SOUTH VIET NAM: The Girls Left Behind

In the days when the tricolor flew over Indo-China, there was a distinct advantage in being a metis—the offspring of a foreigner and a Vietnamese. France generously granted citizenship to any Vietnamese with even a drop of French blood. Slant-eyed Eurasians, born of French soldiers or colons, learned in school that “our ancestors were the Gallic people.” Eurasian men learned to drink cognac and vin rouge, the oftimes beautiful Eurasian women to wear Chanel perfume and Paris gowns. Vietnamese of mixed blood got the best jobs, were always considered a few steps above their fellow countrymen.

During the Indo-Chinese war, when the countryside was invaded by African troops and by a Foreign Legion containing more Germans than French, the garrison towns were filled with a polychromic and polyglot collection of youngsters born of every shade of father. The Eurasian population quadrupled, and a new word had to be coined: Africasians. Many girls with catholic tastes produced several children of mixed blood—each one a different color. Simply by bringing her baby for a cursory examination, a Vietnamese mother could get a “technical certificate of white race” that entitled the youngster to free care and education—even if its father had been a Senegalese.

Under terms of the Geneva agreement, departing French troops took thousands of Vietnamese wives and children with them. Mixed-blood Vietnamese who stayed behind suddenly found that the magic of being a metis had disappeared with the French. Instead of privileged citizens, they became foreigners who themselves had to be assimilated. Those who had held good jobs under the French administration found that the Vietnamese government would hire them—at a low salary—only if they forfeited their French citizenship. With the exodus of French firms, it became difficult for them to find any sort of work. Premier Diem signed a law requiring all Vietnamese with names like Jean. Henri or Marcel to take genuine Indo-Chinese names like Nguyen, Tran or Trinh. Forced to choose between two worlds, many fled in desperation to France, where the government has set up refugee camps and schools for them.

Last week a liner glided down the pistachio-colored Saigon River bound for France with more than 1,000 Eurasians on board. Among them: toothless Louis Loupy and his 14 Eurasian children, the biggest French family in Viet Nam. Many aged parents of adult metis went along with their children, mumbling prayers as they departed the land of their birth. Almost none of the passengers had ever been to Europe before; many of them spoke only Vietnamese.

A few days later a French DC-4 flew off to Paris with 87 abandoned Eurasian orphans who will join 3,000 orphans already being cared for by the French. In the filthy, overcrowded Centres d’Accueil in Saigon, 3,000 more Eurasians are waiting to leave. But most of the 100,000 Eurasians left in Viet Nam will have to stay behind and learn to adjust to their new status. No one hereafter can go to France unless he is legally recognized by a French father, and soldiers are notoriously forgetful.