User:Dangosaurus/Amerasian

Mixed-race children, whatever the occupations of their parents, have suffered social stigma. With genetic relation to U.S. soldiers, Amerasians have faced additional exclusion by perceived association to military enemies of Asian countries. This stigma extended to the mothers of Amerasians, majority of whom were Asian, causing many of the Asian mothers to abandon their Amerasian children. The abandonment of both parents led to a large proportion of orphaned Amerasians.

Often, Amerasians of nonwhite racial makeup were excluded from American Amerasian policies because nonwhite Amerasians did not fit the physical descriptions that these policies called for.

Vietnam
In April 1975, Operation Babylift was initiated in South Vietnam to relocate Vietnamese children, many orphans and those of mixed American-Vietnamese parentage (mostly Vietnamese mother and American serviceman father), to the United States and finding American families who would take them in. The crash of the first flight of Operation Babylift led to the death of 138 people, 78 of which were children. Over three thousand Amerasians were evacuated from South Vietnam; however, more than twenty thousand Amerasians remained.

In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act in an attempt to grant Amerasian immigration to the U.S. However, the Amerasian Immigration Act was not applied to Vietnamese Amerasians, due to a lack of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnamese government. This was due to a clause in the Amerasian Immigration Act that required documentation of the fathers in the U.S. in order for the Vietnamese Amerasians to acquire a visa. In 1988, U.S. Congress passed the American Homecoming Act, aiming to grant citizenship to Vietnamese Amerasians born between 1962 and 1975, which led to 23,000 Amerasians and 67,000 of their relatives to immigrate to the U.S. For the Vietnamese Amerasians, this meant that their migration to the U.S. occurred as teenagers, leading to struggles in the resettlement process.

In popular culture[edit source]

 * The 1957 film Sayonara features a Japanese woman who falls in love with a white serviceman, and they talk about having mixed children together.
 * In the 1972 TV series M*A*S*H, episode 15 of season 8, "Yessir, That's Our Baby", Hawkeye and BJ attempt to send an AmerAsian baby to the United States, facing difficulty at every step of the way. With no other viable solution, they take the baby to a monastery in the dead of night to provide her with safety and care.
 * "Straight to Hell", a song by rock music group the Clash, considers the plight of Vietnam War Amerasians.
 * The 1977 movie Green Eyes starred Paul Winfield as a Vietnam War veteran who returns to Vietnam in search of the son he fathered with a Vietnamese woman.
 * The Chuck Norris film Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988) depicted Amerasian children trapped in Vietnam; Norris plays the father of an Amerasian child who believes that his Vietnamese wife died during the Fall of Saigon.
 * In the 1984 TV series Highway to Heaven, episode 11 of season 1, titled "Dust Child," the two lead characters Jonathan, played by Michael Landon, and Mark, played by Victor French, help an AmerAsian girl facing racial prejudice when she goes to live with her father's family in the United States.
 * In the 1988 TV series In the Heat of the Night, episode 9 of season 3, titled "My Name is Hank," an AmerAsian teenager named Hank believes that he was fathered by a deceased police officer once employed by the Sparta, Mississippi police department.
 * In the 1997 animated television sitcom King of the Hill, Hank discovers that he has an Amerasian brother living in Japan.
 * In the 1999 American Vietnamese language film Three Seasons, James Hager, played by Harvey Keitel, searches for his Vietnamese Amerasian daughter in hopes of "coming to peace with this place".
 * The 2001 novel The Unwanted by Kien Nguyen is a memoir about the author's experience growing up as an Amerasian in Vietnam until he emigrates to the United States at age eighteen.
 * Daughter from Đà Nẵng is a 2002 award-winning documentary film about an Amerasian woman who returns to visit her biological family in Đà Nẵng, Vietnam after 22 years of separation and living in the United States.
 * The musical Miss Saigon focuses on a young Vietnamese woman who falls in love with an American GI and later has his child after the Fall of Saigon.
 * The 2004 film The Beautiful Country is about an Amerasian boy (played by Damien Nguyen) who leaves his native Vietnam to find his father.
 * The 2010 documentary Left By The Ship which aired on PBS Independent Lens in May 2012, follows the lives of four modern Filipino Amerasians for two years, showing the struggle to overcome the stigma related to their birth.
 * In the 2017 book, The Rebirth of Hope: My Journey from Vietnam War Child to American Citizen, by Sau Le Hudecek, Texas Christian University Press. The author recalls the trials she endured growing up in post-war Vietnam as a daughter of an American GI.

Popular Culture
The 1957 film Sayonara features a Japanese woman who falls in love with a white serviceman, and they talk about having mixed children together.