How 1980s Children’s Books Framed Vietnamese Refugees

In the 1980s, American kids browsing bookshelves might have stumbled across titles like Vietnam: The Boat People Search for a Home or My Best Friend, Duc Tran. As Vietnamese refugees arrived in large numbers in the United States, publishers rushed to release a slew of books to help children understand and accept their new neighbors.

Written almost exclusively by non-Vietnamese authors, educational nonfiction texts and narrative storybooks were meant to introduce Vietnamese culture to US-born readers “and to encourage sympathy and tolerance” toward this group, as Jan Susina explains.

As the authors tried to address questions about how refugees can become Vietnamese Americans, the answers they offered “set the boundaries that define ‘the new Americans’ to the Vietnamese and to a wider American public,” writes Subarno Chattarji.

Guidebooks featuring glossy pictures were often published in series on various immigrant groups, like Chinese or Italian Americans. James Haskins’ The New Americans, which was published in 1980, informs young readers that Vietnamese newcomers “are Americans because they want to learn English and go to McDonald’s and get jobs so they can buy The Jacksons records and color TV.”

American identity becomes “rooted in consumerism and the English language,” Chattarji writes. Accumulating material goods is seen as proof of “successful adaptation to a new society,” and this new American lifestyle contrasts with depictions of poverty in Vietnam.

The children’s books, which largely attribute poverty in Vietnam to its communist government, also simplify history to play up communist aggression in the civil war—while omitting the extensive role that the United States military played in the conflict.

For example, a book titled Escape from Saigon describes an orphan’s journey from Vietnam to America as “leaving a land of war and heading to a land of promise and peace.” Why Vietnamese Immigrants Came to America, published in 2003, states that “North Vietnam wanted to take over South Vietnam,” while Vietnamese Americans, released the same year, elaborates that “people were then forced to accept communism.”

This emphasis “serves to minimize, if not erase, the fact of US military presence,” notes Chattarji, especially as the books are aimed at presenting Vietnamese Americans as “yet another successful fit within the larger ethnic mosaic of the United States.”

While the authors of these books convey that immigrants can be easily assimilated into American society, they acknowledge that cultural differences exist. But they often reduce Vietnamese culture to food and festivals, an act that could “create stereotypes which exoticize the Vietnamese.”

“[B]ecause they are written for children and young adults they help to nurture stereotypes,” Chattarji writes, which undercuts efforts to encourage cross-cultural tolerance.

Even as this genre addresses the hostility that Vietnamese refugees faced in their new American homes, many of the narratives—in which “characters realize that people are basically the same”—amount to “a sugar-coating of cultural differences,” Susina writes. He also identifies an alternative: “The other solution is that the Vietnamese-American family solves the problem by leaving the community to find the more congenial environment of an already existing stronghold of Vietnamese-Americans.”

One example appears in Maureen Wartski’s 1980 book A Long Way from Home shows the protagonist facing a school bully who taunts him with racist slurs and lines like “you talkee English?” Wartski’s protagonist runs away from his foster home to a town with a large Vietnamese American population—only to discover that economic competition among locally born and refugee laborers has led to “nearly open warfare” between the two groups.

As Susina concludes, “What is striking in all these books is the fading notion that the U.S. is a great melting pot into which recent immigrants are encouraged to blend.”

With such books appearing well into the 2000s, non-Vietnamese authors could “create a dominant field within which the ‘new Americans’ are placed and defined,” as Chattarji writes. Still, he notes that many Vietnamese Americans are now gaining mainstream literary success—an accomplishment that “recuperate[s] agency and voice” for the community.

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