The Children Left Behind

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it” (DeBonis 60-61).
Joe did attend school up until the fourth grade, at which time his family moved from Saigon to Long Thanh, he was denied the right to attend. He was told, “No, you can’t go, you don’t have any paper work plus you’re ‘My Lai’ you’re half-American” (DeBonis 61).
Before Joe and his mother immigrated to the United States he was made to feel like an outcast, Joe says “ ‘I considered Vietnamese as my family, as my people too, but they don’t think of me the same way…’” (DeBonis 56). Joe was like a “man without a country”; he was made to feel he did not belong while he lived in Vietnam.
Many of the Amerasian children in hopes of escaping persecution and finding their identities had dreams of coming to the United States, “ ‘ I will leave my homeland/ as I have lived in it, with nothing/ but a ticket to my fathers land/’” (qtd. in DeBonis). This poem mirrors the way many of the Amerasian children interviewed in DeBonis’s book felt. Outcasts in the Vietnamese society, ...

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my mother’s clients. She never told us their names. She just said that they were killed in the war…She told the same story to all our neighbors, but even as a child, I sensed that she was lying”(www.pbs.org).
In this story the writer may not of known his fathers name but, in all cases it was generally assumed just because the children were half-American that all of their mothers were prostitutes. “ ‘You know, they think that that’s the daughter or son of a prostitute, so it’s right for them to get hit’” (DeBonis 60). In many cases the parents had long-term relationships and sometimes had gotten married. Sometimes their families were simply abandoned when their fathers and husbands ...

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