Can Tho : A Story of Love & War

I also wrote the screenplay but in that business it is hard to know if my byline will remain.

Memories of Love and War

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Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. State Department and someone from Vietnam's delegation to the United Nations willing to make an exception? Mrazek began making phone calls and writing letters. Mrazek had found a senior Vietnamese official who thought that helping Minh might lead to improved relations with the United States, and the congressman had persuaded a majority of his colleagues in the House of Representatives to press for help with Minh's visa.

He could bring the boy home with him.

A War Story Is a Love Story, Anyway | HuffPost

Mrazek had hardly set his feet on Vietnamese soil before the kids were tagging along. Some called him "Daddy. Another 60 or 70 Amerasians were camped in the yard. The refrain Mrazek kept hearing was, "I want to go to the land of my father. There were lots of these kids, and they were painful reminders to the Vietnamese of the war and all it had cost them. Let's bring them all back, at least the ones who want to come. They took him to orthopedists and neurologists, but his muscles were so atrophied "there was almost nothing left in his legs," Nancy says.

Minh wondered if his father was among the 58, names engraved on it. He was very resistant to school and had no desire to get up in the morning.

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• ALLES, WAS SIE ÜBER HITLER, DEUTSCHE, AMERIKANISCHE UND AUßERIRDISCHE UFOS WISSEN WOLLTEN (German Edition).
• In der Hitze der Nacht (German Edition);
• The Sacred Office of Mediumship!

He wanted dinner at midnight because that's when he'd eaten on the streets in Vietnam. Minh, now 37 and a newspaper distributor, still talks regularly on the phone with the Kinneys. He calls them Mom and Dad. Mrazek, meanwhile, turned his attention to gaining passage of the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which he had authored and sponsored. In the end, he sidestepped normal Congressional procedures and slipped his three-page immigration bill into a 1,page appropriations bill, which Congress quickly approved and President Ronald Reagan signed in December The new law called for bringing Amerasians to the United States as immigrants, not refugees, and granted entry to almost anyone who had the slightest touch of a Western appearance.

The Amerasians who had been so despised in Vietnam had a passport—their faces—to a new life, and because they could bring family members with them, they were showered with gifts, money and attention by Vietnamese seeking free passage to America. With the stroke of a pen, the children of dust had become the children of gold.

It was like we were walking on clouds. We were their meal ticket, and people offered a lot of money to Amerasians willing to claim them as mothers and grandparents and siblings. Counterfeit marriage licenses and birth certificates began appearing on the black market. Bribes for officials who would substitute photographs and otherwise alter documents for "families" applying to leave rippled through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Once the "families" reached the United States and checked into one of 55 transit centers, from Utica, New York, to Orange County, California, the new immigrants would often abandon their Amerasian benefactors and head off on their own.

It wasn't long before unofficial reports began to detail mental-health problems in the Amerasian community. Many Amerasians did well in their new land, particularly those who had been raised by their Vietnamese mothers, those who had learned English and those who ended up with loving foster or adoptive parents in the United States.

But in a survey of Vietnamese Amerasians nationwide, Bemak found that some 14 percent had attempted suicide; 76 percent wanted, at least occasionally, to return to Vietnam. Most were eager to find their fathers, but only 33 percent knew his name. In Vietnam, they weren't accepted as Vietnamese and in America they weren't considered Americans.

They searched for love but usually didn't find it.

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Of all the immigrants in the United States, the Amerasians, I think, are the group that's had the hardest time finding the American Dream. But Amerasians are also survivors, their character steeled by hard times, and not only have they toughed it out in Vietnam and the United States, they are slowly carving a cultural identity, based on the pride—not the humiliation—of being Amerasian. The dark shadows of the past are receding, even in Vietnam, where discrimination against Amerasians has faded.

They're learning how to use the American political system to their advantage and have lobbied Congress for passage of a bill that would grant citizenship to all Amerasians in the United States. And under the auspices of groups like the Amerasian Fellowship Association, they are holding regional "galas" around the country—sit-down dinners with music and speeches and hosts in tuxedos—that attract or "brothers and sisters" and celebrate the Amerasian community as a unique immigrant population.

His grandmother in Vung Tau took him in while his mother served a five-year sentence in a re-education camp for trying to flee Vietnam. He says his grandmother filled him with love and hired an "underground" teacher to tutor him in English. At age 22, in , he came to the United States with a third-grade education and passed the GED to earn a high-school diploma. It was easy convincing the U.

He had a picture of his father, Sgt. Miller II, exchanging wedding vows with Jimmy's mother, Kim, who was pregnant with him at the time. He carries the picture in his wallet to this day. Jimmy's father, James, retired from the U. Army in after a year career. In , he was sitting with his wife, Nancy, on a backyard swing at their North Carolina home, mourning the loss of his son from a previous marriage, James III, who had died of AIDS a few months earlier, when the telephone rang. On the line was Jimmy's sister, Trinh, calling from Spokane, and in typically direct Vietnamese fashion, before even saying hello, she asked, "Are you my brother's father?

She repeated the question, saying she had tracked him down with the help of a letter bearing a Fayetteville postmark he had written Kim years earlier.

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She gave him Jimmy's telephone number. James called his son ten minutes later, but mispronounced his Vietnamese name—Nhat Tung—and Jimmy, who had spent four years looking for his father, politely told the caller he had the wrong number and hung up. His father called back. Is your aunt Phuong Dung, the famous singer?

There was a pause as James caught his breath. I am your dad. Over the next two years, the Millers crossed the country several times to spend weeks with Jimmy, who, like many Amerasians, had taken his father's name. But you know the only thing that boy ever asked for? It was for unconditional fatherly love. That's all he ever wanted.

He said that there had been times when he had questioned the wisdom of his efforts. He mentioned the instances of fraud, the Amerasians who hadn't adjusted to their new lives, the fathers who had rejected their sons and daughters. But wait, I said, that's old news. I told him about Jimmy Miller and about Saran Bynum, an Amerasian who is the office manager for actress-singer Queen Latifah and runs her own jewelry business. I consider myself blessed to be alive. And I told him about the Amerasians who got off welfare and are giving voice to the once-forgotten children of a distant war.

The cavernous Chinese restaurant in a San Jose mall where Amerasians gathered for their gala filled quickly. Plastic flowers adorned each table and there were golden dragons on the walls. Next to an American flag stood the flag of South Vietnam, a country that has not existed for 34 years. An honor guard of five former South Vietnamese servicemen marched smartly to the front of the room.

Le Tho, a former lieutenant who had spent 11 years in a re-education camp, called them to attention as a scratchy recording sounded the national anthems of the United States and South Vietnam. Some in the audience wept when the guest of honor, Tran Ngoc Dung, was introduced. Dung, her husband and six children had arrived in the United States just two weeks earlier, having left Vietnam thanks to the Homecoming Act, which remains in force but receives few applications these days.

The Trans were farmers and spoke no English. A rough road lay ahead, but, Dung said, "This is like a dream I've been living for 30 years. I asked some Amerasians if they were expecting Le Van Minh, who lived not far away in a two-bedroom house, to come to the gala. They had never heard of Minh. I called Minh, now a man of 37, with a wife from Vietnam and two children, 12 and 4. Among the relatives he brought to the United States is the mother who threw him out of the house 27 years ago.

Minh uses crutches and a wheelchair to get around his home and a specially equipped Toyota to crisscross the neighborhoods where he distributes newspapers. He usually rises shortly after midnight and doesn't finish his route until 8 a. He says he's too busy for any spare-time activities but hopes to learn how to barbecue one day.

He doesn't think much about his past life as a beggar in the streets of Saigon. I asked him if he thought life had given him a fair shake. David Lamb wrote about Singapore in the September issue. Catherine Karnow , born and raised in Hong Kong, has photographed extensively in Vietnam.

An earlier version of this article said that Jimmy Miller served in the military for 35 years. He served for 30 years. We apologize for the error. Subscribe or Give a Gift.

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