Mandarin Road - Inspirations

While researching the history of the Vietnam war for my book, Mandarin Road, I stumbled across many heartbreaking stories of the Amerasian children left behind when the Americans withdrew their troops from the country in 1973. These children were the result of relationships between US servicemen and Vietnamese women during the years of what the Vietnamese call the “American War”.

Shutterstock - representation of American troops in Vietnam

Often from birth or even before they were born, these children were discriminated against and rejected by Vietnamese communities for being “blood of the enemy”, for having the features or colouring of their American servicemen fathers. They were called “bui doi” (dust of life) – originally a Vietnamese term used for beggars, street dwellers and drifters.

I read about children who were abandoned by their mothers, thrown out of their homes, abused and injured by neighbours and families and forced to live on the streets of cities like Saigon, begging for whatever food they could get.

One particularly tragic story I read in a 2009 article published in the Smithsonian Magazine by David Lamb, of a boy called Minh, living on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, his legs crippled by polio, thrown out of home by his mother at the age of 10. He was kept alive by a friend who would bring him food in an alleyway where they cuddled up together to sleep.

Some of these children managed to emigrate to America, after the Amerasian Homecoming Act was passed in 1987 and today there are thriving communities of Amerasians across the States. In fact, Minh himself was eventually brought to the US by an American congressman, fostered by a loving family, but because of the trauma he’d suffered, like many of those children had a hard time settling down in his new home.

Many Amerasian children were taken to special “orphanages” in Saigon by their mothers, or simply dumped beside the road or in the rubbish. When I read this, I could only imagine the trauma of a young mother, forced by fear, poverty and desperation to abandon her helpless baby in this way. There must have been many though, who simply couldn’t bring themselves to do that, and would have done anything, including risking their own safety, to raise such a child themselves against all the odds.

Once I’d started to read about the plight of these children, I wanted to write about them. I knew very little about them before, despite having visited Vietnam on several occasions. So, in Mandarin Road, I introduce Mai, a 17-year-old girl living in a farming village just outside Hue in Southern Vietnam at the start of the Tet offensive in January 1968. Hue Citadel, a few fields away, is rocked by the explosions of the battle, and Mai’s village is occupied by Viet Cong guerillas who are using it a base for soldiers and ammunition. One day, when feeding the chickens, Mai discovers a wounded American Marine, hiding amongst the sheaves of straw.

Mandarin Road, against a backdrop of a river in Vietnam

Years later, on his deathbed, that Marine, Ed Grainger, reveals to his American daughter, Nicole, that he served in Vietnam and fathered a child there: a girl, Kim, he’s never had the courage to acknowledge. Nicole makes her father a promise to track her sister down. On her quest to find her half-sister, she discovers the shameful truth about Amerasian children and how they were abandoned and rejected by both communities.

Without giving spoilers, I should say that I wanted the book to end on a note of optimism and hope, to reflect the fact that so much has now been done by so many to redress the balance and to change the lives of Amerasians in America and in other countries across the world.

Mandarin Road is available now to download for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited and also in paperback. Grab your copy from the links on this page. I'd love to hear what you think.

Please visit my Amazon Author page or website www.annbennettauthor.com for more details about my books.