Representation in Surviving Twice
In 2006, journalist Trin Yarborough wrote an extensive 273 page study on the difficulties faced by Amerasian children of the Viet Nam war who felt rejected by their mothers, fathers, and as a consequence motherland and fatherland.
As a curious white journalist, who felt "partially responsible" for her country's actions during the Vietnam War period, Yarborough explored the overall history and experiences of Amerasians through sorting through a multitude of documents, supplemented with the narration of the stories of 6 specific Amerasians residing in California whom the more empathetic and human portrayals of her work is based around.
This posting will focus around how Yarborough, a disconnected journalist, represents the lives of her six informants and the Vietnamese and Amerasian peoples in her writing.
In this elaborate history of the Vietnamese Amerasian, Yarborough trudges on some very sensitive subject matters including:the prostitution of Vietnamese women which led to Amerasian children being born
the prejudice and cruelty of the Vietnamese people toward Amerasians, specific Black Amerasians
fathers who left their children
mothers who abandoned their children
the desperation of Vietnamese people after the war
exploitation and manipulation of Amerasian children
and the failures of policy and politics (red tape) to assist Amerasians in both Viet Nam and the United States.
Yarborough provides an immense wealth of information in her historical reporting of events and retelling of her informants' stories which I will elaborate on in her later postings however, it is important to at least note that these subject matters are easily sensationalized and require a sensitivity (and an acknowledgment of the obvious power dynamics between Yarborough as a well educated white woman and the majority of illiterate Amerasians she interviews) which Yarborough from her journalistic perspective seem to sorely lack in certain passages of this book.
Writing on the reported romantic relationship of one of her informant's mother with an American serviceman, Yarborough injects her share of journalistic suspicion about the woman's love story.
"Perhaps Du exaggerates her great love story with Son's father, but perhaps not. Certainly there were true love stories to be told from war." (26)
Through her tone of doubt and discrediting of her informants' stories as likely untrue and romanticized, she as the authoritative writer is likely perpetuating the generalization that all or most mothers of Amerasians were bar girls or prostitutes unlikely to build genuine relationships with American men.
Later on, after many pages of writing about the heart-wrenching prejudice faced by many Amerasian street children (often black) with being teased, beaten, stolen from, and denied education, Yarborough makes a final call of how to measure suffering:
"Problems with school and with racial insults were not as serious as the unrelenting hunger and poverty of the postwar years, when nuns and children still at the orphanage often went without eating." (88)
As a woman who did not suffer through these prejudices, Yarborough cannot act as the authority about others' suffering.
Often Yarborough included real examples of suffering which border on the edge of sensationalization or exploitation of the Amerasian experience but created a good story.
"Many rural Amerasians had never developed a sense of calendar time, of geographic distances and space, or knowledge of other countries and continents, something that was not unique among immigrant groups in America." 154
"How you survive?"
"I was dog."
"What you mean, dog?"
"I go where people eating at restaurants, go "woof-woof-woof," roll over, do tricks like a dog, they throw me food." (158)
"Oh my God, he stabbed me! I'm going to die! Help me, help me!'" the uncle later told a local reporter. Within minutes the girl lay dead in a pool of blood. Her killer, nineteen-year-old Amerasian Kiem Do, was nowhere in sight... he was illiterate in Vietnamese as well as in English. In less than an hour a police detective found Do, confused and dazed, walking down a street in Little Saigon, repeatedly apologizing in broken English."I sorry I stab her. I love her. Her don't love me." (179)
Intriguingly on page 172, she listed a number of sensationalized headlines about Amerasians unable to assimilate to their new homes in the United States.
Although I believe Yarborough has done much more good than harm with her story, certainly quite powerfully written in certain areas and with amazing photographs, in other areas of the book, I question the choice of her journalistic style of writing that was used to portray Amerasians and Vietnamese as an other, quite different and distant from herself, who Yarborough nonetheless speaks for.
