An International Struggle


Afro-Amerasians

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Source: Yarborough, Trin. Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005. Yarborough, Trin. Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005.

Excerpts and ordering information available at http://www.survivingtwice.com.

The following is from the inside jacket cover of Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War:

Surviving Twice is the story of five of more than one hundred thousand Amerasians born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. Unfortunately, they were not among the few thousand Amerasian children who came to the United States before the war's end and grew up as Americans, speaking English and attending American schools. Instead, this group of Amerasians faced much more formidable obstacles, both in Vietnam and in the United States.

These five — plus tens of thousands of similar children, almost always "the poorest of the poor" — grew up under a repressive communist government in an era when the entire population was suffering from famine and postwar devastation. As victims of racial, class, and political prejudices, they faced their first struggle to survive in a society that did not accept their mixed parentage. But under the Amerasian Homecoming Act, some thirty thousand Amerasians entered the United States between 1988 and 1994, along with perhaps eighty thousand relatives, many of them fakes who were using the Amerasians to escape Vietnam. Most of the Amerasians, by then teenagers or in their early twenties, were illiterate in any language and often suffered from physical and emotional problems. In America, they struggled for a second time to survive.

Surviving Twice raises significant questions about how mixed-race children born of wars and occupations are treated and the ways in which the shifting laws, policies, social attitudes, and bureaucratic red tape of two nations affect them their entire lives.
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