Children of the Dust - 3. The Orphanage

The country known as Vietnam in the twenty-first century, was colonized by the French in the eighteen hundreds, occupied by the Japanese during World War Two, and partitioned―by agreement of the super powers―at the beginning of the Cold War. Each event engendered armed conflict, with suffering by the Vietnamese people the primary outcome. Millions of them died, were injured, lost family and homes, went hungry, and suffered at the hands of both their oppressors and their so called protectors.

When American GIs were sent to South Vietnam in the sixties, they followed in the tradition established by their French predecessors, and openly fraternized with the natives of the country. Women, young girls, and often young men, provided them with a sexual outlet. It was mostly consensual, often paid for, but occasionally forced. The leftovers of these actions were a multitude of children, straddling two worlds, but belonging to neither. Most of them never knew who fathered them; often they didn’t know who their mothers were either. They were frequently abandoned in hospitals or at the gates of orphanages; some were tossed into garbage cans.

In the midst of the misery brought by constant war, the Sisters of the Order of the Infant Jesus of Prague, attempted to offer hope to some of the children of the dust. That is how Vietnamese society dismissed the Amerasian boys and girls the sisters offered succor to at the Child of Saigon Orphanage.

No one knows how many of them were born—and ultimately left behind in Vietnam—during the time the United States stationed armed forces in the country. A large number of births of children resulting from liaisons with foreigners went unregistered. A lucky few were kept off the streets and in the classrooms, away from the violence of gangs, from peddling drugs, or from selling themselves. Those lucky ones were the ones who, somehow, found their way to an orphanage such as Child of Saigon.

I was one of the lucky ones. In nineteen sixty-three I was left at the door of the orphanage, swaddled in what I now know was a Tropical Combat Neckerchief. The note left pinned to the olive green piece of cotton fabric I was wrapped in, claimed my father was a US Marine. It said I was named Vincent Samuel Blake, Jr.