Just As I Thought (15 page)

I must say that I don’t believe women could have invented the insane idea of transporting these children. I have not met one woman who isn’t passionate on the subject—against or in favor—which is quite different from the cynicism and manic energy required for its invention and enaction. Many women truly believed that the American care and ownership of these babies would be the only way their lives would be saved. But most women were wild at the thought of the pain to those other mothers, the grief of the lost children. They felt it was a blow to
all
women, and to their natural political rights. It was a shock to see that world still functioning madly, the world in which the father, the husband, the man-owned state can make legal inventions and take the mother’s child.

The Vietnamese have protested again and again, calmly at first, in the way they have of trying to explain to innocent or ignorant people their methods of caring for children, their view of family life, the extended family, the natural responsibility of community. Then in anger, Dan Ba Thi, Provisional Revolutionary Government ambassador to the peace talks, said: “This is an outrageous attack on our sovereignty; the 1954 Geneva Convention forbids this kind of kidnapping. We demand the return of our Vietnamese children.” And on May 19, 1975, Pham Van Ba, PRG ambassador in Paris, wired the U.S. District Court in California: “We demand that U.S. government return to South Vietnam children illegally removed by Americans. We will assist placement of these children in their family or foster homes.”

These children are, after all, the “young shoots” of Vietnam. Surely all the parents and grandparents, the “aunties” who have suffered and fought for thirty years in horror and continuous loss of dear family, under French oppression and the napalm and bombs of the United States, who have seen the murder of their living earth—surely they will demand to be reunited in years of peace with the hopeful children. They must believe passionately that those small survivors are not to be deprived of the fruits of so many years of revolutionary and patriotic struggle.

A
Ms.
reader’s response:

I am appalled by the misinformation and lopsided reporting in “Other People’s Children” by Grace Paley (September 1975).

I worked on the staff of the agency with the longest and largest ongoing adoption program in South Vietnam, and observed firsthand the orphanages and halfway houses of Saigon. As the mother of four Vietnamese children, I feel that Grace Paley has failed to perceive the essence and philosophy of intercountry adoptions …

The vast majority of Vietnamese orphans who have been adopted are illegitimate and totally abandoned—with no relatives waiting to retrieve them at war’s end. The death rate for abandoned infants and young children was often as high as 80 percent. Of those who stayed in the orphanages and survived, many were badly undernourished and neglected.

Starvation and emotional deprivation tend to foster weak bodies and dull minds. Were these children to be the hope of the future of Vietnam—its political and social leaders, its professors?

Paley quickly dismisses the racially mixed and handicapped children. Somehow her “iron-hearted god of irony” points out that these children would be better off left in an orphanage. Would she leave in an orphanage an abandoned, undernourished, Vietnamese/black infant who had nerve damage in his arms and hands from lead poisoning, as well as severe permanent damage to the retinas of his eyes? If he survived, perhaps he could look forward to being a blind street boy in Saigon. He is my son.

Would she leave an abandoned, six-pound, three-month-old Montagnard girl who had severe diarrhea, dehydration, badly infected ears, scabies, pneumonia, and cytomegalo (a virus which often causes debilitating birth defects or mental retardation)? She, who had been marked by death, is my daughter.

Would she leave an abandoned, sick Vietnamese/Cambodian asthmatic boy? He is my son.

Would she leave a nine-year-old boy whose entire family was killed by American bombs? Perhaps he could have stayed a bit longer and been drafted into the military. Then he could have fought in the war (which one of us ever knew when the war would end?) and, if not killed, he could have added more scars to the ones that already cover his young body. He is my son.

These four children are unique and very special human beings—as are all children. Their stories, however, are not. The children could have come from Timbuktu. Does the name of the country matter when a child is starving, dying, or lonely? She or he is a member of the human family.

Finally, Paley states that she does not believe “women could have invented the insane idea of transporting these children,” and that most women “felt it was a blow to
all
women, and to their natural political rights.” The fact is that the decision to care for the orphans, nurse them, feed them, bury them, love them, process adoption papers for eight years, and, in the end, send them on the airlift, was made, on the whole, by women.

Most of these women were not attempting to save the children from Communism, offer them Christianity, salve their guilt about the war, steal babies from their mothers’ arms, or deprive a country of its future generations. Their reverence for a single human life crossed national, cultural, racial, social, religious, political, and economic boundaries. These women gave the children a chance at life—the promise of a mother and father instead of no one; the warmth of a bed instead of hard wooden slats; the satisfaction of a full stomach instead of a swollen, empty belly; the advantage of essential medical care instead of the threat of death from the measles, chicken pox, starvation; the security of knowing one is loved and wanted instead of rejected and lonely, and on and on.

Many of these women risked and lost their lives in order to give life. My children and I are in their debt.

Suzanne Dosh

Lakewood, Colorado

Grace Paley replies:

I do admire Suzanne Dosh’s extraordinary generosity—the lifelong reality of it—not a gift of money alone but years of responsibility and affection.

However, I made three points—none of which are really discussed or argued by Ms. Dosh:

1. The Orphan Airlift was a cynical political game played by the government in the hope that drama and sentiment would persuade Americans to give military aid to Saigon and continue the war.

2. Many children in that airlift were not orphans, but no official procedure was followed—for example, photographing for the future of inquiry or for identification. There are, right now in
this
country, four or five Vietnamese women trying to get their children back.

3. There are other solutions to the problem of homeless children after war. Jewish children in the Netherlands after World War II were returned to their families, and more recently, 27,000 Nigerian children (many orphans) remained Nigerian.

—1975

I have been harsh on the bomber pilots, and so might anyone who had traveled a couple of hundred miles across their insolent work: the hospitals, schools, villages, streams they made their own by destroying. I am not Vietnamese; I do not have to let go of these recollections in order to live in this world.

But I am, and was in ’69, sadder than I seemed to be in my reports, about the pilots’ long, long incarceration, their uncomfortable or tortured entrance into the world of human suffering.

I still believe the “orphan” airlifts were an outrageous political ploy. But I did not consider the fact of Vietnamese racism in the case of mixed-race children. There may be another word for it relating to family village centeredness, but there is no good word.

I still admire Mrs. Dosh, who responded to my article in
Ms.,
though we might find even wider differences today. Certainly life in the middle-class homes of our defeated United States has been easier than life in unrepaired, impoverished, victorious Vietnam. Decades of American embargo have seen to that. Still, at a poetry reading organized by the Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, I heard American vets and Vietnamese vets read stories and poems. Among them, a wonderful American poet, a young Vietnamese American, Christian Langworthy. I told him how fine his work was, then felt obliged to truthfully tell him how angry I’d been when he and others first came to the United States, as children, part of one of America’s war games; how glad I was that he was here with another language tune in his head to give our English the jolts it has learned over the centuries to use so well.

III / More

In “Demystified Zone,” I sent Faith to Puerto Rico as a representative of her PTA, which had a number of Puerto Rican members. Faith had worked for me in many of the short stories in at least three books, and I thought she’d do well with journalistic responsibility. Although, as usual, her son Richard kept interrupting.

I probably ought to say more about “Some History on Karen Silkwood Drive.” This short report appeared in the late seventies—1977, I think. The Clamshell Alliance had organized opposition to the building of two Seabrook nuclear plants. The ’77 demonstration and civil disobedience involved at least 1,400 people, who occupied the Seabrook parking lot and were finally arrested after a rather pebbly night on the hard ground. We considered nuclear power a war against the future, and it has proven to be so. We considered it economically foolish, and it has become more so. The life of the nuclear plant is short, about forty years; the radiation waste will remain toxic for thousands of years. When we would ask, Well, what are you going to do with this stuff? the feeble answer usually given, with averted eyes, by the plant authorities was “Well, we’ll surely find a solution in thirty-forty years.” Native Americans tell us we are responsible for human life to the seventh generation.

We were successful in this way: only one of the two projected plants was built. About fifty planned for the rest of the country were never built. There were many groups with names like Clamshell, and their nationwide success was due to intense local organizing, the will to be civilly disobedient, and some pretty wise legal maneuvering.

“Cop Tales” is a small accumulation of experiences with the police.

In 1979 we organized the Women and Life on Earth Conference. This was the first of a particular series of transforming Northeastern feminist meetings, gatherings, demonstrations. About eight hundred women came to the University of Massachusetts to talk about ecology, education, patriarchy. Many of us heard, for the first time, the term “ecofeminism.”

Within the next year and a half, groups of many of the same women met again in Hartford, New York, and Vermont, to think about the connections of ecology and patriarchy to militarism and racism, to see that our understanding of the connections among those social oppressions was indeed a feminist analysis. What came next, what naturally followed all that talking and talking, was action, finally: the Women’s Pentagon Action in 1981. Surrounding the Pentagon was not the newest idea in the world. In 1967 antiwar protesters had planned to levitate the Pentagon. We women turned our imaginations in an earthier direction and created a two-thousand-woman theater of sorrow, rage, and defiance, surrounding the building, barring its entrances. There were tombstones for sorrow and huge furious puppets to accompany anger. We had decided against speeches and speechmakers of any kind, and there were none. There were many arrests.

Of course in order to bring all these women together there had to have been many meetings in New York and New England. A position or unity statement had to be written. The women who gathered to write it came from many different organizations, some in stern opposition to one another. But luckily we had never asked for support from organizations, only from women.

I would write that statement. It was an honor for me, and of course the women were also relieved that someone would do the job. Still, it took weeks, because with the honor came the obligation to read and reread it at meetings—by phone to people who could not get to meetings. New ideas were introduced, and lots of questions. It seems odd now, but although we spoke emphatically about misogyny, it was late, almost before printing time, when someone said, What about sexual preference—homophobia? And this in an organization that was at least 50 percent lesbian. The document we produced was not a consensual one, which is usually compromised by that perfectly honorable mediating process. It was exactly, at some length, what everybody believed and hoped. Me too. I’ve included it, since the writing was my responsibility.

As American missile bases were established in Europe and the United States, Women’s Peace Camps were organized. The most famous, I guess, in England—at Greenham. There were others in Italy, in Germany. In the United States, Seneca was not the only one. But it’s the one I’ve written about. It seems to me the most interesting, the most poignant, because it was the place in 1590 where the Iroquois women also begged the tribes “to cease their warfare” and our own great early suffragettes held the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848. An added note—why? for information and praise. The Women’s Rights Convention was preceded by the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York City in 1837. They met, they said, “in fear and trembling.”

“Pressing the Limits of Action” is an interview I had with Meredith Smith and Karen Kahn that was published in the
Resist Newsletter.
I was one of the early members of Resist, which in its logo is usually followed by the words “Illegitimate Authority.” Resist is alive and extremely well after thirty years of supporting grass-roots organizations for social change in cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the country. I am among the older members, and people like to ask me questions about movement history and my own experiences in the anti-war and feminist movements in the hope that I will be useful. On occasion I am.