Amerasians’ Families and Hopes of Homecoming

This chapter examines Amerasians, those who could have been but were not adopted by American families in the 1970s. National concern about this population revived ideas about responsibility to the unwanted children of Vietnam and enabled the passage of legislation that facilitated their migration. Amerasians imagined rediscovering their fathers, winning social acceptance, and escaping poverty, but charges of fraud and misrepresentation, the complexity and rarity of father-child reunions, and the difficulties of adjustment in a national where one was presumed an American rather than guided to become one, compromised their sense of citizenship.