Living Legacies

This chapter tracks the assimilation of adopted Vietnamese and Amerasians through the 1970s and 1980s amid contested memories about wars in Southeast Asia, conceptions of identity, and ideas of community. It traces how they have interpreted their own histories since the 1990s through social media, memoirs, documentaries, reunions, conferences, and calls to Congress. I doing so, they changed the public’s thinking of the past, exposing a history of racial difference, violence, and dislocation.

After the Airlifts

This chapter focuses upon the aftermath of Operation Babylift, the mass airlift of Vietnamese children to the United states on the eve of the nation’s formal withdrawal. Arguably the most dramatic episode of the unfolding adoption and migration story, it received overwhelming media coverage, captured international attention, and pushed Vietnamese adoptees to the center of debates about the war’s end and aftermath. Although the architects of the airlift hoped it would improve the America’s reputation and benefit Vietnamese children, it stoked significant controversy among Americans and Vietnamese who accused the U.S. and Vietnamese governments of playing politics. The airlift and its controversy also displayed the creative ways in which Vietnamese families stretched across national boundaries an, demanded reunions, and disputed American efforts to contain and control the legacies of war.

Vietnamese Adoptions in the Early War Years

This chapter explores the first wave of Vietnamese adoptions against a backdrop of military escalation and growing anti-war sentiment. It examines the language of responsibility, culpability and multiculturalism that came to dominate defences of adoptions in the Vietnam War era as Americans reconsidered the effectiveness and morality of U.S. foreign policy. Integral to such rhetoric was the imagined and real participation of American men and women as soldiers and social workers in Vietnam. The chapter not only elaborates the ways in which Vietnamese adoptions offered Americans an opportunity to engage with gendered notions of citizenship, but also addresses questions about chances for racial equality at home, the extent of the nation’s international obligations, and the power of intimate, familial relations to alter society.

Conclusion

2015: Tung Nguyen and Merrie Li—siblings born in Vietnam who reconnected in the United States in the 1980s—mourned the passing of their Vietnamese mother and puzzled over the discovery that the American man whom Tung believed was his father was not. A large group of Amerasians organized by Jimmy Miller gathered in Seattle for an annual celebration, reflection, and call to political action. During the festive evening of dancing and dining, they honored their successes, paid tribute to Vietnam veterans, and recommitted to helping those who remained in Vietnam. Adoptee Tiffany Chi Goodson, who spent one year in Hanoi, where she taught English and yoga, hosted monthly music events, and served street youth under the auspices of the nonprofit Blue Children’s Foundation, relocated to South Africa with and soon married Chris, a fellow volunteer and traveler whom she met in Southeast Asia. “Operation Babylift: Perspectives and Legacies,” an exhibit documenting and inviting exchanges on the subjects of adoption and the airlifts, opened in San Francisco’s Presidio. The bilingual, interactive space featured artifacts from Operation Babylift, text panels interpreting key events, a set of dialogues that paired adoptees with Presidio volunteers, and notecards—each asking a question such as “What conversation do you want to begin?” “What memories or stories do you want to share?” and “What question do you have about Operation Babylift?”—for visitors to complete and display on a peg-filled wall. National and regional media outlets used the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam to explore the recollections of aging veterans and the status of Vietnamese communities stretching from Philadelphia and Houston to San Jose and Garden Grove, California. The coverage not only replayed familiar themes of exile, anti-Communism, despair, and courageous adaptation but also noted the waning poignancy of the war and shifting priorities among American-born Vietnamese....

Amerasians’ Families and Hopes of Homecoming

This chapter examines Amerasians, those who could have been but were not adopted by American families in the 1970s. National concern about this population revived ideas about responsibility to the unwanted children of Vietnam and enabled the passage of legislation that facilitated their migration. Amerasians imagined rediscovering their fathers, winning social acceptance, and escaping poverty, but charges of fraud and misrepresentation, the complexity and rarity of father-child reunions, and the difficulties of adjustment in a national where one was presumed an American rather than guided to become one, compromised their sense of citizenship.

Introduction

Born to an American man and Vietnamese woman in 1970, Trista immigrated to the United States and was adopted by a young American couple, Nancy and Chuck Kalan, in 1973 after she and her younger brother, Jeffrey, spent a year in the care of a Vietnamese foster family. Although Nancy would eagerly accept and manage the details of Trista’s adoption, her husband, a veteran of the Vietnam War, had initiated their plans. Trista recalled her fear and shyness on meeting her new parents. “When I first saw my father, I cried,” she explained, “because he had a full beard and I wasn’t used to the facial hair.” Moreover, as a four-year-old, “I still had memories of my family,” she related. These memories would become less vivid over time as Trista learned English, became acquainted with American foods, and integrated into the mostly white community of Feasterville, Pennsylvania, but she retained cultural, political, and familial ties to Vietnam through regular contact with Jeffrey, who was adopted into the household of Trista’s aunt and raised as her cousin, as well as her foster family, who departed Vietnam among a wave of refugees and resettled in the Kalans’ household in 1975. Despite relationships and exposure that could have reinforced a Vietnamese identity, she admitted, “I probably actually repressed any of my culture and heritage growing up because I just wanted to fit in.”...