Week 4, ASA 115, Ben Alto

In week 3 of ASA 115 “race traitors” Kieh-Linh Caroline Valverde brought the concept of Vietnamese amerasians in her article From Dust to Gold: The Vietnamese Amerasian Experience. In the article she mentions the common plights of the amerasians that resulted from coital unions between Vietnamese people and American soldiers during the Vietnam War. After, the war amerasians were treated in a largely second-class citizen way due to being thought of as part of the losing side as well as societal customs. This treatment led to lack of education, being raised apart from their birth-mother as well as having no romantic interest.

After, their plight inside of Vietnam was paraded for an American audience, immigration laws were created to allow for Vietnamese Amerasian immigration to the United States in 1982. This legislation had many faults including not allowing extraneous family members to immigrate with the amerasian (This was particularly offensive to the Vietnamese culture where family groups included extended members). Later laws attempted to fix these problems however full scale immigration still continued to be hampered by the relation between the United States and Vietnam. Once inside of America amerasians still faced persecution based on lack of available support structures for the group.

One of the problems listed in the article was the difficulty for amerasians to learn the English language inside of the United States with one student participating in Spanish to English language class while knowing neither of the languages. This relates to a story told by a close family member of mine where he was put into a Spanish to English language learner class in elementary school due to his Hispanic background. He also found the class to be useless as he was much more confident in this English skills as compared to his Spanish skills. I have included an image of google translate to symbolize the effective dissidence of the language barrier that Vietnamese Amerasians faced while immigrating to the United States.