I Might Be Hawai?ian

May 20, 2011 by Sea Beez

When I landed in Honolulu, Hawai’i to attend the Asian Adult Adoptee Gathering & Film Festival in October 2008, my first thought was that I wanted to see the beach. I like to think that when I was born a tropical hormone was injected into my blood stream, making me pine for salty water and cracked coconuts. When the #19 bus to the hotel district arrived, I heaved my two full backpacks onto my back and walked into the air conditioned cabin. Luckily, I got a window seat, so I could stare out at the scenery and take in everything I saw. As the bus wound through its elongated route, I marveled at the various people who boarded and exited the bus. I have a bad habit of staring, but hopefully I wasn’t too conspicuous when I watched the many faces of Hawai’i standing, or sitting, before me. Old and young, men and women, shuffled by and an odd feeling crept up behind my eyes making me suddenly wonder if I could very well be looking at one of my own blood relatives.

As mistaken as I could have been, it’s not a completely irrational suspicion. Being a mixed-race Vietnamese adoptee who was brought to America as an infant with very little identifying information has forced me to periodically reconsider my ethnic heritage.

In fact, it’s only recently that I’m acknowledging the real difficulty with accepting the presumptive and conclusive label of “Vietnamese/White” that appears on my Vietnamese passport. When I consider that Thai, Chinese, Filipino and Korean men, as well as Mien, Hmong and Montangard men, and even Native American and Latino American men, participated in combat operations and acted as support personnel during the Vietnam War, the “White” part of me starts to take a back seat. My naturally dark tan skin and curious indeterminate Asian facial features have started to point in many directions beyond the classic racial identifier, “White”.

Who knows. My mother could have been anything other than Vietnamese.

Sometimes I imagine my mother was a resident of Hawai’i who took a job as an administrative assistant at any one of the numerous American companies that contracted with the American military or the Republic of Vietnam. Possessing a sense of adventure or just being plain tired of the monotony of the same-ol’-same-ol’ on the island, she snatched up the opportunity to transfer to an office in Saigon for a year. In contrast to her White co-workers, my mother may have felt very comfortable in the humidity and hustle-and-bustle of brown people, living and dying as they had done for centuries. My mother could have very well dated a handsome Vietnamese man who had swept her off her feet with his natural cordiality and raucous laughter. It is just one of many possibilities.

Back at the conference, I participated on a mixed-race adoptee panel with four other people. Only after I returned home did it strike me that each of those people had been reunited with their first mothers, except for me. You might suspect that I felt twinges of envy over this fact, but I actually had quite the opposite reaction. When a couple of us met later on for lunch, I was fascinated with their tales about how their unique relationships with their first mothers developed and how these re-connections have been fostered (or not) over the years. The longer I listened to them tell me about the contradictory emotions and anticlimactic ambivalence that settled in between them and their mothers, the more I came to realize that I had resigned myself over the years to the near certainty that I would never come to know who my parents were. For me, it’s not a matter of giving up on some kind of hope of finding them, but rather a re-prioritization of goals in life that I want to achieve before time runs out on me.

The Vietnam War did strange things to people. In my case, it gave me life while possibly sentencing my parents to death. Its massive carnage and destruction also reduced any inclination in me to search for my parents or any hope of receiving credible information on them. At the same time, though, the war expanded the possibilities of my parents’ whereabouts and identities to near endless proportions.

So, I sat on that #19 bus, enjoying the wondrous sunshine, and made believe that a close relative of mine was staring right back at me.