A Grace Paley Reader

Our national grief at the thought of Vietnamese children who would be homeless after the American war seemed somehow more bearable during the war, when all our know-how was being used in making orphans. There did exist a history of homeless children and their wars, which could have been helpful, but we paid little attention to it. It was indeed offered to the country during the “babylift” last April, in public newspaper statements by social workers, historians, educators, religious leaders, and doctors, and in political street demonstrations on both coasts.

According to Joseph Reid of the Child Welfare League of America, there were 50,000 homeless children after the Nigerian-Biafran war. The United States (and other countries) thought these children should be offered for adoption. The Nigerians and Biafrans would not permit it. With the help of the International Union for Child Welfare in Geneva, all but twenty-seven of the children were reunited with family or village communities within two years.

Here is another lesson from history: my friend Karen DiGia was a displaced child in Germany after the Second World War. That is, she was lost in one direction, and her parents, if alive, were lost in another direction, far from home. Here, the Red Cross helped. It took a year and a half before Karen DiGia’s living father was found and they were brought together. She was only one child among hundreds of thousands. Had she been adopted away into Italy or the United States or Japan in some well-meaning child-consumers project, her records filed and sealed, they would have never met; she would have become an orphan and he the father of a dead child.

Karen told me that the streets of German cities were full of pictures of children. “Have you seen this child, Anna Marie; she was wearing a blue smock; she wandered away from our camp…” Translated for Americans today, whose kind hearts and open purses intend to take Vietnamese children into the finality of adoption, there may well be pictures posted on the walls in Saigon or Danang: “Has anyone seen Phuoung, last seen in a blue smock; she let go of my hand for a minute…”

In Vietnam there is a saying: “If mother is lost, there is auntie; if father is lost, there is uncle.” The parentless child becomes the child of the large household, the village, old aunts who may not even be blood relatives but who share the natural responsibility of all adults for all the young. This has already happened in North Vietnam, where there is only one “home” for orphans. This is happening now in South Vietnam—grown-up refugees and children in the tens of thousands are returning to their villages in what the Provisional Revolutionary Government called the “Campaign for the Return to the Homelands.”

Well, how did the orphan airlift happen, then, considering these histories, these facts? I have to say it coldly. The war in Vietnam, which began in ignorance, self-congratulation, and the slaughter of innocents, ended in much the same way. The orphan airlift in April was a balloon of sentiment that raised some 2,600 Vietnamese children and floated them across 12,000 miles of sky. The groups most responsible for that sky of flying/dying babies were the following:

1. Adoption agencies, with contracts begun in professional decorum a year earlier. The agencies panicked when it appeared that the war would end and the subject matter of their contracts, Vietnamese children, would disappear, absorbed into the life of their own country. These agencies, determined to meet these contracts, lost their businesslike cool and allowed themselves to be helped by …

2. World Airways. Anxious to add love of children to its reputation as one of the world’s largest charter airlines, World Airways, in the person of Ed Daly, who owned 81 percent of its stock, leaped into the early-April headlines and news photographs as the first of the baby transporters (although the U.S. government stepped in immediately and halted future World Airways baby flights). World Airways stock rose from 4⅛ to 6½ in one week, Ed Daly held the babies in his arms, and the company applied to the Civil Aeronautics Board for a domestic license to fly coast-to-coast. The New York Times tells the story of a $300 million to $400 million fortune amassed during the war years, when, under a contract with the Defense Department, World Airways planes carried cargo while military planes often flew empty.

3. The adoption agencies were also helped by a cynical political decision by the Ford administration to use the children in order to dig military aid for Thieu out of Congress. The language by which the kindness of American families was mocked does exist: U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Graham Martin, according to The New York Times, told President Thieu’s Deputy Prime Minister Phan Quang Dan, “The collective shipment abroad of these orphans should help swing public opinion to the advantage of the Republic of Vietnam.”

People who argued in favor of the airlift described the squalid, impoverished, unhealthy conditions of the orphan asylums in wartime Saigon, the possibilities of prejudice against mixed-blood children and handicapped children, and the superior opportunities in the United States in the years to come.

Actually, lovers of children have had every opportunity to help all the children of South Vietnam (but without direct ownership)—the 30,000 in orphan homes, the million or so who have lost one or both parents. Legislated aid could have gone from our own Congress to be distributed through international organizations like Medical Aid for Vietnam, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, American Friends Service Committee, or the International Children’s Fund. Private contributions can also be given to these organizations and earmarked for Vietnam. As of this writing, however, despite the fact that the Paris peace accords obligate the United States to provide postwar assistance to the country we devastated, no aid has ever been considered. The destruction of that small country in the last ten years cost Americans, at the government’s lowest estimate, $150 billion. Lovers of children, we should be able to persuade Congress to offer one reconstructing billion for food, medicine, hospitals.

Still, it’s the iron-hearted god of irony who points out that children who might be subjected to racial prejudice were being sent to the United States, the center of that pathology; that handicapped, war-mutilated children had been taken from a country where it would be the responsibility of family and community to keep them functioning in the ordinary life of the world. They were brought into a society which specializes in institutions, dumping grounds for the handicapped and the old, whose own Vietnam veterans are hidden in the recesses of Veterans Administration hospitals, whose black or handicapped orphans are unadoptable (and there may be as many as 100,000 of these children).

That same iron-hearted god of irony (who usually works in literature) spoke even louder, for we have the moral deafness of self-congratulators. A C5A, a plane that had at other times suffered structural problems (and was actually grounded for these problems in 1971), was stuffed with weapons, howitzers, sent to Vietnam, where it deposited the howitzers intact at the airport, then had its bare compartments filled with Vietnamese babies and older children “orphans,” took off for the United States, and crashed in flames.

Years ago—1966 or 1967—people in the peace movement carried a poster of a well-dressed man holding a cigarette against the arm of a child. On the poster the question was asked: Would you burn a child? In the next poster, the man applied the burning cigarette, and the answer was given: When necessary. The third poster showed a child burned and crippled by American napalm. There may be a fourth now, that plane crashing, the children burning, the war ending.

Some are orphans, little persons who enter into a normal American procedure planned for the benefit of children, carrying true papers of orphans. American parents had been waiting for them a long time. Many of them are already being loved and cuddled behind the “adoption curtain,” as Betty Jean Lifton, writer and author of Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter, has called it. Their records are sealed, their past no longer exists.

When the first children were flown into San Francisco, they were kept briefly in the Presidio, an Army base just outside the city. Two young Vietnamese women and a third who spoke excellent Vietnamese visited the Presidio to talk to the children. These women were Jane Barton, an AFSC worker who had lived and worked in hospitals in South Vietnam for three years; Muoi McConnell, who was a nurse in Danang; and Trang Tuoung Nhu, a Vietnamese woman born in Hue, who is Indochina coordinator of the International Children’s Fund.

I talked with them and to Don Luce of Clergy and Laity Concerned and Doug Hostetter of the United Methodist office of the United Nations, both of whom had spent years with voluntary organizations in Vietnam and spoke Vietnamese and knew the city of Saigon. And I understood that the orphan asylums there were not necessarily full of orphans, but the streets often were.

Children were brought to these institutions during the war by parents who thought they would be safe. They were brought by women or men who were unable to care for their babies, and who believed that they would have a better chance at a couple of meals a day in such a place. According to Judith Coburn, a journalist reporting in The Village Voice, they were also brought by Saigon bar girls who wanted their mixed-blood kids kept out of the hard life. Or there were children who, at the age of two, were deposited in orphanages by government people, having been taken away from their mothers, who were political prisoners. Any of these parents must have signed papers—papers that were supposed to prove the children’s legal availability for adoption, papers that the poor in any country are often persuaded to sign in fear and despair for their kids. All these people might hope or expect to reclaim their kids at the end of the war.

Then there are the children who had not come from orphan asylums, who didn’t know how they had been gathered up, or from where, to arrive at what place?—a child who’d survived the C5A crash but lost his mother’s map and address; an eleven-year-old who later ran away from his foster parents in California, crying to go home to Vietnam; a boy who’d been in a refugee group from Danang and who had been separated from his mother; and the twenty-nine Cambodian children who arrived, mysteriously and without papers, on the East Coast of the United States. (The hard work of Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman [D-N.Y.] and her staff has kept those Cambodian children in foster care, safe from immediate adoption, while efforts are made to learn who they are and where they are from. The first thing learned was that twenty-one of the children had one living parent. The U.S. Immigration Service was forced by congressional pressure to send a letter to the foster parents advising them that the children’s identity was being investigated and that adoption would be delayed.)

A class-action suit has been brought in California by the Center for Constitutional Rights, asking that the adoption of all these children be held up, that they remain in foster care with their records open and their short lives unsealed while Vietnam reorders itself and time without war brings families forward to reclaim and renew their lives. At this writing, the case is in court. Witnesses are describing the confusion and exchange of children’s names, not from unkindness, just from carelessness and pressure where rigor was particularly required. One woman, who had received a six-year-old Vietnamese girl for adoption, testified that the child was not an orphan and that she wanted to return to Vietnam. In addition, there should have been immediate photographing of each baby and child, in its own clothes, with its special characteristics—birthmarks and war wounds—described and recorded. In late June, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to determine within three months whether or not the 22,000 children are orphans.

I must say that I don’t believe that women could have invented the insane idea of transporting these children. I have not met one woman who isn’t passionate on the subject—against or in favor—which is quite different from the cynicism and manic energy required for its invention and enaction. Many women truly believed that the American care and ownership of these babies would be the only way their lives would be saved. But most women were wild at the thought of the pain to those other mothers, the grief of the lost children. They felt it was a blow to all women, and to their natural political rights. It was a shock to see the world still functioning madly, the world in which the father, the husband, the man-owned state can make legal inventions and take the mother’s child.

The Vietnamese have protested again and again, calmly at first, in the way that they have of trying to explain to innocent or ignorant people their methods of caring for children, their view of family life, the extended family, the natural responsibility of community. Then in anger, Dan Ba Thi, Provisional Revolutionary Government ambassador to the peace talks, said: “This is an outrageous attack on our sovereignty; the 1954 Geneva Convention forbids this kind of kidnapping. We demand the return of our Vietnamese children.” And on May 19, 1975, Pham Van Ba, PRG ambassador in Paris, wired the U.S. District Court in California: “We demand that U.S. government return to South Vietnam children illegally removed by Americans. We will assist placement of these children in their families or foster homes.”

These children are, after all, the “young shoots” of Vietnam. Surely all the parents and grandparents, the “aunties” who have suffered and fought for thirty years in horror and continuous loss of dear family, under French oppression and the napalm and bombs of the United States, who have seen the murder of their living earth—surely they will demand to be reunited in years of peace with the hopeful children. They must believe passionately that those small survivors are not to be deprived of the fruits of so many years of revolutionary and patriotic struggle.

I am appalled by the misinformation and lopsided reporting in “Other People’s Children” by Grace Paley (September 1975).

I worked on the staff of the agency with the longest and largest ongoing adoption program in South Vietnam, and observed firsthand the orphanages and halfway houses of Saigon. As the mother of four Vietnamese children, I feel that Grace Paley has failed to perceive the essence and philosophy of intercountry adoptions …

The vast majority of Vietnamese orphans who have been adopted are illegitimate and totally abandoned—with no relatives waiting to retrieve them at war’s end. The death rate for abandoned infants and young children was often as high as 80 percent. Of those who stayed in the orphanages and survived, many were badly undernourished and neglected.

Starvation and emotional deprivation tend to foster weak bodies and dull minds. Were these children to be the hope of the future of Vietnam—its political and social leaders, its professors?

Paley quickly dismisses the racially mixed and handicapped children. Somehow her “iron-hearted god of irony” points out that these children would be better off left in an orphanage. Would she leave in an orphanage an abandoned, undernourished, Vietnamese/black infant who had nerve damage in his arms and his hands from lead poisoning, as well as severe permanent damage to the retinas of his eyes? If he survived, perhaps he could look forward to being a blind street boy in Saigon. He is my son.

Would she leave an abandoned, six-pound, three-month-old Montagnard girl who had severe diarrhea, dehydration, badly infected ears, scabies, pneumonia, and cytomegalo (a virus which often causes debilitating birth defects or mental retardation)? She, who had been marked by death, is my daughter.

Would she leave an abandoned, sick Vietnamese/Cambodian asthmatic boy? He is my son.

Would she leave a nine-year-old boy whose entire family was killed by American bombs? Perhaps he could have stayed a bit longer and been drafted into the military. Then he could have fought in the war (which one of us ever knew when the war would end?) and, if not killed, he could have added more scars to the ones that already cover his body. He is my son.

These four children are unique and very special human beings—as are all children. Their stories, however, are not. The children could have come from Timbuktu. Does the name of the country matter when the child is starving, dying, or lonely? She or he is a member of the human family.

Finally, Paley states that she does not believe “women could have invented the insane idea of transporting these children,” and that most women “felt it was a blow to all women, and to their natural political rights.” The fact is that the decision to care for the orphans, nurse them, feed them, bury them, love them, process adoption papers for eight years, and, in the end, send them on the airlift, was made, on the whole, by women.

Most of these women were not attempting to save the children from Communism, offer them Christianity, salve their guilt about the war, steal babies from their mothers’ arms, or deprive a country of its future generations. Their reverence for a single human life crossed national, cultural, racial, social, religious, political, and economic boundaries. These women gave the children a chance at life—the promise of a mother and father instead of no one; the warmth of a bed instead of hard wooden slats; the satisfaction of a full stomach instead of a swollen empty belly; the advantage of essential medical care instead of the threat of death from the measles, chicken pox, starvation; the security of knowing one is loved and wanted instead of rejected and lonely, and on and on.

Many of these women risked and lost their lives in order to give life. My children are in their debt.

Grace Paley replies:

I do admire Suzanne Dosh’s extraordinary generosity—the lifelong reality of it—not a gift of money alone but years of responsibility and affection.

However, I made three points—none of which are really discussed or argued by Ms. Dosh:

1. The Orphan Airlift was a cynical political game played by the government in the hope that drama and sentiment would persuade Americans to give military aid to Saigon and continue the war.

2. Many children in that airlift were not orphans, but no official procedure was followed—for example, photographing for the future of inquiry or for identification. There are, right now in this country, four or five Vietnamese women trying to get their children back.

3. There are other solutions to the problem of homeless children after war. Jewish children in the Netherlands after World War II were returned to their families, and more recently, 27,000 Nigerian children (many orphans) remained Nigerian.

(1975)

I have been harsh on the bomber pilots, and so might anyone who had traveled a couple of hundred miles across their insolent work: the hospitals, schools, villages, streams they made their own by destroying. I am not Vietnamese; I do not have to let go of these images in order to live in this world.

But I am, and was in ’69, sadder than I seemed to be in my reports, about the pilots’ long, long incarceration, their uncomfortable or tortured entrance into the world of human suffering.

I still believe the “orphan” airlifts were an outrageous political ploy. But I did not consider the fact of Vietnamese racism in the case of mixed-race children. There may be another word for it relating to family village centeredness, but there is no good word.

I still admire Ms. Dosh, who responded to my article in Ms., though we might find even wider differences today. Certainly life in the middle-class homes of our defeated United States has been easier than life in unrepaired, impoverished, victorious Vietnam. Decades of American embargo have seen to that. Still, at a poetry reading organized by the Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, I heard American vets and Vietnamese vets read stories and poems. Among them, a wonderful American poet, a young Vietnamese American, Christian Langworthy. I told him how fine his work was, then felt obliged to truthfully tell him how angry I’d been when he and others first came to the United States, as children, part of one of America’s war games; how glad I was he was here with another language tune in his head to give our English the jolts it has learned over the centuries to use so well.