Vietnamese-Amerasians: Where Do They Belong?http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~thantran/Amerasian.html My Life I can't imagine growing up without knowing who my father is or what he was. Without my father, my life can not be completed. I am very fortunate that I have the best of two worlds and that I have a chance to be loved by both my mother and my father. Most Vietnamese Amerasians do not have this life opportunity to be loved by both parents. Their lives will never be complete because they are the "children of the dust". This term is used to describe the wandering life of Amerasian children. Their lives are described as "dust" because they are ever flowing with the wind dust, which has neither beginning nor ending. (I will use the terms Vietnamese-Amerasians and Amerasians interchangeably. Although Amerasians is a board term that can include Korean and Philippines, in this paper Amerasians only denote Vietnamese-Amerasians.) In the case of Vietnamese Amerasians, the children wander and their lives flow freely in their own country. In Vietnam, they search for a place that they can belong to. In America, they continue to do the same thing--searching for a place that they can call their own after being deserted in Vietnam..... ...... To get an explicit differentiation of races, for most of white Amerasians, they do not have many difficulties or face extreme racial discrimination as black Amerasians do. Because black Amerasians had tri-identities-"culturally Vietnamese, politically American and physically black", they could not fit in as a full Vietnamese, American, or African-American (Gonzalez, 1B). It was more difficult for them to adjust and be accepted in mainstream society because of their obvious skin color compared to white Amerasians. Most "black" Amerasians they defined themselves as Vietnamese because they experience a closer culture to the Vietnamese community. However, in the Vietnamese community, they saw black Amerasians differently from white Amerasians. They recognized "black" as "a handicap and a reason for scorn" (Rutledge, 134). One black Amerasian blamed himself for the misfortune, I feel ashamed that my mother was with a black man, and now I have to carry at. I wish I were a white Amerasian (Gonzalez, 1B).But would being white Amerasian better their non-existence identity and situation as an overall foreigner's child both in Vietnam and then in the United States? A college student at Oklahoma University saw the difference in treatment between white Amerasians and black Amerasians at his school just like the "white" skin preference over "black" skin color in mainstream society. He said: Amerasians have had a difficult time being accepted into the Vietnamese-American communities. If they have black heritage, the bias in often not subtle; if they have white heritage, it is more passive (Rutledge, 135).This showed that all societies (including Vietnamese and American), no matter how many policies its government passed to help the "minority" race, the mentality in the people will never change based on lighter skin supremacy over darker skin subordination. ........ |
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