Despite their heritage, searchers are not at home in Vietnam
By Ashley Rowland, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Sunday, November 25, 2007
LANG SON PROVINCE, Vietnam Ñ They have the same slight build, skin tone and black hair as the Vietnamese, and even speak the same language.
But to the villagers in this dusty hamlet, accessible by a rutted red dirt road, two U.S. military translators are an oddity Ñ Vietnamese, yet not.
ÒTo these people, you look Vietnamese, so youÕll always have Vietnam in your heart. If youÕre not white, youÕre not really American,Ó said Sgt. Lihn Bui, an American-born translator with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, the military organization that searches for missing troops.
Still, they know sheÕs different from them. ÒThey can just tell me by my demeanor and spot me out,Ó she said.
Bui, along with Sgt. Tuan Pham, is responsible for translating for the 17 Americans and 90 Vietnamese who work at a JPAC excavation deep in rural Lang Son province Ñ no easy job at a site that includes two digging and sifting stations spread over a hilly area that can take 30 minutes to cover by foot.
ÒItÕs tough,Ó said Pham, who left Vietnam for California with his mother and brothers when he was 11. His father, a former South Vietnamese soldier, escaped to a Thai refugee camp when his son was 2 years old. Until they reunited in California, Pham knew his father only from pictures.
The translators have much in common: Both of their families left Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, after the war in hopes of starting better lives in California. Both grew up speaking Vietnamese at home and English in school. And both say working with JPAC in Vietnam has given them a chance to see the country their families emigrated from Ñ something neither planned to do on their own.
Pham, now 30 and on his third JPAC mission to Vietnam, said coming back to Vietnam has given him a chance to learn about the countryÕs culture. For instance, he asked some of the village women working at the dig site why they wore business-card sized pieces of black fabric on their shirts. They told him it was part of a 100-day period of mourning for a dead relative.
He doesnÕt think about the war or the fact that heÕs in North Vietnam, home to the communist forces his father fought during the war.
ÒI came here just to do a mission,Ó he said. ÒI donÕt judge nobody. I donÕt judge the people. I donÕt judge the government.Ó
Pham said his father is happy his son has returned to Vietnam with the U.S. military.
ÒHe worked with American soldiers before. He said we did a good job for the American people,Ó Pham said.
Pham and Bui speak a southern Vietnamese dialect Ñ different in accent, and some words are different from the dialect of the north. Neither knows the local language, which they say the villagers switch to when they donÕt want the translators to know what theyÕre saying.
The Vietnamese workers sometimes talk about how big the Americans are. But theyÕre polite and not resentful that the translators live in America.
ÒTheyÕre just really curious about a Vietnamese that lives in the States and then comes back over here. They just want to know anything and everything about you,Ó said Bui, whose parents moved to the United States in 1975, several years before she was born.
They ask if sheÕs married and if she has children. In a country where women may have two children by the time theyÕre 21, they are perplexed that sheÕs 28, single and childless.
They also chide her for not knowing as much of the language as they think she should, and her parents for not teaching her more. Even though she spent several hours a week learning to read and write Vietnamese in Sunday school, she forgot some of the language when she went to college.
ÒThese Vietnamese people, theyÕre like, ÔYour mom and dad didnÕt teach you Vietnamese well,Õ and itÕs not that,Ó Bui said. ÒItÕs only the American culture. You get so caught up in the American culture that you kind of forget about your own.Ó
Pham said the villagers who are being paid to work for JPAC as guards, bucket and wheelbarrow carriers, and sifters have welcomed the U.S. team.
ÒEverybody is happy that the Americans are here. TheyÕve got jobs to do,Ó Pham said.
© 2007 Stars and Stripes