The Adopted Vietnamese Community: From Fairy Tales to the Diaspora

INTRODUCTION

Stories of forced migration and kinship separation commonly associated with numerous global diasporas have always been deeply entrenched in the history and culture of the Vietnamese people, from ancient legends to the stories of political refugees who left their homeland at the end of the Vietnam War. For example, according to a mystical legend thought to be over four thousand years old, the people of Vietnam descend from a love affair between Lac Long Quan, a dragon king from the water, and Au Co, a fairy princess from the land. It is said that their brief union produced one hundred eggs—which hatched into the first Vietnamese children.

Despite their love, Lac Long Quan and Au Co were forced by circumstances to separate. The king returned to the water and the fairy returned to the land. Each took fifty of their children with them, and, even though they and their children longed to be reunited, they were destined to be estranged from one another. For many overseas Vietnamese or Viet Kieu, separated from their family and homeland following 1975, this legend continues to have a powerful symbolic resonance as they attempt to make sense of their historical losses and their struggles abroad.[1]

A lesser-known episode in this legend tells how a few of the fairy princess's eggs became tangled within the luxurious folds of her nest and were left behind. A European king and his queen discovered the infants that eventually hatched from these eggs. Without knowing to whom they belonged and thinking they were abandoned, the royal couple decided to take the infants back to their own soil and raise them, even though they looked different from the people in their land. As the years passed, although these children knew nothing about their birth culture, they often felt rejected because of how others in their host land continually saw them as foreigners. And, although these children were loved by their new parents, they still struggled to come to terms with their separation from their lost Vietnamese family.

I begin with this legend in order to include the very real but largely unknown migration history and diasporic lives of the adopted Vietnamese community into an existing mythology about the origins of Vietnamese people. I was influenced by Yngvesson and Mahoney's critique of the "contradictions from which no culturally consistent narrative can be told" in identity narratives constructed for and by inter-country adoptees.[2] These authors argue that the inter-country or trans-national adoptees they studied (from countries such as Korea and Ethiopia) are more likely to be "denied a seamless origin story [and] struggle with the compelling discourse of authenticity visited upon them countless times in encounters with countless others" due to their visible difference and cultural hybridity.

As we will see, the adult voices of adopted Vietnamese reveal that their sense of identity is marked by similar feelings of lack of authenticity. Around one thousand Vietnamese war orphans were removed from their birth country as infants or young children to be adopted overseas in the war years prior to 1975, and approximately three thousand more were evacuated at the end of the Vietnam War in a Western humanitarian project known as Operation Babylift. Just like my fictional altruistic foreign king and queen, white parents adopted the majority of the Vietnam War orphans, even though they looked different from them and most of the people in their land. And, like my fictional children who were unknowingly lost to Lac Long Quan and Au Co, these orphans would grow up to be treated as "different" in their host land even though they grew up knowing very little, if anything, about their biological parents and birth culture. And, as the adopted Vietnamese began to mature, they would come to feel curious about their birth country and the people they left behind.

Before I present some of the adopted Vietnamese's own accounts of their lives, it might be worth introducing my own background, as it no doubt plays a role in how I frame their stories. I left Vietnam as an orphaned baby in 1972, during the Vietnam War, and was adopted into a white Australian family who lived in an exclusive suburb on the outskirts of Sydney. In my early years I felt very comfortable and did not feel any different from my adoptive parents or their two biological sons, who have shown me much love and always regarded me as part of their family. My own sense of belonging changed when outsiders started asking me questions such as "Where are you from?" and I would struggle to find an answer I felt comfortable with. The only thing I knew about Vietnam was that it was a land of poverty and orphanages, and I was afraid to be associated with it. It made me become an object of pity in the eyes of those who asked. Instead, I insisted on telling people that I was "from" the lovely suburban house up the road on the waterfront in order to promote the fact that I had just as "good" a white middle-class background as they did.

Once I began school, I continued to try to fit in with my predominantly white peers, hoping to pass as one of them even though, to my distress, I was regularly referred to as "the Asian girl." I spent a great deal of effort throughout my adolescent years trying to avoid being identified as Asian, especially after seeing pitiful or murderous Vietnamese characters in Hollywood Vietnam War movies and embarrassing Asian nerd parodies in a series of teen comedy films, both of which were popular in the 1980s. And yet, underneath, I was desperate to find ways to feel more positive about my Vietnamese ancestry. Unfortunately, every book and film on Vietnam that I came across was limited to presenting very Eurocentric accounts of the Vietnam War that portrayed Vietnamese people as silent victims, sexual objects, or killers.

It was not until my years as a university student living in a more multicultural part of Sydney that I began to feel strong and confident enough to find out more about my past and what became of the other Vietnamese adopted into the West. My detective work began at the university library, but I soon discovered that even in the late 1990s the experiences of Vietnamese adoptees rarely, if at all, rated a mention in the general literature about Vietnam. And, although a few more thorough academic studies on the backgrounds and contemporary identities of the Vietnamese diaspora had begun to include references to the adopted Vietnamese migration, most scholars in the humanities and social sciences had overlooked our presence.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War in April 2000, I decided to launch Adopted Vietnamese International at www.adoptedvietnamese.org to create a space for the adoptees to tell their stories and begin a dialogue with each other and the diaspora. The cooperative has since initiated a number of transnational activities. Our use of e-mail, e-groups, and instant messaging reduced the time, cost, and distance factors that had previously hindered the ability of Vietnamese adoptees from as far apart as the United States and Australia to meet each other and coordinate events such as international conferences and return trips to Vietnam. We also created websites as an affordable and easy medium to publish our own accounts of our adoptions from Vietnam and our negotiations with cultural identity in various forms; these sites include short personal narratives, poetry, and photography.

A few memoirs by American women about their involvement as volunteers during Operation Babylift in 1975 also began to appear in late 2000.[3] However, the voices of adopted Vietnamese were only given limited attention in these and similar texts, as was any in-depth or critical reflection upon the adoptees' experiences. After I had held meetings with adopted Vietnamese in Australia and the U.S., led a delegation of adoptees back to Vietnam, and presented a couple of papers on the topic at conferences at Yale and M.I.T., I decided in 2002 to start writing about my own community of adopted Vietnamese in more depth.

I began a research master's thesis in sociology that drew upon life-history interviews with thirteen now adult-aged adopted Vietnamese who will be referred to in this article by pseudonyms.[4] The orphans that were able to retain their Vietnamese names after their adoptions chose to use Vietnamese pseudonyms. All were adopted from South Vietnamese orphanages between the years 1969 and 1975 as infants or young children by white parents and were raised in countries such as Australia, France, the U.S., and the United Kingdom. This essay aims to provide readers with an overview of the adoptees' accounts of their lives "beyond the frame" and how overseas Vietnamese have so far been defined.

These new Vietnamese voices begin to offer readers some insight into the challenges Vietnamese-born people have faced in maintaining a sense of cultural continuity after being placed in the center of white middle-class privilege. As the adoptees discuss their adulthood, we can better understand how the recent engagements they have undertaken to reconnect with other Vietnamese, while not without challenges, have the potential to positively shape their sense of identity and belonging.

FROM RAGS TO RICHES

 
How did the adopted Vietnamese feel their lives might have changed once they joined their adoptive parents? Their own post-adoption narratives began to read like a modern-day Western fairy tale of "rags to riches." I was offered stories of lucky escapes from under-resourced orphanages, malnutrition, and various forms of ill health. Their adoptions were generally seen as providing them with loving families, good medical care, and an education that was often followed by university studies or entry into well-paid professions. However, further investigation into the adoptees' stories of rags to riches revealed that a complex process of racial and cultural alienation accompanied their journey from poverty to middle-class privilege.

Most adoptees said that in their early years they felt the "same" as their adoptive parents. This in itself was nothing new. From Locke to Mead, there is a whole body of literature devoted to the notion that children identify with their parents or the significant others around them. But given that the adopted Vietnamese are visibly different and had a different ancestry from their adoptive parents, I was interested in finding out what cultural tensions might have problematized this process. As the interviews progressed, I began to see a pattern emerge where the adopted Vietnamese used the word "same" as a racially and culturally loaded term to describe a "whiteness" given the value of "normal." For example, the adoptees' recollections of their childhood upbringing include statements that they were raised as a "normal Australian lad," "all American," "raised as normal," "white . . . just like my family" and were "indoctrinated in the dominant view" irrespective of their cultural background.

I soon began to wonder to what extent this process of assimilation achieved its success at the expense of their cultural background. Things became very interesting when the adoptees began offering stories about what they knew about their pre-adoption past. Their stories of how and why they were orphaned were mostly vague, and the gaps that could not be filled with hard facts were mostly bridged by fantasy and speculation by their adoptive parents.

D. Eng observes that trans-national adoption is often explained and legitimized by adoptive parents and adoption agencies through "generalized narratives of salvation—from poverty, disease, and the barbarianism of the Third World."[6] In the adoption narratives that adoptive parents offered the Vietnamese orphans, Vietnam and its people are symbolically removed from being conceptualized by adoptees as "normal" sources of kinship and community in favor of being potential sources of trauma and inferiority. Vietnamese are mainly described as poor uneducated mothers, unfeeling prostitutes, and savage soldiers. General references about the Vietnamese having worthy cultural attributes, such as observations that "Vietnam is and always has been one of the most intensely literary civilizations on the planet" are absent in the adoptees' childhood knowledge about Vietnam.[7] Positive portrayals of Vietnamese women, such as the stories about the Vietnamese warrior heroines Lady TriEA\u and the Trung sisters, along with other important Vietnamese characters and achievements, also go unreported.

Scholars have observed that even in the late 1980s for "much of the world the very word Vietnam represents an event and an experience—the wars of 1946 to 1975—rather than a country."[8] An example of Vietnam and Vietnamese being portrayed as a tragic event is adoptee Sasha's recollection of how her Australian adoptive parents described her Vietnamese past. As a child, she says, she was told "that my mother was probably a prostitute who wasn't able to keep me or had died in the war." This explanation of her adoption made her feel she had "to be grateful . . . which I resented because I'd never had a choice as a baby." She demonstrates a desire to flee from any identification with her background: "I felt that my culture and racial identity was something to be ashamed of because I needed to be rescued from it." In contrast, the possibility of the West (people, values, soldiers) playing any destructive role in the war, and its own possible responsibility for the orphaning of children, is absent from Sasha's and most of the adoption narratives that the adoptees recall being offered.

It is useful to remember that these Vietnamese orphans were adopted at a time when much of the information produced about Vietnam outside its national borders was filtered through the U.S. where, it has been claimed, its "policy makers saw Vietnam through a lens heavily shaded by European 'orientalism' as well as by the home-grown racialism that pervaded much of American culture."[9] A strong presence of colonial discourse was not unusual in Western political rhetoric, media narratives, and fictional film representations of Vietnam and its people. Such sources of knowledge would have most likely influenced adoptive parents, as the majority had not traveled to Vietnam but instead collected the orphans upon or soon after their arrival into the West.

Generalized narratives of the orphans' "salvation" from inferior Third World characters are also evident in adoption narratives offered by some of the Westerners who assisted the Vietnamese orphans' evacuation. For example, the personal memoir of Peck-Barnes, an Operation Babylift volunteer, describes how Vietnamese orphans were "abandoned in . . . trash heaps or pawned off to anyone who had a spark of compassion" by careless Vietnamese. The voices of the Vietnamese, particularly the birth mothers who relinquished their children, have so far not been given a substantial platform to reply or explain. Peck-Barnes positions Westerners in the role of rescuer, particularly the women who, she writes, "left the comfort of their homes and went to Southeast Asia to reclaim discarded babies." "Many a housewife skimped on her weekly grocery budget to fill a small shoebox of items that could keep a child alive," she remarks.

Western religious values are also featured in some of the memoirs by adoptive parents as a way of explaining the adoption of Vietnamese orphans. For example, L. Noone, an Operation Babylift adoptive parent, in her personal memoir and overall useful adoption guide, Global Mom, tells other adoptive parents "God brought your family together for a reason," and that it "is a powerful spiritual journey," although she counsels parents to 'Pray for guidance to whomever you perceive the Divine Creator to be."[10] Religion also took a central role for the adopted Vietnamese. For example, Mina, an adoptee raised in Australia, told me in an interview, "The organisation I was adopted through was looking for loving Christian families to adopt Vietnamese babies." Joe, also raised in Australia, claims that his adoptive father became involved in adoption through his role as a Christian minister. Sasha's adoptive parents also adopted her through Christian church connections.

The problem with these rags to riches stories is that adopted Vietnamese are compelled to aspire to the morality, religious values, and cultural structures belonging to the West. These codes often presume the inferiority of the Third World, whose own morals and values are silenced through the "absence of a text that can answer back."[11] My research did not attempt to recover these voices. The real circumstances that led to Vietnamese becoming available for adoption is a subject ripe for further research. It was mainly financial and linguistic constraints that influenced my own decision not to explore the lives of the adopted Vietnamese before they were adopted. I was unable to spend a significant period of time in Vietnam searching through orphanage files and cannot speak Vietnamese, which would most likely have been necessary had I found any birth parents willing to be interviewed.

What I was able to discover is how the adoptees' lack of exposure to positive accounts of Vietnamese people and culture in their childhood left them with little knowledge and power to see past the racism and cultural stereotypes that surrounded and devalued their past. I admit that I began feeling a guilty sense of relief as the adoptees' experiences were revealed to be similar to my own. I no longer felt that I was the only one to have undergone feelings of trauma and shame when trying to make sense of and come to terms with my background as a child. I made this confession to my supervisor and colleagues to check the validity of my findings. They sent me off to explore a range of feminist and postmodern works by writers such as bell hooks. I was able to find ways to support my belief that my own status and condition helped me have insight into the subject and helped me make adopted Vietnamese feel they could discuss some of the more painful conflicts of identity that they experienced while growing up.

The next part of the adopted Vietnamese lives that I wanted to explore was their late childhood to adolescence. I had regularly encountered racism over this period of my life, and I was eager to find out if other adopted Vietnamese had also been exposed to a series of racial taunts. I once again had that guilty feeling of relief when I began to find out that I was not alone. The adopted Vietnamese I interviewed recalled that they too began to feel their identities were challenged once they entered school and were taunted for being "the Asian" and "different." All disclosed that they felt uneasy and unsettled, or, at the very least, frustrated by their no longer being able to be recognized or accepted as the "same" as white by peers, while being encouraged to feel normal once they returned home from classes.

My Dung, an adopted Vietnamese Australian, provides us with some insight into how her own sense of identity at home was contradicted by how others saw her at school: "I felt I was white, but because I don't look like my parents or the majority of students at school I was treated like I was Asian." She was made to feel inferior: "Directly and indirectly, by students, teachers and people walking past who believed they had the right to have a go and judge me."

It was not uncommon for adoptees who received similar treatment to interpret that being "different"—Vietnamese/Asian/Other—meant that they were inferior, with some even experiencing a deep sense of shame and racism toward other non-whites. Such identity struggles and internalized racism can be seen in Sasha's discussion of attitudes she had as a teenager toward dating and Asians. She found that she was "the only non-white" and felt that, "boys saw me as being too different to go out with." She explained that because her "mentality was so white" (like that of her peers) she saw "Asianness as inferior, not as good, not as attractive, and I would have felt ashamed to be seen with an Asian male."

Similarly, Luke, an adopted Vietnamese American, states that "As a younger boy I always hated looking in the mirror, because I didn't like what I saw. I wanted to be like all the other kids. Tall, white, no flat nose, no slanted eyes, and no brown skin. I hated the way I looked." One of the effects of this treatment is that Luke failed to resist the popular racist attitudes of his peers and told himself that he would "NEVER date an Asian girl."

By now we can see even more flaws in the adopted Vietnamese's otherwise happy myth of rags to riches. For many, their sense of identity becomes permeated by feelings of worthlessness and alienation. One of the main sources of their sense of exclusion is their being unable to escape being associated with racist notions of "difference" and "Vietnameseness" at their culturally homogeneous schools. These adoptees' ability to feel pride in their cultural background is hindered by their lack of connection to others who shared it. Making matters worse, the prospect of adopted Vietnamese ever having anything to do with Vietnamese people and culture seemed highly unlikely. Most of us hadn't met any Vietnamese people. Even if we could meet them it seemed intimidating, if not a little awkward, as we didn't speak Vietnamese or know anything about the culture.

Ironically, our first steps toward meeting other Vietnamese people were largely assisted by the adoption agencies who removed us from our birth country during the Vietnam War and delivered us into the care of white families. In April 2000 the adopted Vietnamese began to meet collectively at events organized by adoption agencies such as Holt International to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Operation Babylift. It was during this period that I began to meet other adopted Vietnamese, first online and then in person. These meetings provided me with some background knowledge of the interests and concerns of the adopted Vietnamese in their adult years and guided the questions I would ask in the interviews about this stage of their lives.

Before I present some of the adopted Vietnamese's own accounts of their experiences in trying to reconnect with other Vietnamese in adulthood, it might be useful to outline the general changes that have assisted them on this particular journey. All thirteen of the adoptees have moved to more multicultural areas where they find it easier to interact, at various levels, with the overseas Vietnamese community. Ten have returned to visit Vietnam, and the other three are planning to do so. A number have made friends with overseas Vietnamese after meeting them in their workplace or at a university. Perhaps what is most surprising is that several have begun to date Asians (including Sasha, who once felt she would be embarrassed to be seen with an Asian male). Yet, despite the efforts of the adopted Vietnamese to reconnect with the people from Vietnam and the diaspora, cultural differences between them continue to create tensions.

RECLAIMING AND RETURNING

I began my exploration into the adult lives of adopted Vietnamese by asking them how they respond to the question, "Where are you from?" This question used to cause me much bother as a child, although today I find it easier to answer, having now met many first- and second-generation overseas Vietnamese people and visited Vietnam twice. I am now quick to remind others not to stereotype Vietnam as being only a site of abject poverty. I also endeavor to list some of the achievements of the Vietnamese diaspora's scholars, artists, and activists whenever I meet people who try to associate the overseas Vietnamese community exclusively with violent gangs, drug dealers, and other negative minority stereotypes.

Most of the adoptees I spoke to feel that they are also more confident as adults in answering the "Where are you from?" question—with many presenting an identity that integrates both their Western upbringing and Vietnamese past. Their hybrid constructions illustrate the way in which adopted Vietnamese have begun to feel less inclined to completely identify as white than they did in childhood. For example, Ken, an adopted Vietnamese American, who has begun to spend time with the Vietnamese and general Asian-American community, feels that he does not "hold white people up as the social ideal anymore." A more extreme transformation was Luke's description of himself as no longer being "all American" but rather "I'm all Vietnamese."

Alternatively, Sasha did not feel a complete sense of being Vietnamese. She has been able to overcome a sense of shame about her background, having visited Vietnam in 2000. Of the trip's impact she says that it "enabled me to feel proud for the first time of being Vietnamese, that the Vietnamese people are not to be ashamed of—they were fighters—courageous and inventive." On the "Where are you from?" question, she now replies, "I was born in Vietnam but adopted into an Australian family. Over time it has been easy to answer. When I was young I hated the question." She feels more confident about using it as "an opportunity to educate people on the issues of adoption." "My identity has been defined by being between two cultures/races . . . apart from my looks—I don't belong in Vietnam."

Ben, an adopted Vietnamese from the U.S., explains his transition from Vietnam to being an American farmer's son with a joke when asked "Where are you from?" saying, "I reply I was born in Vietnam and raised in Minnesota. I don't know much about Vietnamese culture, but I sure can tell you how to milk a cow at 5:00 a.m." However, he acknowledges that this question was once more painful. "Now it is a very easy question to answer, but when I was young and still searching for myself it was extremely difficult." He believes that he and other adopted Vietnamese once had difficulties with this question because they lacked "a certain amount of understanding of the culture that he/she comes from in order to instill a sense of pride."

Ann, an adoptee raised in France, also once felt uncomfortable with presenting an identity that included references to her Vietnamese ancestry. "When I was a child, saying I was born in Vietnam was like confessing a defect (abuses made me feel like that)." Her new ability to talk about her heritage is partly due to the fact that racist remarks are less common in the multicultural neighborhood that she moved to in adulthood. In addition, she has built resistance to negative comments about Vietnam after traveling there in 1994 and seeing it for herself. She was eager to assert that after her visit "I [now] feel much more proud of my background, I even insist on talking about it."

The adoptees who had returned or were planning to do so all expressed a great deal of anticipation and some anxiety about their first trips back to their birth country. This is not surprising considering the trauma and mystery that surrounded Vietnam in the adoption narratives they were offered as children. Most of the adoptees felt that their trips back to Vietnam were generally rewarding, although their ability to develop meaningful connections with the locals was often hampered by cultural differences. However, a few adoptees felt that their trips were highly stressful and deeply disappointing. On top of a series of awkward cultural situations, a few felt unwelcome and rejected because they lacked "typical" Vietnamese appearances due to their mixed-race ancestry.

For those who held hopes that Vietnamese would automatically accept them, this aloofness came as a deep shock. Tuyet, an adopted Vietnamese who spent her childhood in a privileged world of Western expatriates due to her adoptive parents' work in the Middle East until they moved to the U.S. when she was a teenager, initially believed that a trip to Vietnam "would fill the void that I seemed to have carried around with me all my life . . . that I would finally feel a sense of completeness. It would validate the pride of being Vietnamese." However, once she visited her birth country she reported a number of distressing cultural situations and frequent attitudes of racism toward her mixed-race appearance. An excerpt from her travel journal reveals how this surprising outcome affected her enthusiasm to reconnect with other Vietnamese and even produced hostile feelings toward them:

Some of the adopted Vietnamese felt that their meetings with the older generation of Vietnamese people back in the West were also made more difficult due to the cultural differences that sometimes resulted in rejection. Such exclusion was even felt by adopted Vietnamese who had arrived in the West as young children. For example, Nick was adopted at the age of six and raised in the U.S. Nick had only recently begun to meet Vietnamese people again. When reflecting upon his adult feelings toward those who share his ethnic background, he claims, "I am very proud to know these people" but admits "they acknowledge my Vietnamese heritage but know I am not one of them anymore." Like Tuyet, he believes that the adopted Vietnamese need to exhibit certain cultural attributes before some Vietnamese people will accept them. Of his own experiences he believes: "Adopted Vietnamese must accept who they are. I realize this is a very difficult task and sometimes one might feel isolated. From personal experience, I know the Vietnamese overseas will not willingly accept adopted Vietnamese unless they speak Vietnamese."

The adoptees' accounts of their recent activities with the second generation of overseas Vietnamese showed greater compatibility, including their sharing of experiences with Vietnamese language and food among young Vietnamese friends who also grew up in the West. Other adoptees have begun to learn more about Vietnam through joining groups such as Mam Non, which is run by a second-generation Vietnamese woman whose brother was adopted from Vietnam. Even those who felt too shy or uncomfortable to regularly socialize with the second generation expressed an appreciation for English-language books by young overseas Vietnamese authors such as Andrew Pham and subtitled films by directors such as Tony Bui.

Adopted Vietnamese felt they were making the strongest connections with individuals who were also adopted from Vietnam. Tuyet, who had expressed a strong sense of alienation during her visit to Vietnam, explains the difference between Vietnamese and adopted Vietnamese: "They [adoptees] can offer similar or same experiences which may help us understand better the feelings of being lost, misplaced, and alone." Simon, an adopted Vietnamese raised in the U.K., also believes that meeting other adoptees has provided him with "a good opportunity to meet up with other people who had a similar background, to share experiences, and to know, ultimately, that I was not alone." Ben also felt it was easier for him to connect with other adoptees, "because they understand me better . . . as well as creating an environment of understanding and belonging."

The adoptees' reconnection to other Vietnamese people might be seen as a work in progress rather than an automatic process. Cultural differences were repeatedly cited as the main source of tension. If we consider the contemporary conflicts that exist between ethnic, political, and religious groups in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, then the cultural identities of Vietnamese cannot be easily reduced to any one true essence or neatly located within clear boundaries. The politics of identity in the adopted Vietnamese might be seen as just another part of the diversity that exists throughout the Vietnamese diaspora rather than as an entirely separate phenomenon. Now that the adopted Vietnamese have begun to interact with the Vietnamese community, they can offer new insights and experiences that contribute to re-conceptualizations and revisions of what it means to be Vietnamese despite differences. The potentiality of adopted Vietnamese to play a role in such transformations can be seen in the attitudes of Cindy, an adopted Vietnamese raised in Australia:

Ken perhaps best summarizes how the adoptees' experiences can contribute to a positive re-conceptualization of all identities. His inclusive views resist the urge to invest in grand narratives of groups having "pure" and innate origins and identities while defending the need to acknowledge that differences do exist:

CONCLUSION

It is important to acknowledge that although the adopted Vietnamese featured in this essay have begun to invest in a range of Vietnamese activities and relationships, not all adoptees have pursued or will plan to make active connections with Vietnamese people in the homeland or its diaspora. In addition, I am not proposing that all the adoptees that do will necessarily feel reconciled or that my own investigation can possibly claim to represent every aspect and individual of the adopted Vietnamese community. The voices of the adopted Vietnamese presented here and my interpretations of their experiences do provide a little more understanding of how essentialist attitudes and a lack of recognition and respect for difference and diversity can alienate them from both the host society and the Vietnamese diaspora.

There is no evidence to suggest that the complex identities of Vietnamese adoptees are either fixed to the "Vietnameseness" of their pre-adoption past or completely determined by the "whiteness" involved in their post-adoption upbringing. Their experiences offer readers a glimpse of how we might all be comfortable in any number of cultural identities if given regular approval and acceptance. The white/Vietnamese dynamic outlined here exists only because white parents (whose own cultural diversity and complex identities remain unexplored here but are equally important) adopted the majority of these orphans. The trend of white parents adopting from overseas common to most other trans-national adoptions today is always open to change—and so are the constructions of identity in the adoptees. As Luke puts it, "Had I been adopted into a Black family, I would associate with the Black community . . . being adopted into a Caucasian family I associated with other Caucasians."

In summary, the ability of adopted Vietnamese to transform their racial and cultural identifications so dramatically from childhood to adulthood shows how flexible categories of race and culture are at an individual level. But the adoptees' struggles to present their shifting and multiple identities to others highlight how vigilantly such loose categories are still tightly guarded in society. I propose that the experiences and activities of adopted Vietnamese offer a valuable source of inspiration and support for new work by scholars, writers, artists, and activists who question and revise the numerous ways we socially construct all cultural identities and define the boundaries between them. Without such endeavors, we might only have fairy tales.

NOTES

1. A. Lam, "Vietnamese Diaspora" (2003. Downloaded from: http://www.danchu.net/ArticlesChinhLuan/Collection2004/LamAndrew401.htm. 1 June, 2004).

2. B. Yngvesson and M. Mahoney, "As One Should, Ought and Wants to Be: Belonging and Authenticity in Identity Narratives," Theory, Culture and Society, 17 (2000), 101.

3. L. Thieman, This Must Be My Brother (Fort Collins, CO: Priority Press, 2000). S. Peck-Barnes, The War Cradle: Vietnam's Children of War, Operation Babylift—The Untold Story (Colorado: JM Printing Co., 2000).

4. I. Williams, "Not Quite/Just The Same/Different: The Construction of Identity in Vietnamese War Orphans Adopted By White Parents." Unpublished Thesis. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Technology, Sydney (2003).

5. I. Harvey, Australian Parents for Vietnamese Children: A Social & Psychological Study of Inter-Country Adoption. MA Thesis Published by the New South Wales Department of Youth and Community Services, Australia (Sydney, 1980), 345. See also M. Thomas, Dreams In The Shadows: Vietnamese Australian Lives in Transition (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1999).

6. D. Eng, "Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas," Social Text, 21 (2003), 9.

7. A. Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976), ix.

8. See C. Mackerras, R. Cribb, and A. Healy, Contemporary Vietnam: Perspectives from Australia (Wollongong: University of Wollongong Press, 1988), 1.

9. R. Griffith, "The Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies," American Education (2000. Downloaded from: http://www.american.edu/bgriff/rghome/TheCulturalTurn.htm. 18 July, 2003. p. 2.).

10. L. Noone, Global Mom: Notes from a Pioneer Adoptive Family (Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 2003), 9.

11. B. Parry, "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse," in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin, eds. (London: Routledge, 1995), 36-44.