Vietnam's American children

...officials have issued vague warnings about the "disorderly movements" of children that could result from a summary departure plan, one which could undermine public support for refugees...

...Thus, 10,000 children, a low estimate for their actual number in Vietnam, may realistically mean 24,000 total arrivals if family members are included, well above the arrival ceiling under the Shultz plan...

...N ORE COMPLICATED and contradictory matters lie behind these rates and totals...

...his "accomplice" (his word) was a priest of pristine lineage, a man who'd early joined the Resistance, and whose only error in life was to have angered Rome with theological views for which a later pope made him a cardinal: Henri de Lubac, S.J...

...They are your children...

...Faced with Vietnam's release offer, however, the U.S...

...and problems surrounding illegal aliens in general -- have created an exaggerated unease among lawmakers, one intensified by a penurious national mood...

...Since that time, four men have steered Peter's barque in Pads...

...First Secretary Nguyen said in early January that his country was "still getting reports in" on Amerasians, though he used the 10,000 to 15,000 range normally given for the children...

...As extraordinary as this assemblage was in the long, conflict-ridden history of church-state relations in France, it was already what one might be tempted to call old red hat...

...having been lobbied hard by private American groups -- the first Amerasians finally left Vietnam and arrived in the U.S...

...You have to tell them your story as they look you over...

...In the fall of 1984, Secretary of State George Shultz told Congress that the Reagan administration planned to establish an "Amerasian subprogram" within its ODP quota that would take as many as 5,000 Amerasians and their relatives annually over a three-year period...

...More recently, Nguyen expressed Vietnamese impatience with the processing Amerasians undergo from U.S...

...97-359, federal legislation which gave priority to Amerasian emigration bids...

...Seven years after the end of the war, in 1982 -- both Vietnam and the U.S...

...Then, there is the question of whether local authorities would take an interest in counting Amerasians even if they were directed to by Hanoi...

...97-359...

...The road to nowhere which the Amerasians have been on since the end of the Vietnam War threatened to come full circle...

...But unofficially, more selfish motives -- such as an interest in better relations with the West and an unwillingness to care any longer for the Amerasians -- "played a part in the departures...

...Next, the questioners ask for documents...

...The Vietnamese have long called for a well-oiled, bilateral departure arrangement with the U.S...

...United States and United Nations sources, and at least one former ODP interviewer who recently spent a year in Ho Chi Minh City, say otherwise...

...The U.S...

...In this enterprise no one else has played the role Lustiger has, but his leadership derives only in lesser part from his position as archbishop...

...Even if it is conceded that some false claims were filed, the move was excessive and inappropriate...

...Even if things were to return to their pre-January status, and even if diplomatic relations were to ensue between Vietnam and the U.S., it's 25 April 1986:241already too late to wipe away the record of half-hearted treatment Amerasians have suffered for so long...

...But they hadn't...

...At times, U.S...

...arrival total is scandalous...

...Vietnam charges, for example, that children with exit visas are not being taken by the U.S...

...This is why the most haunting question that surrounds the issue is not: "When will processing resume...

...You have to explain why you, a Vietnamese, deserve to go to the U.S., the land of your missing father, a father you have never seen or don't remember...

...Led by the U.S., which disputed the Vietnamese claim of an ODP "backlog," these countries, which include France, Australia, and Canada, have balked increasingly at taking 6migrts for various reasons...

...American officials, for example, complain these 6migrts have not met immigration priorities...

...The moratorium reflected Vietnamese unhappiness over the fact that people with exit visas -- non-Amerasians mostly -- laad yet to be taken by so-called receiving countries...

...These details never reached the television screens of America which beamed pictures of emotional reunions and the signing by President Reagan (at approximately the same time as the first arrivals) of P.L...

...According to State Department statistics, approximately 3,200 Amerasians and 4,500 family members have now reached the U.S...

...Some, he said, are "in the streets...

...Others have been the targets of State Department suspicion stemming from a reasonable concern that some people might be dishonestly describing themselves as caretakers of Amerasians in order to leave Vietnam...

...Meanwhile, the mothers of Amerasians have had it even harder...

...For all this, not much has changed...

...They came, in large measure, as the result of the interest of their fathers' efforts...

...Caught unaware, the U.S...

...My successor and his successor won't have to hide anymore...

...This cautioning has been used to blunt calls for allowing more Amerasian arrivals under a federal humanitarian parole provision...

...as immigrants...

...Vietnamese estimates may be unrealistic...

...officials as they pass through ODP...

...Ironically, these children have had the most difficulty adjusting once they leave...

...Consider how Congress grudgingly crafted P.L...

...officials gauge arrivals to the existing ODP ceiling...

...At this rate there will be dioceses without priests by the turn of the century...

...Understand why I tell you these things," he says earnestly, "they do not reflect on me but on the church...

...As time went by, the ODP choice received more emphasis...

...The admissions criteria of "looks, stories, and documentation" have been applied inconsistently, and the children themselves have been prey at times to the prejudices of American consular officers...

...Such naysaying has contributed to making Amerasian admissions a numbers game in which U.S...

...Preoccupied with reordering its society, Vietnam never raised the Amerasian issue during the immediate postwar period...

...There is also a question whether accurate counts of Amerasian children are available...

...She's nervous and intimidated, poor and uneducated, afraid of making an honest mistake that will jeopardize the quest to leave...

...Eventually, the Reagan administration picked the ODP, an emigration program available theoretically to anyone in Vietnam, including Amerasians...

...at last report, no further meetings were scheduled...

...Mothers may have been moved there under the Communists' plans for New Economic Zones, or may have sought refuge there, fearing that their obvious American bonds would make them targets for persecution...

...later withdrew its prohibition on caretakers at the urging of voluntary agencies, but a restriction on adult siblings reportedly still applies, and has splintered families...

...Committee for Refugees in Washington, D.C...

...Lustiger did not stand alone at the altar...

...The episcopate of Jean-Marie Lustiger -- its weaknesses and its strengths -- may be epitomized in these events and words, but to really understand them, to give the man his due as well as to prepare the ground for a critique, you have to take a brief look at the state of affairs that preceded his astonishing appearance in French public life, Few post-industrial nations have more dismal statistics where religion is concerned...

...At root, though, the children have tumbled into a social, political, and economic crack...

...By most accounts, they have not been subject to a formal policy of discrimination...

...In Vietnam, the necessary first step toward departure, i.e., obtaining an exit visa, is "haphazard, labyrinthine, and exasperatingly slow," according to the report by the Catholic Conference...

...In'the late fifties, nine of ten Catholic infants were baptized...

...All you have to do is see their faces and take them," he said...

...In the eyes of government and the media, he is probably regarded as the de facto spokesperson for Catholicism in France...

...so far, while an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 remain in Vietnam, subject to various forms of discrimination...

...It is always a matter of waiting...

...Reluctantly, the Vietnamese went along with the choice...

...The interminable church-state turmoil is over in France...

...Curiously, the Shultz announcement suggested that matters could be resolved by 1987, even though the acceptance rate of the plan seemed out of sync with numerical estimates of Amerasians...

...Figures pertaining to clergy are more depressing...

...not one of them, until now, has dared to conduct such a ceremony...

...It is arguable, for example, whether ODP should have been grasped at as a last resort for getting the children to their fathers' country...

...These days scarcely 10 percent of French Catholics attend Mass (versus 25 percent in 1965), and the figures are much lower among workers...

...Indeed, only slightly more than 3,000 Amerasians have arrived in the U.S...

...As one American has put it: "History is going to ask why we didn't take our children in all at once...

...But such eagerness is belied by Vietnam's restrictiveness in granting visas to ODP interviewers, a factor which in the opinion of some sources has hampered departures...

...History has not been kind to these children...

...Documents proving foster parentage are rare in Vietnam, whereas family presence is crucial for the children's adjustment to the U.S...

...The coincidence of these events strongly suggested that years of negligence had ended...

...the sudden Madel boatlift from Cuba...

...Stationed in Ho Chi Minh City, ODP interviewers screen people who have been cleared by Vietnam...

...Will you and your mother ever know whether you can leave Vietnam for the U.S...

...They told me to keep things low key," another former ODP interviewer said, recalling a briefing he gave to federal officials upon returning from a year in Vietnam...

...Then there is the strange logic one State Department source offered...

...Vietnam has repeatedly proposed sweeping and swift departures under which the Amerasians would go to the U.S...

...Furthermore, an unknown number of Amerasians are believed to be cut-off from ODP altogether because they lack the proper documents...

...De Gaulle, on re-entering his capital, had not seen fit to associate the cardinal in the joyous "Magnificat" sung in Notre-Dame...

...There were 41,000 priests in France in 1965...

...The answer to such a puzzle is a mix of factors...

...Today, the possibility for Amerasians to again leave Vietnam in substantial numbers is uncertain at best...

...or "When will I I , p ~ relations begin...

...Developments over the last decade -- the steady arrival of nearly a million Indochinese refugees...

...now fewer than two-thirds are...

...In other words, each Amerasian has arrived with 1.4 relatives...

...There is general agreement that it is easy to find Amerasians in places such as Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and Da Nang, but the countryside is another story...

...Vietnam and the U.S...

...Virtually all are shut off from any sense of what their absent parents are like...

...Because of their undisputed ties to our country," Shultz said, "these children and family members are of special interest . . . . "The subprogram became the Amerasians' avenue to the U.S...

...Asked how the Vietnamese explain this discrepancy, a diplomatic source said: "They're fuzzy on it...

...No serious-minded person simply blames this state of affairs on the tradition of "Catholic Action" or the present French episcopacy...

...They don't encounter outfight segregation," says Grace Sum, executive director of the Pearl Buck Foundation, long a leading Amerasian advocate...

...The Vietnamese government maintains that the children have access to education and employment, and may become citizens at age eighteen...

...Their very faces are a reminder of a former enemy...

...Even more important in the eyes of immigration law, they disembarked with citizenship papers as they approached U.S...

...The capacity of the Vietnamese for a census is in question...

...Asked why the Amerasians' circumstances aren't highlighted like some of the pre-conditions the U.S...

...but one that will remain long after the last Amerasian face has been scrutinized in Ho Chi Minh City...

...attend...

...is apparently happy to admit its sons and daughters very slowly...

...struggled to devise a plan to accept the children, but debate arose between the two governments on how the Amerasians should get to the U.S...

...sets for relations with Vietnam -- a reckoning on POW's and MIA's, and Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia -- he replied, "What good would it do to tie them to normalization...

...In fact, it has been said that the only reason that legislation passed in the first place is because it was designed to cost the federal government virtually nothing...

...until Vietnam haIted ODP processing this January...

...State Department eventually turned to the ODP program, which had begun in 1979...

...The force of Cardinal Lustiger I II STEVEN ENGLUND L AST SUMMER, the archbishop of Pads, Jean-Made Cardinal Lustiger, celebrated a Mass in the cathedral of Notre-Dame for the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of his see from the Nazis...

...Eventually the questions end, and the waiting begins again...

...Lacking the right appearances, and plagued by ignorance and often poor records, these mothers have occasionally run into considerable processing tangles...

...not only remain divided on Amerasians, but address the issue in ways freighted with politics rather than concern for the children's needs...

...Though Amerasians who had already cleared Vietnamese processing continued leaving in early 1986, by March their exodus had come to a near standstill...

...Children of blacks have had it the hardest...

...In a nation so uniquely oriented to the capital as the French are, the metropolitan of Pads unquestionably holds the most watched job in the French church...

...Officials probably won't admit it, but politics and economics have had a great deal to do with putting Amerasians who seek to leave Vietnam before those ODP examiners...

...in 1982 proved to be unique...

...97-359 turned out to be patently ineffective, and in retrospect the events of 1982 a cruel tease...

...Echoing others who question Vietnam's ability to locate the children, the one-time ODP interviewer explained that Vietnam may be "metering out" the Amerasians it knows of in order to sustain American interest in ODP...

...Vietnam values not only racial purity, but also fatherhood, neither of which the Amerasian presence suggests...

...Vietnamese and U.S...

...But they are very poor and having a rough time...

...Advocates say the low U.S...

...These are not refugees," Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach reportedly told American visitors in October...

...As of January 1, Vietnam blocked all new legal departure JOSEPH CERQUONE is a free-lance writer and a consultant to the U.S...

...decided it could accept the Amerasians via ODP because the program would classify them as "refugees," a legal category for which an admissions ceiling was already in existence...

...in which those features would be absent...

...Furthermore, simple arithmetic indicates that the scheme failed to include adequate numbers of relatives, people whose presence is regarded as crucial for the children's adjustment in the U.S...

...The U.S...

...So goes the "ODP interview," the screening process under the UN-administered Orderly Departure Program, through which significant numbers of American children, the war-time progeny of American fathers and Vietnamese mothers, can leave Vietnam legally...

...The system seems to be working reasonably well," a State Department source said just prior to the Viet(. / namese suspension...

...Such considerations, however, don't erase the fact that Vietnam, regardless of its self-professed humanitarianism toward the children, has quashed processing new Amerasian cases by virtue of its ODP moratorium...

...In 1963, 80 percent of Catholics were married in a church...

...The wartime archbishop of Pads, Suhard, had somewhat soiled the church's linen by his ambiguous relations with Vichy and Berlin...

...For despite their own suspension of the ODP program, the Vietnamese are seen as hoping it will remove people they regard as undesirables, and to preclude the embarrassment of boat refugees...

...Then suddenly, four years ago, Vietnam decided to let them leave, agreeing that the Amerasians would be better off in the U.S...

...It fell to an 6migr6 Jew who'd lost his mother at Auschwitz, who'd converted at fourteen, and who was foreign to the traditions of French Catholicism to have "recovered the honor of the church of France...

...now it's 61 percent and falling...

...American officials have constantly rejected such offers, saying the children don't fit into any immigrant category in federal law...

...But while governments did nothing, the Amerasians continued to live as outcasts in their native land...

...It placed full financial responsibility for resettled Amerasians squarely on the shoulders of sponsors...

...The shattered dreams that some Amerasians and their family members have suffered during ODP interviewing are of course less public...

...Social workers indicate that because of racial intolerance in Vietnamese society, black progeny identify more with the .U.S...

...attempts by halting its participation in ODP processing...

...Customs...

...The U.S., on the other hand, ignored it for different reasons, not the least of which was embarrassment over this aspect of Rs war-time legacy...

...The reverse has been true for Amerasians fathered by Caucasians...

...In 1984, only 111 men were ordained to the priesthood...

...Cases are then weighed by receiving countries to see if they qualify for entry...

...They stare from the pit of poverty that encircles most people in Vietnam...

...As a result, last year the State Department refused to consider the cases of non-blood relatives for a period of six months...

...officials met in Bangkok early last month and discussed the ODP program without resolving matters...

...The U.S...

...For years after the war, the existence of Amerasians in Vietnam was scarcely acknowledged by both the American and the Vietnamese governments...

...The new taw, overly restrictive and inappropriate, couldn't be applied to Amerasians in Vietnam because American-Vietnamese consular relations did not exist...

...And of course he is a principal candidate for the presidency of the Coramonweah 242...

...The shortfall may stem from Vietnam's objection to the refugee classification, processing procedures, and ceilings of the ODP program...

...I' don't have the exact number," Nguyen Dan Quang, Vietnam's First Secretary to the UN, said earlier this year, "but there are many...

...Vietnam isn't going to withdraw from Cambodia, so it's likely normalization won't be occurring soon...

...Officially, Hanoi agreed to the departures out of humanitarian concern for the Amerasians' welfare...

...The misfortune compounds as the older these sons and daughters become, the harder it is for them to adapt to the land of their fathers...

...But for some years now, there has been a feeling that a new approach and new blood are badly needed...

...The Eglise de France has rediscovered not only its right to exist but to speak out...

...T HAT ROAD was built ever so slowly...

...In a better world, this memorial service would have been unexceptional, but in the France of the Fourth or Fifth Republics, it was unheard of...

...Eighteen months earlier, on his elevation to the cardinalate, Lustiger had held an official reception in his residence which every important politician, from Mitterrand on down, chose to STEVEN ENGLUND teaches French history at the Universit~ de ParisVIII and is writing a book on French nationalism...

...The initial arrivals in the U.S...

...At a glance, what has happened since 1982 seems rather simple...

...The U.S...

...Catholic Conference Commonweal: 240notes in a recent report that these officials have not been consistent about advertising the chance for exiting under ODP...

...The congregation included many of the most important leaders of French state and society...

...Uncharacteristically punctilious on this occasion, Lustiger wrote out his sermon which included a set of excerpts drawn from Father de Lubac's clandestine wartime writings in Tdmoignage Chr~tien...

...They~ told me not to toy around with the issue or bring it up...

...PROPHET OF RENEWAL OR RETRENCHMENT...

...It is also used to mute discussion about speeding matters along...

...Social oddities, they encounter antagonism and mistrust...

...today there are 28,630, and one priest in three is over sixty-five years of age...

...N THE AMERICAN side, the gap between what has been said ! about Amerasians and what has been done is more easy to review...

...Their manner is pleasant, but they have asked for the impossible -- a birth certificate, proof that the Vietnamese woman sitting next to you is your mother...

...They mark moments in the emergence of the church from its ghetto in this country...

...They indicate Vietnam actually produced only about 4,000 Amerasians and relatives last year, or 1,000 fewer than could have been taken by the U.S...

...Even the 'appropriateness of parole for Amerasians is ,t~wnplayed: " . . . (it) may be used for refugees only when there are compelling circumstances . . . . " a State Department spokesman told voluntary agencies three months after Secretary Shultz revealed the formal plan to funnel Amerasians through ODP...

...In Doi Dung Sua Me, a popular play in Hanoi about a black Amerasian child abandoned in 25 April 1986:239South Vietnam, the child of mixed parents cries out hauntingly, "Who am I?" Such cries did not come from the first Amerasian arrivals in the U.S...