Children of Reunion

Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations

Allison Varzally

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469630915, 9781469630908
• eBook ISBN: 9781469630922
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1961, the U.S. government established the first formalized provisions for intercountry adoption just as it was expanding America’s involvement with Vietnam. Adoption became an increasingly important portal of entry into American society for Vietnamese and Amerasian children, raising questions about the United States’ obligations to refugees and the nature of the family during an era of heightened anxiety about U.S. global interventions. Whether adopting or favoring the migration of multiracial individuals, Americans believed their norms and material comforts would salve the wounds of a divisive war. However, Vietnamese migrants challenged these efforts of reconciliation.

As Allison Varzally details in this book, a desire to redeem defeat in Vietnam, faith in the nuclear family, and commitment to capitalism guided American efforts on behalf of Vietnamese youths. By tracing the stories of Vietnamese migrants, however, Varzally reveals that while many had accepted separations as a painful strategy for survival in the midst of war, most sought, and some eventually found, reunion with their kin. This book makes clear the role of adult adoptees in Vietnamese and American debates about the forms, privileges, and duties of families, and places Vietnamese children at the center of American and Vietnamese efforts to assign responsibility and find peace in the aftermath of conflict.

1 Vietnamese Adoptions in the Early War Years

“We are well aware that children all over the world need love and care, but our focus is presently on Vietnam due to the horror which is being perpetuated in our name there,” wrote Don and Augusta Sandstrom in a 1967 letter inquiring about opportunities to adopt a Vietnamese child. Fearing that their incentives might be misconstrued, the couple hastened to add, “Please don’t be concerned that ‘guilt’ is our motivation, it isn’t that simple when you have a great deal of love to share; but when you see an evil war being waged, it is hard to turn your eyes away without helping at least one little soul caught up in it. Unfortunately, the suffering of Vietnamese children continues, perhaps the child with whom we will eventually share our home and love is not even born yet!”1 The Sandstroms were not alone in their desire to mitigate, by caring for a Vietnamese child, the destructiveness of a war whose purpose and prosecution they opposed. Although some Americans remained supportive of the U.S. campaign in Southeast Asia, challenges mounted as casualties increased, the war lengthened, and progress stalled.

The U.S. presence in Vietnam dated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to control the decolonization of French Indochina during the 1940s. In the ensuing decade, the failure of these attempts prompted Harry S. Truman’s slow but steady increase of American support for the French who battled against an emerging, independent Vietnamese state led by Ho Chi Minh. Like other populations who had long suffered the indignities of colonial rule, Vietnamese sought independence and had seized the opportunity of a weakening French empire during and immediately after World War II to do so. Ho Chi Minh helped make national independence rather than agrarian reform and class struggle the central objective of the revolution.2 During the fateful Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, French troops faltered and ultimately surrendered to Vietnamese nationalists, an outcome assured in part by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s reluctance to provide even more military aid given the abundant financial support the United States had already extended. The Geneva Accords, which established the terms of peace, temporarily partitioned Vietnam into northern and southern regions. Rather than sever commitments, Eisenhower worked feverishly to build an antiCommunist, South Vietnamese state under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem. Certainly, Cold War concerns, namely a belief, or stated belief, that the United States must check an apparent expansion of Soviet influence in Asia, had motivated his actions. Yet, worries over the postwar reconstruction of Great Britain and Japan, a desire for markets and materials in Southeast Asia, the entreaties of Britain and France to help preserve their colonial empires, and the appeals of Vietnamese elites seeking support for their agendas also swayed his and his successors’ decisions.3

The United States ignored calls to neutralize troubles in Vietnam before 1965 or have contact with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, i.e., North Vietnam) once fighting broke out. Privileging military and political strategies over diplomatic ones, the United States and the DRV deflected international pressures and fought with little external involvement until 1968. The Tet Offensive—coordinated attacks by the North Vietnamese Army and National Liberation Front forces on more than one hundred cities in South Vietnam intended to spark rebellion among South Vietnamese and the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces—altered the character of the war. Chastised, but not deterred, the United States adopted new methods of warfare, most notably counterinsurgency (the kidnapping, imprisonment, and assassination of likely insurgents) and Vietnamization (extending more support and increasing the combat role of South Vietnamese troops). Military stalemate regionalized the conflict as air and ground wars spread to Laos and Cambodia. Meanwhile, the opening of peace talks in Paris in 1968 between the United States and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) on one side and the DRV and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) on the other not only raised the importance of diplomacy between these parties, but elevated the participation of third-party nations and international opinion. The Tet Offensive also energized transnational social movements that would successfully constrain negotiations and direct outcomes.4

Shaped by existing demands for peace and social justice, the antiwar movement in the United States organized expressions of the mounting frustration with war in Southeast Asia. Its political liberals, who constituted the movement’s majority, respected the United States’ tradition of championing human rights and distrusted the Soviet Union, but denounced the Saigon regime’s authoritarian nature and believed U.S. resources were best invested elsewhere. Its pacifists put forward a stronger critique of American Cold War policy, equally faulting the Soviet Union and the United States for destabilizing global politics, while radical members of the movement identified Vietnam as simply a compelling example of more fundamental problems in U.S. society. Meanwhile, leftists, the smallest but an increasingly visible and noisy constituency, rejected both Marxism and the inequalities of capitalism. In 1965, a series of teach-ins at college campuses protesting Operation Rolling Thunder—a massive aerial bombardment of North Vietnam—helped crystallize and bring public awareness to these diverse voices against the war. Moreover, through the late 1960s, media coverage of mass demonstrations, the support for them expressed by Martin Luther King Jr., distaste for the military draft, the realization of an impasse after the Tet Offensive, and the launch of congressional hearings on the war strengthened the movement. Although he promised to end America’s war in Vietnam when he assumed the presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon also wished to maintain Saigon’s government and a non-Communist Vietnam. Such designs involved not only strengthening Chinese and Soviet participation in international negotiations, but intensified bombing campaigns and secret assurances to South Vietnam’s leader, Diem Bien Thieu. Domestic dissent crested in the fall of 1969, persisting despite the tragic consequences of collisions between antiwar protesters with federal troops, and contributed to the end of the conflict. Although retaining a dislike for antiwar activists, the American public came to accept and assent to their message.5 More generally, they stated suspicion about the competence of their political leaders and both the utility and morality of U.S. foreign policies.6

That suspicion directed some Americans, including the Sandstroms, to act on the behalf of Vietnamese children whose plight they discovered through the graphic accounts of humanitarian organizations and the media. In professing responsibility and proposing adoptive parenthood as the solution for needy children, they recommended the American family as a site of inclusion and redemption. Ideas about appropriate forms of family reveal an era’s truths about national identity and purpose.7 In the late 1960s and 1970s, Americans determined to aid Vietnamese children were also critiquing the state of U.S. foreign policy, proposing new gender roles, and testing the possibility of racial equality. In a revision of the rhetoric and reasoning that had governed American adoptions of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children following U.S. interventions in other regions of Asia during earlier stages of the Cold War, American adoptions of Vietnamese children more often expressed a loss of faith in the containment policy specifically and the United States’ ability to do good in the world generally. Thus, adoptions of the period were more explicitly, heatedly debated as political acts—with participants denying their own political motives while highlighting those of opponents—and increasingly represented as an apology for rather than the fulfillment and endorsement of the United States’ expansionist, anti-Communist practices.8

Integral to such rhetoric was the imagined and real participation of American men as soldiers and civilians in Vietnam. In selectively provisioning, caring for, and adopting Vietnamese children, these men disputed their reputations as brutal warriors and undercut traditional assumptions about masculine national service.9 Celebrating the compassion of its “gentle warriors,” the U.S. military sought to prove the benevolence of its designs in South Vietnam, its determination to democratize and modernize the country.10 Yet, these intentions were compromised not only by the irreconcilable contradiction that U.S. policies created the very harm select soldiers sought to repair, but by the decision of some American men to make permanent their commitments to Vietnamese children; these men would cease to be soldiers and become fathers who upended rules about nuclear family formation so central to the cultures of the home front and military. As primary caregivers, not simply providers for or protectors of children, these men made an assertion about national belonging usually professed by women, contributing to and reframing what historian Susan Jeffords has called the remasculinization of America, the revision and partial restoration of patriarchal power challenged by the assertions of the era’s women’s rights and civil rights movements.11 Yet, as social workers, agency organizers, and aspiring mothers, American women pushed back against men’s claims to Vietnamese children, reprising a familiar, maternal justification for their access to political influence.

Vietnamese adoptions offered Americans a chance not only to wrestle with gendered notions of citizenship, but also to consider the nation’s obligations to peoples in newly independent nations, the prospects for racial equality and integration in an increasingly color-conscious era, and the role of family as a location of social and political change. Americans increasingly articulated an alternative vision of American identity and national purpose, one that included new anxieties about the integrity of their representative government, the possibilities for interracial harmony in a multiracial society, and the sources of national unity amid bitter cultural and political divisions.

American adoptions from Vietnam continued a pattern of assuming care for foreign children displaced by political and economic instability in Europe and Asia that dated to the 1930s and expressed the reach and depth of U.S. empire over the course of the twentieth century. U.S. voluntary agencies initiated child sponsorship programs in troubled regions, through which poor children received money, school supplies, clothes, and gifts from their American foster parents, some of whom were unable to legally adopt because they had not married or fell outside the white, Protestant mainstream.12 During the 1940s, the U.S. military involvement in Europe and a refugee crisis prompted not only the expansion of such sponsorships, but temporary provisions for intercountry adoption. Although open to all European children, those unsettled by Soviet occupation in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Greece, and Italy most often received the visas made available. In total, more than 4,000 were adopted by Americans between 1948 and 1953.13 Their absorption by American families expressed not only the power of anti-Communist beliefs in shaping refugee policy but a shift in ideas of care and connection; rather than protect children overseas by investing in their families, communities, and institutions, Americans after World War II would increasingly chose to bring them to the United States. This idea of adoption as a solution to international political and economic crises showcased a confidence in family as the locus for change and the realization of U.S. geopolitical goals.

The confluence of falling domestic fertility rates and repeated U.S. interventions in Europe, Latin America, and especially Asia through the second half of the twentieth century accelerated the migratory practice. In addition, in the wake of the era’s challenges to racial segregation, gender codes, and conceptions of youth, Americans came to believe that all children deserved the safety and affection of a family rather than the perceived indifference of an institution.14 Meanwhile, American demand for European babies outstripped the dwindling supply as nations of the western continent recovered and rebuilt under the Marshall Plan—an American-funded program designed to ward off Communism and stabilize battered European economies. Moreover, although most Americans wished to adopt babies, the majority of available European children were adolescents. Jewish agencies, tending to Jewish youths, preferred to resettle them in Europe or Palestine rather than the United States. Finally, the renaissance of nationalism and relaxation of racial ideologies that had once stigmatized the offspring of black American GIs and European women persuaded European countries to withhold rather than deliver the next generation to expectant, foreign families.15

Still swayed by ascendant humanitarian principles of the Cold War era and a desire to parent, Americans looked elsewhere, specifically to eastern Asia, where the United States had attempted to establish its dominance since the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the former settler colony, which had practiced the art of empire by crowding out European rivals, subjugating Native Americans, enslaving Africans, and excluding Chinese laborers, first indulged its impulse to influence Asia in the Philippines. Systematically and brutally suppressing local resistance, the United States secured control over the archipelagos, corroborated its claims in the Pacific, and set a precedent for further expansion. Asian leaders, especially Chinese and Japanese, recognized and braced against the entry and ambitions of yet another imperial power.16 Japan’s rise in the region—marked by its defeat of Russia, takeover of Korea, and occupation of northeastern China—ran contrary to American interests and ultimately brought the two ascendant powers into direct and devastating conflict during World War II. Much to its disappointment, the United States’ victory did not assure peace and the acceptance of its liberal vision in the postwar era. Instead, Soviet interests in northeast Asia, China’s Communist revolution and resistance to the United States’ Pacific designs, and nationalist movements sweeping through Asia assured conflict and instability. Confronted with these challenges, the United States recommitted rather than retreated, first fighting a war in Korea that caused massive combatant and civilian deaths, the ruination of landscapes, and the destruction of factories and cities. The war ended inconclusively and frustratingly in 1954 without relieving American desires for hegemony or anxiety about Communism. In Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the United States made another, final and failed attempt to realize its vision of dominance in Asia, assuming the position of another colonial power, finding collaborators, and imposing pain and agony on millions of people.

This history of hubris, competing ambitions, and violence informed the reception of Chinese children. Chinese American and white families noticed and adopted refugee children from Hong Kong who had fled the mainland after the Communist revolution in 1949. Death and desperation on the crowded island pushed relatives to abandon or find alternative homes for their kin. One grandmother, Ling Wing Yung, described life in Hong Kong as “very hard. To make a living at my age in order to support myself and my two grandchildren … is unimaginable.” Although she recognized the existence of freedom in Hong Kong, she feared the eventual advance of Communism. “I would not like to have my grandchildren grow up under such circumstances,” she pleaded in a letter to friends, so “those are the reasons I want you to take them to the States. They could grow up with their minds free from fear.… Will you help me?”17 By the early 1960s, under the authority of the Hong Kong Project, cooperating U.S. and Hong Kong organizations had recognized the concerns of Lin Wing Yung and placed as many as 500 Chinese children in the United States, first wooing Chinese American families, whom they argued best understood China’s political situation and could best communicate its cultural traditions.18 Many of those immigrants who answered the call were distant relatives or friends of the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Vietnamese Adoptions in the Early War Years
• 2. After the Airlifts
• 3. Amerasians’ Families and Hopes of Homecoming
• 4. Living Legacies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index