Mixed Race Studies

Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War

C-SPAN: Created by Cable
2005-09-11

Trin Yarborough talked about her book, Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War, published by Potomac Books. She talked about the lives of orphans who weren born to American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Randy Tuan, who was one of many orphans adopted to work on a farm, spoke about his life and music. Following their presentation, Mr. Tuan and Ms. Yarborough responded to questions and comments from members of the audience.

The book told the stories of five Vietnamese Amerasians born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. Not among the few thousand Amerasian children brought to the U. S. before the war’s end who grew up as Americans, speaking English and attending American schools, this group faced many more formidable obstacles, both in Vietnam and in their new home. She wrote that an estimated 100,000 children were born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. She also wrote that many of these children faced difficult lives as a result of racial prejudice or an inability to identify completely with the Vietnamese culture. The book looked at the effects of the Amerasian Homecoming Act, a Congressional program enacted in 1987 that brought 28,000 Vietnamese Americans to the United States before the program was stopped in 1994 because of problems with fraud.

Watch the video (01:12:12) here.

Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War

Potomac Books (an imprint of University of Nebraska Press)
April 2005
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-57488-864-5
Papberback ISBN: 978-1-57488-865-2

Trin Yarborough

Surviving Twice is the story of five Vietnamese Amerasians born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. Unfortunately, they were not among the few thousand Amerasian children who came to the United States before the war’s end and grew up as Americans, speaking English and attending American schools. Instead, this group of Amerasians faced much more formidable obstacles, both in Vietnam and in their new home. Surviving Twice raises significant questions about how mixed-race children born of wars and occupations are treated and the ways in which the shifting laws, policies, social attitudes, and bureaucratic red tape of two nations affect them their entire lives.

Legacies of war

The Washington Post
2015-04-17

Annie Gowen, Bureau chief — New Delhi

Linda Davidson, Photography

Forty years after the fall of Saigon, soldiers’ children are still left behind

Vo Huu Nhan was in his vegetable boat in the floating markets of the Mekong Delta when his phone rang. The caller from the United States had stunning news — a DNA database had linked him with a Vietnam vet believed to be his father.

Nhan, 46, had known his father was an American soldier named Bob, but little else.

“I was crying,” Nhan recalled recently. “I had lost my father for 40 years, and now I finally had gotten together with him.”

But the journey toward their reconciliation has not been easy. News of the DNA match set in motion a chain of events involving two families 8,700 miles apart that is still unfolding and has been complicated by the illness of the veteran, Robert Thedford Jr., a retired deputy sheriff in Texas.

When the last American military personnel fled Saigon on April 29 and 30, 1975, they left behind a country scarred by war, a people uncertain about their future and thousands of their own children. These children — some half-black, some half-white — came from liaisons with bar girls, “hooch” maids, laundry workers and the laborers who filled sandbags that protected American bases.

They are approaching middle age with stories as complicated as the two countries that gave them life. Growing up with the face of the enemy, they were spat on, ridiculed, beaten. They were abandoned, given away to relatives or sold as cheap labor. The families that kept them often had to hide them or shear off their telltale blond or curly locks. Some were sent to reeducation or work camps, or ended up homeless and living on the streets.

They were called “bui doi,” which means “the dust of life.”

Forty years later, hundreds remain in Vietnam, too poor or without proof to qualify for the program created by the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 that resettles the children of American soldiers in the United States.

Now, an Amerasian group has launched a last-chance effort to reunite fathers and children with a new DNA database on a family heritage Web site. Those left behind have scant information about their GI dads — papers and photographs were burned as the communist regime took hold, and memories faded. So DNA matches are their only hope…

Read the entire photo-essay here.