The Adopted Vietnamese Community: From Fairy Tales to the Diaspora

Summary

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Stories of forced migration and kinship separation commonly associated with numerous global diasporas have always been deeply entrenched in the history and culture of the Vietnamese people, from ancient legends to the stories of political refugees who left their homeland at the end of the Vietnam War. Willing discusses the mystical legend of a love affair between Lac Long Quan and Au Co in order to include the very real but largely unknown migration history and diasporic lives of the adopted Vietnamese community into an existing mythology about the origins of Vietnamese people.

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Extract

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The Adopted Vietnamese Community: From Fairy Tales to the Diaspora

INTRODUCTION

Stories of forced migration and kinship separation commonly associated with numerous global diasporas have always been deeply entrenched in the history and culture of the Vietnamese people, from ancient legends to the stories of political refugees who left their homeland at the end of the Vietnam War. For example, according to a mystical legend thought to be over four thousand years old, the people of Vietnam descend from a love affair between Lac Long Quan, a dragon king from the water, and Au Co, a fairy princess from the land. It is said that their brief union produced one hundred eggs-which hatched into the first Vietnamese children.

Despite their love, Lac Long Quan and Au Co were forced by circumstances to separate. The king returned to the water and the fairy returned to the land. Each took fifty of their children with them, and, even though they and their children longed to be reunited, they were destined to be estranged from one another. For many overseas Vietnamese or Viet Kieu, separated from their family and homeland following 1975, this legend continues to have a powerful symbolic resonance as they attempt to make sense of their historical losses and their struggles abroad.1

A lesser-known episode in this legend tells how a few of the fairy princess's eggs became tangled within the luxurious folds of her nest and were left behind. A European king and his queen discovered the infants that eventually hatched from these eggs. Without knowing to whom they belonged and thinking they were abandoned, the royal couple decided to take the infants back to their own soil and raise them, even though they looked different from the people in their land. As the years passed, although these children knew nothing about their birth culture, they often felt rejected because of how others in their ...

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