Week 4, ASA 115, Neil Castro

In week 4, the main topic is about sleeping with the enemy and war babies. This topic talks about how invaders from another country most notably the United States that did horrendous things within the country that it was trying to defend like Vietnam. The invaders or the solders during the Vietnam War in the context slept with Vietnamese women during the war which later on led to pregnant women. These babies were called war babies and after the war ended, some of these babies were left in Vietnam. This led to these babies fatherless which according in Kieu Linh Valverde's reading. “From Dust to Gold: The Vietnamese Amerasian Experience”  referred to this Vietnamese saying, "a child without a father is like a house without a roof.". This meant that Amerasians (the war babies) will be treated with huge prejudice and without a father figure to turn to, they will understand the caring aspects when a child has a father like figure in their life. To remedy this, America gave these war babies a right to citizenship to the United States. Still it created huge turmoil because at first America was denying the notion of these Amerasian and even though the Amerasian Act of 1982 helped they had to "examined" by Caucasians to be worth to become "American". Even if they passed through these regulations, they had to go to their immediate family which they do not even know their father (and imagine when the father was revealed, yikes). War Babies had it rough because of the systemic racism within these legislation laws between the US and Vietnam and the daily life later on in American life. Amerasians lost their own identity which can lead to confusion like how mixed race people in the United States where dealing with.

I understand how they felt because it happened to Filipinos in World War II. During World War II in the pacific campaign, Filipino women went through heinous experiences with solders. They created war babies later on and once some Americans left the island, they left them. However, they were accepted in the Philippines because it was colonized before at the beginning of the 20th century. Still, how do they resolve this sense of lost identity? Why did the government treated this group with racism because even though they technically "won" the conflict, they didn't solve a majority of the problems after the conflict. Communism was on the decline but what happened and why did the war babies get treated unfairly that lead to America to fix it? Becoming Amerasian is like being mixed race nut in another country.