Coming to America Part I
Us: I want to talk about getting adopted and coming to America… Susan: I was sitting in a corner, they had this lady, she’s uh, drove by and she ask me ‘What’s wrong with me’, and I say ‘I’m sick, I don’t feel good’. She said ‘Are you ok?’ and I said ‘No I’m not’ and she said ‘Well come with me’. And so I get in her car, and she said ‘Well you can come into my house and stay with me, if you wanna help and babysit my kids’. And so I came with her, she’s in a studio and she’s got two small children, one of them is half American and half Vietnamese, the other one is half Korean and half Vietnamese, ‘cause at that time the Korean troops were there in Vietnam also. One of her husbands got killed, the one American got killed, but they weren’t married they just lived together, and her other child was half Korean and half Vietnamese, I guess he was married when he was in Korea but he was a soldier. And so I stayed with her, they had an American gentleman named Ricky who is my brother now, he was a really good friend of hers. He always came to the house and things like that. I hadn’t spoke a word of English at that time, but he spoke Vietnamese. So he would come over and we would become very good friends, and then one day he told me, he say ‘You wanna come to the United States?’ and I say ‘Well I can’t marry you, you’re too old’, and he’s like ‘I don’t want to marry you, my mom and dad are old couple and I have a brother who live in the United States. He’s in college, and my mom wants daughter but she doesn’t want to go through diapers and bottles at night, if you wanna come to the United States I will take you there to meet my parents’. I thought he was just kidding me? Then one day I get a letter from my—from his parents, with picture and everything like that, and then he says ‘I’m gonna go back to the United States and I’ll be back in a couple months’, and I thought he’d never come back. So I never thought anything of that. He left for about 3, 4 months, and then he came back! That’s the first time I met them. He’s a retired Commander in the Navy, my mother was a pediatrician doctor, and they said they wanted to adopt me. They couldn’t get the paperwork done because I lived in so many places, and I mean I was an orphan during this time, and the Vietnamese government was very corrupted, they wanted money. I didn’t have the proper paperwork, like Birth Certificate and things like that, so they wanted money from my parents but my parents refused to pay them. They went back to the States and said ‘Don’t worry, I will come back for you, and I will take you home with me’. So it took them two years to get the paperwork done and everything, and I left Vietnam in 1974.
Us: How did you assimilate to the United States? Susan: I remember this funny story, I had never seen a washing machine before, never in my whole life and I still do it the old fashioned way by hand, and he said ‘Honey, you can put the dishes in the washing machine’, and I say OK and I look at him and he put everything in the dishwashing machine and he turned it on. I couldn’t figure out how it washed it! So I kept opening it up and up to see and he said ‘You can’t do that, if you do that it won’t wash them’, but how does it wash them? And he’s like ‘That’s how it works, and I said I wished it had like a window so I could see what’s going on in it cause I had never seen that. The first time I had American food, I had American food and my dad took me to Bob’s Big Boy, I had a burger and a milkshake! Us: How was school? Susan: I remember my high school had only like 200 kids, and I was the only Asian in that school.
Us: You were the only one? Susan: I was the only one.
Us: How was that, that must’ve been interesting? Susan: It was very difficult because a lot of them had never seen an Asian kid before, they called me gee, they called me nam, and there was this boy, Rodney, he was very nice to me, he was very polite, and I remember he was my first boyfriend!