowded flat where two of her brothers were secret guerrillas who would have thrown me out with the bathwater if they saw my American eyes staring back at them. She says that if my first mother really wanted me to speak Vietnamese, she would have kept me and raised me instead of giving me to my blind grandmother and skipping town to do every Tom, Dick and Harry who arrived on base.

My first mother counters that my second mother doesn’t know the slightest thing about her situation, never bothered to ask and warned her to stop putting lies in my head. She yells, “What does an uptight, midwest farm girl know about life anyway?!” My second mother jabs her chubby finger at my first mother and says, “What does an uneducated, manipulative Vietnamese city girl know about life since you’re dead to your son anyway?!”

That’s the last straw. I’ve had enough. I sit up, get out of bed and quickly get dressed. I plug in my earphones, put on my sneakers and head out the door. I’m deaf to the pleas of my two mothers as they reach for me and beg me to stay with them. But, I belong to neither of them. They both have foisted shame upon me in order to mold me into a more sympathetic person. Yet, it’s turned me against them. I do the opposite of what is expected of me so as to counteract the imposition of a foreign will on my life’s territory. I’ve convinced myself that I am no one’s son, regardless of who gave birth to me or who fed me. I’ve always been a burden.

On that point, there is no argument.

[NOTE: The following is a work of fiction.]

The Army man held me on his lap. I have the picture to prove it. This man’s big white hands curled around my plump little baby body so I wouldn’t fall and land on the wooden floor. The tinted reflection of my face looked bloated in the lenses of his sunglasses. The black-haired adults stood around us, smiling broadly, but their sharp brown eyes peered through the helplessness of the situation. Some of them teetered on the brink of exhaustion. Their knees appeared weak with the thought of giving up yet another child to a country that was sending its bombers over to float above their land like seagulls over a landfill.

But, nothing could’ve prepared me for what came next. The black-and-white photo of me entertaining the Army man became a press favorite and my image galvanized people all over the world to save up their pretty pennies to take home a child just like me. Dailies and weeklies saw their circulation jump tenfold simply by slapping my timeless mug on their front pages. The contrasting image of the impressionable foreign foundling sitting atop the knee of the corn-fed saintly soldier played expertly upon the maternal desires of the womenfolk and the predictable protectionism of the men folk. Inquiries flooded the orphanage, praying for our lonely souls and slipping in a few extra dollars to let the local officials know how much they cared about our safe arrival in more appropriate environs.

My mom and dad, the people who had the foresight to pick me out of the tropical bumper crop of 1974, told me that if it weren’t for the photo of me in their local newspaper, they wouldn’t have known to save me from the onslaught heading south. Their tales of ghoulish oriental Grim Reapers knocking on peasant doors and whisking away the young to fight against the doughboy GIs fed my already latent fear of scythes. They repeated over and over the stories of the Red scourge that hid among the reeds and waited for the hazy jungle nights to obscure their crimes against the good people of Indochina.

One day when I was playing on the Tonka earthmover in the schoolyard sandlot a rude boy wearing one boot and one sneaker skipped over to me and pushed me off it. I heard him laugh as I got up and ran to the teacher, crying about the indignity of losing face and losing my turn. The teacher crossed his arms and looked down at my teary eyes and curtly scolded me about wasting his time. He pointed to the painted pony on a spring and suggested I go play on it and stop messing with the other boys. It was going to take time, I told myself, to learn the rules of this new country. My mom’s face appeared to me and reminded me, as she did every morning at the bus stop, that not everyone is going to like me and they will call me names. But, I should ignore their taunts and ignore their shoving because I am above them, I am special. Instead of going to play on the toy pony, I marched over to the kid who pushed me off the earthmover and recited to him exactly what my mother had told me each and every morning, especially the fact that I was special. That’s when the kid with one boot and one sneaker punched me in the face, got off the earthmover and told me that it’s my turn again.

Every evening before even touching my dinner, I was encouraged to clasp my hands and pray for those, who unlike myself, couldn’t make it to our supper table because their legs had been blown off by mines or they had been starving on the street corner clutching clods of dirt. I was fully convinced that my survival depended on my adorableness that had magically warded off the strikes of the rifle butt to the skull or the point blank shots to the chest, which felled the other unlucky wretches left behind. How else could I explain my good fortune of living in such bountifulness and virtuosity? People told me that it wasn’t happenstance that had reached down out of the clouds and plucked me from Death’s hairy arms. It was simply destiny that I and my parents had been strolling down the same path of mercy and meeting at just the right time. People may tell me that this is a strange way to be thankful for the gift of life, but I’m convinced that there is no other way. I must believe that I am special. Don’t you?

pic by sume

Reflecting

I don’t know how long I stood there, in front of the mirror, looking for my father’s features. There must be something there, a hint in the shape of my nose or the curve of my jaw. Surely I’d be able to find some distinguishable feature that would verify at least half of my genetics could be be accounted for. He was my father and fathers do not lie. At least that’s what I told myself as I traced lines upon my face, the tip of my finger growing numb to the touch of my own skin.

The breakdown of trust between my father and I and its unintended consequences have been one of the most emotionally draining to explore and convey. I used to think that love and trust between parents and their children was all you needed to build a solid relationship between the two. All else, whether it be communication, respect, loyalty or honesty could be built upon those two elements. It was also my thinking that if one, either love or trust, were ever challenged or even totally destroyed, the other would help to repair the damage. Sadly, I’m finding that this is not necessarily the case.

I still love my father, but it has done little to help re-establish the level of trust I once afforded him. Knowing and understanding the depth of his deceptions and the manipulative intentions behind them, has irreparably damaged my perception of his integrity. Furthermore, discovering his manipulative use of my mother’s “memory” filled me with such shock and disgust that it destroyed any sense of admiration I might have held.

At this point, I’m aware that some elaboration is necessary, but feel that doing so would bring too much focus upon my father’s actions. Writing about this will inevitably point fingers at him, however, at this point, I’ve chosen to put more of my energy into trying to understand the consequences rather than the actions themselves. Trying to further explain why he withheld the truth and flat-out lied about my adoption would require a great amount of speculation on my part. The exact reasons behind his choices are ultimately his to tell, and he has chosen not to explain himself.

I’m not sure I’d believe him even if he did suddenly decided to elaborate on what he meant by, “I had my reasons.” People keep telling me I shouldn’t let it take away from the good things he’s done. They say I should find some way to forgive and let it go. “It was a long time ago, and I’m sure he meant well,” seems to be their main defense. I don’t know how to get it through to them that I’ve already forgiven his actions. It’s not a matter of forgiveness now, but of trust and how its absence negatively affects our relationship.

The loss of faith in the only father I’ve ever known feels comparable to the sense of loss I feel when I think of Má. I was never allowed to know her and suddenly feel as if I never really knew him. He has widened the distance between us, and the resulting sense of betrayal has given me little cause to bridge the gap. The search for more meaningful relationships has taken me in the opposite direction as I search to fill the vacuum. Fortunately for me, I was able to establish and maintain relationships without trust becoming an issue. That is the amazing thing.

The ability to trust can prove surprisingly resilient even after repeated bombardments of disappointment. The resilience seems born from necessity since the growth and solidifying of a relationship, whether between parent and child, friends or lovers, depends on at least some level of trust. In very early childhood, one would think it’s just natural to trust one’s parents but these days, I question whether it could truly be called trust as I know it today.

While bonding with my parents may have been an early indication of my growing in that direction, the concept of trust wasn’t a conscious idea. Even then, I don’t think you could really call it trust in the way you’d refer to it with an adult. To me, real trust requires some amount of judgment, knowing who you can and cannot trust and understanding why. What I had with my parents in those early days was based on naiveté. I simply didn’t know anything better. Was it nothing more than attachment?

There were many reasons the subject of trust interests me. One was that I wanted to understand how my relationship with my parents might have contributed, if at all, to my own concepts of trust now. Another was spurred by reading an article in which an adoptive parent stated she felt her daughter thought she needed “permission” to express her feelings about her “birth” mother. There was something about using the word “permission” that angered me.

Thinking about it in terms of granting permission suggests that the adoptive mother exercised her power over her adopted daughter and allowed her to express her feelings. Talking about their adoptions is something every adoptee has the right to do, and that should be made clear from the beginning. I thought back to my own experiences and wanted to suggest to the author that an adoptee’s reluctance to discuss their adoptions should often be thought of in terms of trust.

I didn’t share that level of trust with my parents. It wasn’t because they were awful people, but because I didn’t think they could deal with it. I didn’t want to hurt them, didn’t want to make them feel bad or make them think of me in a negative way. Their approval and acceptance was important to me, and I didn’t want to endanger that. I didn’t trust that they would be able to just listen rather than tell me how I should think and feel.

My solution was to turn to people I thought I could count on, the result of which further isolated them from that part of my life. I think that was the beginning of that “dual existence” many of my fellow adoptees refer to when discussing their “adopted selves” and their “normal selves.” That’s not to say that I think adoptive parents should pump themselves up with enthusiasm and rush their children to talk about their feelings.

I think adoptees should be made to feel empowered to speak about their adoptions. Too much parental pushing would seem to have the opposite effect. Besides, one would hope that if a deep level of trust is first established as simply parent and child, the bond would naturally extend to one between adoptive parent and child. By that, I mean one need not overly stress adoption in very early childhood but rather concentrate on establishing and maintaining a solid parent/child bond as a foundation.

I think if my parents had stressed my adoption too much, I would have felt more like an outsider than I already had. Too little gave me the impression my adoption wasn’t open for discussion, that I should somehow be ashamed of it. All that said, I don’t think I would have been comfortable sharing everything with my parents even under the most idea circumstances.

Sometimes, parents whether adoptive or not, have to give their children room to grow on their own. We have to trust that our children will figure out some things for themselves. Within reasonable limits, isn’t it only right to have the same faith in our children that we ask them to have in us?

posted by Anh Ðào

Làm Tài Việt Nam = Made In Việt Nam

Original foto © 2007 R.E.S. Recreated by Anh Ðào Kolbe/wwww.adkfoto.com

A dog tag is the informal name for the identification tags worn by military personnel, because of their resemblance to actual dog tags.

Sumeia Williams

Identity Replacement Conditioning.
It begins with the changing of a name.

Erase. Replace.
Lê Thị Bửu Trân was preserved only as text on a page - the right to replace it with a Western name purchased for a few thousand dollars. Mismatched but easy for Americans to remember and pronounce, my new name served as a testament to the alien-ness of the environment that was to be my home.

First impressions.
“Bonding” was essential to successfully imprinting upon me the graph of my new family’s identity. This psychological process, so vital to human beings, served as a kind of primer-coat. It covered my undeveloped consciousness, smoothed it over for easy transferral and later sealed in any objections or doubts as to its validity.

Indoctorinization Initialization.
Identity restructuring often occurs under the guise of acceptance and belonging. When my parents changed my name, they intended it to be a sign of acceptance and a means through which I might “fit in.” In actuality, it was a kind of branding. Neither my adoptive parents nor my environment could accept me as I had been.

Like a mark of ownership, my new name helped us all to believe I belonged to and with them. The cutting and pasting of my identity was cast as being a good thing and I was none the wiser. Belonging was a necessity and that reduced the value of my original heritage even more.

Gratitude Adjustment.
Give me adoption or give me death. “Forget the past,” society says, “but if you must remember, do so in light of the fact that all you have lost is nothing compared to what you have gained. Be grateful to be alive. Be grateful for your opportunities. Be grateful you weren’t left in Viet Nam. See the orphanage. Look at the poverty.

Understand from where you came. Be witness to what could have been. Aren’t you glad you didn’t grow up like that? Take what we have given you without questioning, without complaint. God bless your adoptive parents. God bless America. Pity the country that couldn’t take care of you.”

It was rarely said aloud. The suggestions were subtle, subliminal, almost automatic.

Ethnic Subversion Immersion.
Movies, television, school and church all worked together to convey the message that Lê Thị Bửu Trân brought with her little, if anything of importance.

“Life is here and now. She was then and so far away. Let’s bow our heads and pray, be thankful for our blessings. You cannot fight destiny. Respect authority. Respect your parents. God. Country. Family.”

The struggle to fade into the landscape of racial ambiguity, pop culture, fashion and teenage trends trumped everything. To truly become something, you have to know it, study it, lose yourself in it. You’re told how to speak, what to eat, what to wear, what to like, what to believe until you forget to wonder if there was ever anything else.

Ethnic Equations
Face and race were the first of many clues that something of was out place. Beyond nothing “matching,” the isolation and feelings of dislocation, there was the secret knowledge that I could never go back. Even if face and race matched, culture did not. The way “others” saw me would rarely be the way I, the other, saw myself. Face(x) + Race(x) + Culture(y) ≠ Ethnicity(y) or (x).

Society seemed to offer me only three directions in which to go. I could stick with what I knew and continue in the direction that my parents had laid out for me. I could break from my comfort zone and try to become “fully” Vietnamese. Or I could try to cut straight down the middle and carve out some existence in-between. All would later prove problematic. The first two would send me down paths that I could never fully explore. The third down a path that could never be tangibly defined.

To refer to it as a kind of “third space” proves inaccurate. That suggests a place in which I inhabit when in fact, there is no tangible place with which to identify my hybrid ethnicity. It seems more appropriate to say I carry it within myself. It is who I am and up to me to define. I write the equation, determine whether the answer is correct or not while reserving the right to revise.

Excerpt taken from Turn My Eyes Away (Rosemary Taylor, 1976):

“We were primarily a salvage operation in a time of warfare. We were there to help gather up the debris while mightier powers laboured over ultimate solutions. One foreign company concentrated on collecting the mountains of scrap metal that littered the countryside and marketed it profitably in Korea. Our very small war effort was to collect the human litter, too insignificant for the concern of the military strategists, the newborn mites who were abandoned daily throughout the country in the maternities, orphanages, hospitals, and scrap heaps. Their feeble whimper held little shock value when the blood of a nation was screaming to heaven.

“But while some optimists wanted to believe in the usefulness of their scrap metal, we wanted to believe in the possibility of man’s redemption. We wanted to believe that every life is unique and has its contribution to make to the enlightenment of mankind.

“Perhaps it is naive to sustain this belief when mankind seems to be plunging toward a chaotic hell. Wherever one looks, selfishness, lies, greed, ambition and irresponsibility are all woven by man’s ingenuity into a system so complex that the individual emerges with his conscience pure as the driven snow. And saddest of all, he is convinced of his innocence.”

posted by Kevin Mînh Allen

marigold her name
yellowing bracelet slipped off
her tiny wrist bones

April 4, 1975. A C-5A military cargo plane took off from Tan Son Nhut air base near Sài Gòn, carrying hundreds of Vietnamese babies, as well as their escorts and other military and civilian personnel. Operation Babylift had officially commenced. However, due to a mechanical failure, the backdoor to the plane blew out at around 23,000 feet. The pilot turned the plane around in an attempt to return to the airbase, but had to crash land in a rice field. Out of those hundreds of infants and young children on that plane, only 40 survived the crash.

But, the beat went on.

Regular airliners stepped in and, when all was said and done, by April 26, 1975, over 2,000 Vietnamese children were carried out of the madness and chaos of the former Republic of South Vietnam and re-settled in foreign lands.

One of those kids was my sister, nicknamed ‘marigold’, only two months old then. My parents used to tell me that when she came to them she was extremely thin, sickly and couldn’t keep any food down. They were so afraid that she would die before they could get her to the hospital for emergency treatment. But, she made it.

And, one of these days – I can only hope – my sister will want to know more about why people continue to commemorate the lives lost on this date.

But, my sister’s a survivor. And, perhaps that’s all that matters to her.

posted by Kevin Mînh Allen

[NOTE: The following is a work of fiction.]

I stand before you in this courtroom prepared to defend him against being cast back into the vagaries of history. There was a time when I too saw him as a foreign occupier and inveterate killer. But, as his only son, I must give him the benefit of the doubt, no matter how many years he’s been on the run.

I never knew my father because, in a way, he barely knew my mother. They met at a local hospital where the wounded were tended to, but who eventually went insane from looking into frozen eyes. My mother had been a recent graduate from nursing school. Her patients were of every size, color and age. They loved when she came by to coo to them as she undressed and re-dressed their bandages and increased their morphine drips.

When lucid enough, her patients would tell my mother about their wives or girlfriends with whom they’ve lost touch or the children back home they were not likely to see again. They would lament the little children they shot, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not, while securing yet another hamlet. They writhed in guilt when they told her of the captives they bayonetted and the women they doused with gasoline and lit on fire because, they laughed, Buddha wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. My mother would pretend to listen right up until her patients choked back tears and sucked in their last, lonely breath.

One afternoon, my father caught my mother’s eye while keeping one of his buddies company by reading this fellow’s letters from home to him. They peered at each other from across the room, neither one able to disengage from their locked-in stare.

My father told me that my mother was very handsome, not exactly pretty, mind you. However, he said her voice seemed to float outside her body whenever she sang to him. He made it a point to return to the hospital again and again, even outside of visiting hours, to read letters from home to any random dying buddy. Even when no letter came, my father became an expert at memorizing important details about each soldier’s background and fashioning a believable account of life back in the States.

My mother slowly noticed my father’s specious talent. She would hear him read aloud about the harvesting of pumpkins or the painting of massive walls inside massive homes with yards that seemed to take up a whole city block. Sometimes the head nurse would catch my mother listening intently to my father and yell at her to get off her duff and administer more morphine to quiet the screams filling the ward.

In time, my father, in his broken Vietnamese, started asking my mother to go out with him to the nearest phơ stall after her shift. My mother was no demure daisy and readily accepted his invitations. But, she was also no prostitute, and never asked him for money when she headed to his place for a night cap. My father refused to talk about those nights because he said that’s between my mother and him. Fair enough.

And then, like the last drop of wine, my mother was gone. She never returned to the hospital. The head nurse had no idea where she could’ve gone when my father asked around about her. He was heartbroken. He stopped coming to the hospital to ease his buddies’ grief with entertaining stories of mashed potatoes so smoothe and girlfriends so true. My father left Việt Nam never knowing about my birth, nor my mother’s death in the market where a mortar landed and ripped through flesh and fruit.

My father returned to work at the local tire factory and finally married his high school sweetheart. But, after trying to conceive a child, and failing each time, his new bride blamed his herbicidal sperm and left him for another man. This other man happened to be his shift supervisor at the tire factory. This turn of unfortunate events left my father dejected and unable to make the monthly mortgage payments on the new house he had built for his future family. As if things couldn’t have gotten any worse, he was laid off from his job and had to move in with his sister’s family where he became the default nanny to her two kids.

Later, my father came down with pneumonia and thought he would never make it out of bed again. After this extended illness, he found that whenever he tried to speak his mouth filled with an iron-rich liquid that would dribble down the front of his shirt and he would be forced to run to the nearest bathroom to throw up the detestable taste in his mouth.

His subconscious became a tape recorder and kept looping the playback of nonsequitor murder. Every bazooka round he shot at nondescript enemies standing in his peripheral vision missed its target. It wasn’t long before he finally engaged one of the faceless demons who tried to ambush him. That night he was in the middle of furious hand-to-hand combat with this impish foe when he suddenly awoke to find his sister lying limp on top of him because, as he quickly realized, he knocked her out as she was trying to comfort him.

Without a job and without a home my father found himself staying with a sympathetic friend. One night, as he turned on the closet light to get a coat before going out to grab a beer with the guys, a heavy, knotted net fell on top of him. His body was scooped up and lifted into the air and set down in an even darker place than what he was accustomed to.

Not seeing any presence of light, my father feared that his heart had just stopped beating and he had keeled over in the coat closet. A feeling of embarrassment struck him and he wanted so much to go back to his pasty old body, drag it out of the closet and prop it up on the couch, in order to give his corpse the proper dignity it deserved.

After what felt like an endless sleep, my father’s eyes adjusted to the dim light that eventually pulsed from above and below. Slowly, layers of yellowing paper blew in and landed in front of him. My father started reading the writing on them and recognized his Army buddies’ names that appeared on the parchment: “Robert”, “James”, “Adam”, “Matt”. Every time he read those names aloud the men’s groans would grow louder and my father would feel their icy hands clutching at his elbows.

My father grew apprehensive each time another long curled piece of paper fell into his lap. The breezes that brushed past his damp skin picked up in intensity. The air swirled all around him, buffeting him until he felt nauseated from the pendulum motion of the enclosure he found himself in. In the still dark, his ears detected the sound of rope strands twisting and then snapping.

Without food or drink, my father would dream that he saw me. He could see himself working in an electronics store and standing in the home appliance department, schmoozing a young couple to buy a washing machine/dryer combo, when suddenly he saw me pass by. He tried to reconcile the reappearance of a lover with the missing memory of a child. I looked nothing like my mother nor my father, but held a striking resemblance to their own parents.

In earnest, my father tried convincing me that when I passed by I was clearly humming the martial melody of the national anthem of the Republic of South Vietnam. I apparently struck every note and every chord as if I had been singing this song my whole life, from sun up to sun down:

Này Công Dân ơi! Quố Gia đến ngày giǎi phóng.
Ðồng lòng cùng đi hy sinh tiếc gì thân sống.
Vì tương lai Quốc Dân cùng xông pha khói tên.
Làm sao cho núi sông từ nay luôn vững bền.
Dù cho thây phơi trên gươm giáo.
Thù nước, lấy máu đào đem báo.
Nòi giống, lúc biến phǎi cần giǎi nguy.
Người Công Dân luôn vững bền tâm trí.
Hùng tráng quyết chiến đấu làm cho khắp nơi.
Vang tiếng người nước Nam cho đến muôn đời.
Công Dân ơi! Mau hiến thân dưới cờ.
Công Dân ơi! Mau làm cho cõi bờ.
Thoát cơn, tàn phá, Vě vang nòi giống.
Xưng danh Nghìn nǎm giống Lạc Hồng.

[English translation]

O People! The country nears its freedom day.
Together we go forward to the open way.
Remembering our centuries of history,
Brothers from North to South reunite,
With hearts young and pure as crystal
Multiply our efforts and do not spare our ardent blood.
No danger, no obstacle can stop us.
Our courage remains unwavering in the face of a thousand dangers.
On the new way, our look embraces the horizon
And who can repress the soul of our youth?
O People! Going until the end is our resolution.
O People! To give all is our oath.
Together we go forward for the glory of the Fatherland.
We fight for the immortality of the Lac Long race.

There was only one person who could have sung the anthem as beautifully as that – the mother of his child. Crying out in joy, my father threw himself at me and gave me such a bear hug. I stood still like a pole, not fully comprehending that this man was revealing himself to me as my father. This couldn’t be, this is all a mistake, I thought to myself. All my life I had been told the only father and mother that counted were the ones who fed, clothed and housed me. The first set of parents were dead and would never come back. My father, reading my thoughts, exclaimed that as long as I was alive, he and my mother were always with me.

He flipped back the salt-and-pepper bangs that hung over his pasty forehead and gazed at me in amazement.

With tears welling up in his eyes, my father took out a yellowing sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it and handed it to me to read aloud. I looked down at his hand holding the piece of paper, took it from him, sighed, and read: “The bond between mother and child may be indestructable, but the bond between a father and his son is irreplaceable.”

posted by Anh Ðào

No more auction block for me
No more, no more
No more auction block for me 

Many thousands gone

No more driver’s lash for me
No more, no more
No more driver’s lash for me
Many thousands gone

No more whip lash for me
No more, no more
No more pint of salt for me
Many thousands gone

No more auction block for me
No more, no more
No more auction block for me
Many thousands gone 

[Listening to Sweet Honey In The Rock’s version of No More Auction Block]

There’s a new social phenomenon that has been sweeping all walks of life off of their feet.  First it was MySpace.  Then Friendster.  Now it’s Facebook.  Originally started for college students, the rest of the world has signed up and taken over, making virtual connecting so effortless it borders on promoting stalking and other predatory behaviors. While it has allowed me to reconnect with past friends from an era when the internet hadn’t been born, Facebook has a lot of what I affectionately call “time killer” applications.  Most of them are silly and harmless, but there was one that did get my knickers in a bit of a twist and that is “Friends for Sale”.I pride myself on being a humble person, so you can imagine how surprised I was when I found myself being bought and sold by many people (friends and non-friends).  Normally I would take this as a back-handed ego boost, but the fact that everyone who was handling me like some hot product were ALL adoptees, seemed like an unfathomable contradiction in terms.  The fact I was begging one of my adoptee friends to buy me, so I wouldn’t belong to another adoptee who I just met and didn’t feel comfortable in being her prized pet, sent out fireworks and not the pretty kind.

With a raised eyebrow and a long “Hmm”, I couldn’t help thinking, “What’s up with that sh*t???”  Again, I know it’s all in fun, but talk about perpetuating a long history of abandonment and commitment issues.  I mean, admit it people – while having biological children does cost money, the exchange of green paper doesn’t seem as sordid an affair as it does when adoption is involved, regardless if corruption played a part or not.  Granted, at least being a bought child, there is a quiet saving grace knowing that your parents really wanted you, even if they may feel they got the wrong one later down the line.  Sorry, no refunds.

Growing up, people would inquisitively ask where my parents got me and I would politely respond: International aisle on the shelves between bags of rice and condense milk.  My price tag = $$$ with an underdetermined expiration date.

I am not glorifying that I am that type of adoptee who gets bent out of shape about everything in life, but something like “Friends for Sale” is a tasteless tongue-in-cheek form of slavery.  I have been bought once already.  Actually I take that back – every time I have a job I am being bought, for the services I offer has a price, whether it’s paying my worth or not.  But in the adoption setting, once is more than enough.  So my fellow adoptees, the buck stops here.  I am not for sale.