Word: amerasians
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...like the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, where American G.I.s left thousands of unwelcome offspring. In Vietnam, these children were dubbed bui doi, or the dust of life. "Being a bui doi means you are the child of a Vietnamese bar girl and an American soldier," says Henry Phan, an Amerasian tour guide in Ho Chi Minh City. "Here, in Vietnam, it is not a glamorous thing to be mixed." As a child in Bangkok during the early 1990s, Nicole Terio fended off rumors that her mother was a prostitute, even though her parents had met at a university in California...
Next door, 14-year-old Jaime Adriano is waiting, too. He was only two months old when his mother abandoned him, overwhelmed by the prospect of raising an Amerasian child on her own. Jaime lives with a foster family, sleeping in a coffin-sized bedroom where he keeps his hip-hop clothes and prized hair gel. Neighbors whisper that his foster father beats him, but there is nowhere for the 14-year-old boy to go. School is out for the former honor-roll student: his foster father recently lost his job and Jaime's $10 tuition was the first...
Back when Clark was open, Amerasian children of servicemen did have a chance to go to the U.S.?if their mothers could prove paternity. While that didn't happen too often, the occasional success story gave others hope, and they bombarded the U.S. embassy in Manila with citizenship applications. Older Amerasian girls traded on their exotic-but-familiar looks to marry serving soldiers, later settling in prosaic places like Oklahoma City and Fort Wayne. But with the base gone, so are the servicemen and the link to American passports. Few of the Europeans or Americans who descend on Angeles these...
...Minh City an aunt, living in devastating poverty, is hopeful that her relatives in America will help her. "I wanted to write letters," she says between tears, "but I couldn't afford the stamp." Tiana hears gruesome testimony from Amerasian orphans and My Lai survivors. In Hanoi she dances with Oliver Stone at the Metropole hotel and converses with Le Duc Tho, Pham Van Dong, General Giap -- old warriors from an old nightmare...
...Philippine island for 30 years after World War II before surfacing, anything is possible. But it is more likely that any Americans still in Vietnam remain there for conjugal reasons and have led retiring lives. Either that or the people sighted were really East Europeans or the now grown Amerasian offspring of former G.I.s...