Most of them are unwanted, jobless and homeless, but children of U.S. servicemen still hope for a better life in the land of their fathers : Amerasians: Vietnam’s Misbegotten Legacy

The war was still raging that day 15 years ago when Vietnamese nuns heard the cries of a baby boy stuffed in a garbage can and took him inside their orphanage to raise.

Today, Nguyen Thanh Binh, the son of a black American who went home and a Vietnamese mother who abandoned him, shares the plight of thousands of Amerasian youths languishing in the decay of Vietnam, desperately trying to get out and find their fathers.

“My circumstances are miserable,” says Lam Anh Hong, 18, whose mother gave her away to a relative. “I always live with hope. I don’t give up hope.”

Like Binh and Hong, many of the Amerasians born of American fathers and Vietnamese mothers were abandoned by both parents, left in orphanages or with relatives or friends, often to fend for themselves.

Jobless, Unwanted

Many of the Amerasians are jobless, homeless, uneducated, unwanted, barely able to speak English. They sleep at night on the sidewalks and in the parks. Some turn to prostitution to stay alive.

Blacks like Binh also are victims of a Vietnamese caste system. White Amerasians may be at the bottom in the clannish Vietnamese society, but they are at the top within the Amerasian society. The black Amerasians are at the bottom.

All suffer the taunts of their Vietnamese peers, “Amerasians no good. Go to America.”

Charlie Brown Phuong, at 25 one of the older Amerasians, was one of those abandoned by their mothers. “She don’t want I be her son,” he says.

‘Nobody Helps Us’

Phuong was raised in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Da Nang but ran away when he was 11 and boarded an evacuation ship to Ho Chi Minh City as North Vietnamese forces swept southward to conquer South Vietnam in 1975.

Now he sells newspapers, cigarettes and bread and sleeps in a park. “Nobody helps us,” he says. “Look at my eyes. They are very old because I work very hard.”

But some get lucky. Nguyen Thi Thu Huong, an 18-year-old wearing a blue ribbon in her brown hair and pink slippers on her mud-caked feet, was found one day selling postcards for nickels and dimes, washing herself in a fountain in the center of the city. Her father left Vietnam when she was 2.

“Only foreigners help,” she says. “I feel lonely. I feel sad. I want to be in the U.S. to study, work and have friends. I go, I have a job and a good house.”

Dream Came True

Then, a short time later, she is a Cinderella, on her way to America with her mother, one hand carrying a suitcase, the other affectionately wrapped around her 8-year-old Vietnamese half-brother. A small group of Amerasian street kids went to Tan Son Nhut Airport to see them off.

U.S. officials say help is also on the way for the 10,000 Amerasians that they estimate still remain. Vietnamese authorities put the estimate at 16,000 but that is hard to pin down because no official census has been taken. More than 6,000 Amerasians and 11,000 of their relatives have left Vietnam legally since the start of the U.S. Orderly Departures Program in 1980.

Bruce A. Beardsley, director of the Orderly Departures Program in Bangkok, Thailand, has cut much of the bureaucratic paper work and persuaded the Vietnamese to do the same.

“I have been pushing the best I can to get departures to go at a much more rapid rate,” he says. “We’re trying to expand the transportation net.”

5,500 Were Waiting

At one point early this year, 5,500 Amerasians and their family members already approved for resettlement in the United States were awaiting transportation.

Some of the Amerasians camp out in a park next to the Foreign Ministry, awaiting the roll of the dice, the anticipated approval that will be their ticket to America. In the interim, they hang out in front of the hotels, clinging to American tourists, begging not only for money but for affection.

Some Amerasians carry the physical scars of war as well as the mental pain of rejection.

Pham Thi Lan, 22, never knew her father. Her mother died of heart disease when she was 8. When her stepfather remarried, he threw her out of the house and she went to live with her grandmother. Her neck and chest are scarred by napalm.

Los Arm in War

Vuong Thanh Hai, 20, has a hole in his head and only one arm. His father left when he was born, his mother died when he was 6. Shrapnel from a 155-millimeter artillery shell cut away his right arm.

The Amerasians are the legacy of some 2.7 million Americans who served in Vietnam until the last were withdrawn in 1973. Other Americans, including military and civilian employees of the U.S. Embassy, remained until the U.S.-supported Saigon government of South Vietnam fell to Communist North Vietnam in 1975.

Many Amerasians and their fathers have been trying for years to find each other. But some Amerasians were rejected by fathers who want nothing to do with them. Some of the fathers, already married, went back to their American families. Others returned and married American women after the war and started new families. Some may be unaware that they left offspring behind.

But for some who do know, the wrenching memories have driven them into post-traumatic stress disorder and counseling, unable to resolve the guilt of leaving their child in the streets.

Government Cooperation

The Vietnamese government lately has been cooperating more in efforts to send the remaining Amerasians to America, promoting it as a humanitarian gesture. But U.S. officials say the real motive is to establish better relations with the United States in hope that it will lead to diplomatic recognition and badly needed American aid.

“I’m sure it’s not just humanitarian instincts which are pushing things in the direction they’re going,” Beardsley says. “They’ve got an economy that’s in a hell of a mess.”

So bankrupt is Vietnam’s economy that the government until recently insisted on booking all refugees including Amerasians and their families on Air Vietnam, the official government airline, because it so desperately needs the U.S. dollars. But often the Air Vietnam flights are unreliable because of mechanical problems or the bumping of refugees, whose fares are discounted, for higher-paying passengers, U.S. officials say.

Now refugees are permitted to travel on other airlines, and U.S. officials have been working to add charters. The other carriers that service Ho Chi Minh City--Air France and Thai Airways--are booked with so many regular passengers at full fare that it is difficult to get seats for refugees at reduced fare.

Cultural Orientation

Last December, some flights were begun directly to the Philippines, where Amerasians and relatives spend six months for language training and cultural orientation that will help them adjust quicker in the United States. The usual routing is through Bangkok.

The International Committee for Migration based in Geneva, an organization that assists refugees, is now coordinating all transportation out of Ho Chi Minh City for them.

In efforts to help the dirt-poor Amerasians in the countryside who could not otherwise afford the travel and lodging for their interviews in Ho Chi Minh City, the United States has approved in principle a Vietnamese proposal to establish an Amerasian transit center to be financed by the United States. The center would provide transportation and a place to stay for the Amerasians and their families while they are being processed.

Despite all the promises, for some it is too late. They are no longer the cute, cuddly children of the war years of the ‘60s and ‘70s. They have grown into teen-agers and young adults, as old now as their fathers were then. Some gave up hope, took jobs, married, had children of their own and changed their minds about leaving.

Search Is Futile

For many Amerasians, the desperate search for their fathers is futile.

“We have been contacted by probably just over 200 men who are looking for kids or know where their kids are at,” says Bruce Burns, a San Jose, Calif., attorney and tracer of Amerasians and their fathers. “If you compare that to how many Amerasians there are, it’s a very small number.”

Burns has been successful in locating some fathers. But many of them have settled into the “real world,” as opposed to what they saw as the unreality of Vietnam.

“In most cases,” Burns says, “the father said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with the child. Don’t bother me. I don’t want to disrupt my family or my life. That was a long time ago when I was young and I want to forget about it.’ ”

Rejected by Father

Burns recalls helping one girl find her father, an Army chaplain during the war. She was attractive, bright, fluent in English and a medical school student.

“He’s still a minister in the United States,” Burns says. “He just told her to get lost. He didn’t want anything to do with her. He didn’t want her to infringe on his life. He acknowledged that this is his child but he didn’t care about her.”

Burns says the Vietnamese government is concerned that some Amerasian women are selling sex, attracting mostly Soviet and other Eastern European soldiers and civilians.

“When you’re living on the streets and you don’t know who your family is and you have the opportunity to make money through prostitution, it’s very attractive to them,” he says. “The alternative is to continue to not have enough to eat and to barely survive.”

Minimum Requirements

Beardsley says the United States has cut the documentary requirements for an Amerasian to leave Vietnam to a minimum.

“Essentially an Amerasian’s face is his passport,” he says. “If you look like an Amerasian, we don’t care if you have any documents at all. You don’t have to have an identified father to move somebody out.”

Beardsley says no one has been denied resettlement because they are suspected of prostitution, but he says he has seen reports that “some of them have been continuing in this profession on resettlement in the U.S.”

Luu Van Tanh, vice chief of the Consular Section, denies his government discriminates against the Amerasians, but concedes that other Vietnamese children mock them and other Vietnamese discriminate against them.

Mothers Forced to Choose

Some of the mothers later married Vietnamese men who forced them to choose between them and their Amerasian children. Others had difficulty finding a job because they had Amerasian children.

Other women tried to protect their children by hiding them in the home or moving them from the cities to the country, by putting charcoal on their face or dying their light hair black to disguise them, and by destroying all of the documents and photographs showing that they had an American father.

One child was virtually a prisoner in her apartment until she went to the United States because her mother did not want her subjected to the taunts of the other kids.

“Those children are the victims of the war and we . . . must help them,” Tanh says.