Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Atonement

Abstract

Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Atonement By Allison Varzally “We are well aware that children all over the world need love and care, but our focus is presently on Vietnam due to the horror which is being perpetuated in our name there,” wrote Don and Augusta Sandstrom in a 1967 letter inquiring about opportunities to adopt a Vietnamese child. Fearing that their incentives might be misconstrued, the couple hastened to add “please don’t be concerned that ‘guilt’ is our motivation, it isn’t that simple when you have a great deal of love to share; but when you see an evil war being waged, it is hard to turn your eyes away without helping at least one little soul caught up in it. Unfortunately, the suffering of Vietnamese children continues, perhaps the child with whom we will eventually share our home and love is not even born yet!” The Sandstroms were not alone in their desire to mitigate by caring for a Vietnamese child the destructiveness of a war whose purpose and prosecution they opposed. Having discovered the plight of orphans through the graphic accounts of humanitarian organizations and the media, Americans in the late 1960s and 1970s were determined to act on the youths’ behalf. In professing responsibility and proposing adoptive parenthood as the solution for needy children, they recommended the Americanfamilyasasiteofinclusionandreparation.However,asscholars have long observed, ideas about the appropriate forms of family reveal larger truths about national identity and purpose.1 In the Vietnam era, couples determined to aid Vietnamese children were also commenting on the state of U.S. foreign policy, race relations, and gender roles. In a revision of the rhetoric and reasoning that had governed American adoptions of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children following U.S. interventions in other regions of Asia during earlier stages of the Cold War, American adoptions of Vietnamese children expressed a loss of faith in the containment policy specifically and the United States’ ability to do good in the world generally. Adoptions of the period were more explicitly, heatedly debated as political acts and increasingly represented as an apology for rather than the fulfillment and endorsement of the United States’ expansionist, anti-communist practices. As an interdisciplinary group of scholars has documented, Americans of the late 1960s and early 1970s were hardly the first generation to Adoption & Culture 2 (2009) 160 act upon a sense of obligation for children displaced and damaged by war. Nor were they the first to conflate personal desires for the security, affection and contentment of parenthood with their views of international relations. In her analysis of an article penned by Norman Cousins for a 1949 issue of Saturday Review, Laura Briggs noted the expressions of regret and attempts at compensation made by some Americans in the wake of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cousins declared the United States responsible for the sufferings of the Japanese, especially Japanese children. Since restrictive immigration laws made larger gestures of support, including adoption, impossible, he proposed that Americans make financial donations. This sense of obligation echoed through the statements of concerned Americans excerpted in Cousins’s piece. While one woman offered a “small tax payment for my share in the guilt of belonging to a race which dropped the first atomic bomb,” a former WWII pilot wrote that helping Japanese children financially might “soothe an elusive feeling of collective guilt” (187–88). Even though some Americans made an explicit, causal connection between U.S. military actions and attention to Japanese injured by those actions, most did not specifically blame the United States for Japan’s misfortunes. Such critical pronouncements ran counter to the widely accepted, positive narrative which emerged after World War II in which the United States appeared as a heroic nation whose just strategies had brought the war to a quick end and ensured a lasting peace. Even after the U.S. media, social workers, and high profile celebrities such as Jane Russell had made Americans aware of and demanded help for mixed-race children fathered by American soldiers in the 1950s, this celebratory narrative and a more abstract sense of responsibility persisted.2 Historians such as Arissa Oh, Rachel Winslow...