He Looks Like Me : Two Amerasians Seek Their Dads--and Their Missing Heritage

T hey are strangers from another time, cast off by their mother s ‘ country as the detritus of a long, ugly war. We call them Amerasians; “half-breeds,” say the Vietnamese.

So they come, by the thousands now, looking for that half of themselves that they believe will make them whole. They want to call him Dad. The vast majority will never get that chance. Still they search, through a labyrinth of emotions, because they must. Two have come far closer than most.

“I didn’t want to find him right away,” Trang Nguyen says. “I wanted to learn English, to study. I wanted to be something, so he could be proud of me. But then I couldn’t wait.”

Trang is home in Fontana now, finally in a land that feels as if it fits. She has been in the United States for 18 months. It took six years for Vietnamese authorities to let her, her mother and her half-sister out.

She is engaged to an American, engineer George Sparks. Her father has told her that he would like to attend the wedding. Trang believes him, with all her heart.

“I wait 22 years and now I can call Dad,” she says. “I so happy. I feel that I love him the first time I saw him.”

When she looked at him, she saw herself.

“My mother, my grandmother would tell me, ‘Look in the mirror and you will see your father,’ ” Trang says, her smile growing wide.

The eyes and ears--and is it the nose too?--are his, Trang can see now. Both father and daughter are small-boned. And now Trang knows her father is quiet, sort of shy. Just like her.

A story such as Trang Nguyen’s--entangled in the larger scheme of war and its aftermath of abandonment, recrimination and guilt--is rare. She searched for her father, a man who left her mother in Saigon before she was even born, and found him--on the first try.

Her fiancee had suggested that it might be time to begin her search. Nervous, Trang wondered if she could stand rejection, whether it would be better not to ask questions if the answers could bring pain.

George went to the Yorba Linda Public Library and flipped through the telephone directory for Boise, Ida., where Trang’s mother had remembered her boyfriend had lived. But that was 1968.

The Boise phone book listed two men with Trang’s father’s name. George dialed the correct number on the first attempt.

Rarer yet, this man, an Air Force veteran, did not mind being found. In February, he drove from Boise, where he lives with a girlfriend, to meet his daughter for the first time. He has never married. Trang is his only child.

Her father, a fireman, cannot quite put his feelings about what it means into words--not with Trang and certainly not with a reporter who calls.

“I just don’t want to talk to anybody about it,” he says, sounding annoyed and shocked.

Other reunions between Amerasians and their fathers--and there have been so few that resettlement workers around the country can recount them by name--are fraught with ambivalence, too.

A civil engineer who had worked in Vietnam was reunited with his daughter and asked her to live with him and his family in West Los Angeles. The family underwent two years of counseling, and everything seemed fine. Now the engineer and his American wife are getting a divorce.

Last month, a retired Air Force general flew from New York to pick up his Amerasian son in Los Angeles. The son returned with his father, but within two weeks had run away.

“It’s understandable,” says Loc Nguyen, who directs the Amerasian program at the United States Catholic Charities office in Los Angeles. “The Amerasians are caught between love and hate.”

Like so many Amerasians, Trang Nguyen suggests that her search for her father was indistinguishable from the search for herself. She wants nothing more from him than an acknowledgment of a bond.

And she, too, is a bit uneasy about what that means. When she talks about their meeting, she balls her fist and holds it to her stomach. It means nervous and afraid.

“I wait after he stopped car and he get out and I walked out and hugged him,” she says. “He almost cry. I almost cry. He say he so nervous. . . .

“My mother, all this time, she said he will come and get me. She said not to worry, that he would come right away. She was so sure. So I said, ‘OK, Mom,’ and she was right. Before I met him, I felt like something was missing. I don’t feel that anymore.”

Trang hasn’t been in touch with her father since March, when he sent her some photographs of himself during the war and another taken in January, 1976.

There is an 8x10 of him and Trang’s mother, Tho Nguyen, taken in a Saigon photo studio two weeks before he left Vietnam. The couple, who lived together for about eight months, had met at the air base where Tho washed the soldiers’ clothes.

Trang’s mother, who now lives in Garden Grove, had her own photographs. But with the Communist victory in 1975, Trang’s grandmother burned all mementos of the Americans their family had known. Americans were risks.

“I was very pleased to see you last month and enjoyed our visit very much,” Trang’s father writes. “I realize it was much too short of time, but later we will be able to see each other longer and maybe under less stressful conditions.”

Then he goes on to talk about the photographs. “I think we were much younger then!” He ends his note about there. “Love n’ Hugs,” he writes, signing his name.

He still cannot call himself Dad.

Bang Quoc Nguyen met his American grandfather and uncle for the first time about a year ago. His older daughter, then age 4, went along for the trip to San Jose.

The grandfather recognized his relatives right away. It was almost like deja vu : Bang looks very much like his father did at age 22.

Tears fell from the grandfather’s eyes.

Bang cried that day, too, and his tears have never really stopped since.

Bang’s father, with a new wife and daughter, has made it clear that he does not want to see his son. Messages have gone unanswered, or maybe, Bang hopes, they have never been passed on. A woman on the telephone--his father’s wife?--says please don’t call anymore.

“I call my uncle every day,” says Bang. “I tell him I miss my father. I ask him to help.”

But the silence loosely translates as “No.”

“I am very, very sad and disappointed,” Bang says.

He fingers the photographs taken in Vietnam. There is 2-year-old Bang, his Vietnamese mother, his American dad. All wear smiles.

Bang, who has lived near the heart of Orange County’s Little Saigon for almost two years, knows much more about his father than most Amerasians from Vietnam ever will. He and Bang’s mother had a marriage and a life. They lived together, mostly in Phan-thiet and Saigon, for eight years. Bang’s birth was even registered at the U.S. Consulate.

When the Viet Cong swept into Saigon in 1975, Bang’s Marine father got out just in time.

“I don’t remember anything about my father,” Bang says. “But my mother always tells me. He would go to work and she would stay home and take care of the house. On the weekends, we would all go out together.”

Bang and his mother stayed behind when the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, he says, because his mother felt she had no choice: “She was afraid that if she came with him in 1975 it would be very strange for her to come to this land.

“She wouldn’t know what to do with herself. She thought he would leave her because she is Vietnamese. My father had a lot of girlfriends in Vietnam, too.”

Bang’s mother lives with her son now. So does his Vietnamese wife, Hung Nguyen, and their two daughters, Hang, now 5, and Elizabeth, 1 1/2.

Bang named Elizabeth after his American grandmother, who died in 1989. She once sent Bang and his family a box of clothing in Vietnam. Among Bang’s most treasured possessions is Elizabeth’s photograph--black and white, formally posed decades ago.

And even Bang’s father, in a way, has been in touch before. He sent his son money--about $200 a year--from 1985 to 1987. Bang didn’t ask for it.

Yet, he asks for more now. He wants to know, from his father, that he counts.

Bang’s mother doesn’t want her photograph taken--she doesn’t want it to appear that she is causing trouble, she doesn’t want to upset her husband’s wife. She just wants her son to have a dad, and for her grandchildren to know him, too.

In the parlance of experts who study this special brand of sadness, Bang is a classic case. Devastated may not be a strong enough word to describe how he feels.

“For refugees who approach the search as a vehicle for confirming their own sense of identity, for validating the authenticity of their existence, such rejection can be catastrophic,” says one report, prepared by United States Catholic Charities.

It is a risk, these same experts say, that Amerasians searching for their fathers perhaps should not take.

Most fathers, like Bang’s, simply do not want to be found.