It is estimated that one million ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers were killed during the war in Vietnam. An equal number of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars were killed as well. The civilian death toll is thought to be as high as 3.5 million. In addition, millions of acres-much of it precious agricultural land-were rendered unusable as the result of an aggressive defoliation campaign carried out by the United States through its RANCH HAND program. During the course of "technowar" waged against a peasant society, the United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam than it did on Europe during all of World War II. In staging the largest air war in history, the United States destroyed the hundreds of towns, villages, roads, and bridges that formed the infrastructure of Vietnamese society. The devastation was so complete that since 1975, more than one million Southeast Asians have been forced to leave their homeland.

The social chaos and desperately harsh living conditions caused by years of U.S. military adventurism in Southeast Asia precipitated the largest movement of refugees in recent history. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reported that by 1980, 245,025 Vietnamese, 52,887 Laotians (including Hmong), and 16,044 Cambodians had found their way to the United States. Within less than a decade the U.S. population of Vietnamese increased to 679,378; the number of Laotians reached 256,727, and Cambodians 210,724.

In a poignant reminiscence that appeared in The Nation late in 1990, Vietnamese American journalist Andrew Lam made mention of an uncle who complains, "When Americans say Vietnam, they don't mean Vietnam." His uncle was pointing out the fact that for most Americans, Vietnam eists only as a metaphor for an array of indefinable social ells and cultural malaise. Its complex history, intertwined as it has been with that of the United States, is lost in the miasma of current problems, both domestic and foreign. The concrete, historical Vietnam as the lost homeland of refugees now living in the United States does not register in the minds of most Americans. In the popular memory, vietnam is little more than the "damn little pissant country" (Lyndon Johnson) that brought the American colossus to its knees. Who can forget the media images of little yellow men and women in black "pajamas," wielding vintage World War II rifles, holding their physically imposing captured foes at gunpoint? But mostly, we prefer to suppress the memory of this nation's mos protracted and costly war. "Vietnam, in effect," wrote Lam, "has become a vault filled with tragic metaphors for every American to use,"

But popular memory, aided and abetted by the distortions of mass-mediated revisionist history in the form of television news and entertainment, cannot deny that U.S. involvement in Vietnam transformed a formerly prosperous and self-sufficient agricultural region into an impoverished country that is no longer capable of supporting its population without outside assistance. To punish Vietnam for having won the war against imperialism, the United States until recently blocked actions that would allow the devastated country to rebuild. Not only has the United States enforced a trade embargo on Vietnam since 1978, American leaders have had a hand in ensuring the humanitarian aid, food, medicine, and agricultural equipment no find its way into the country. The United States has also wielded its influence to prevent the World Bank and the International Development Fund from extending loans that would allow for the reconstruction of Vietnam. Pressure applied to U.S. allies has "kept their financial aid at a minimum and in some cases eliminated it altogether."

In an updating of the "model minority" thesis, refugees from Southeast Asia have been heralded as the latest immigrant success story. James M. Fallows, for example, lavishes praise upon the Asian American entrepreneurial family by charting the economic rese of a Vietnamese immigrant, Nguyen Dong (a pseudonym). After first working for minimum wage at an El Segundo, California, waterbed factory, within ten years Nguyen had improved the financial status of his large family to the point where they now own two homes, a furniture store, and a beauty salon located in chic Beverly Hills.

Such selectivity flattering portrayals of successful Southeast Asian refugee families belie the truth that half of the Vietnamese who live in California receive some form of public assistance. Further, unlike other Asian American groups, Vietnamese Americans have a high percentage (14.2 percent) of households headed by women, with only 74.1 percent of Vietnamese children living with both parents. And of course households headed by women (particularly those headed by nonwhite immigrant women with limited job training and communication skills) are more likely to be plagued by poverty.

Vietnamese American portrayals on network television have been slow in coming. Other than random appearances on various and sundry programs, only the Fox network's teen-oriented cop show 21 Jump Street (1987-90) and the sitcom Down Home (1990-91) regularly featured Vietnamese American characters. Among a group of four young undercover cops in 21 Jump Street was an Asian American named Harry Truman "H.T." Ioki (Dustin Nguyen). Interestingly, Ioki occupied a role substantially more than that of the traditional Asian American sidekick, the all-purpose helper to his white superiors. Even so, it was obvious that Officer Tom Hanson (Johnny Depp) was being positioned as the principal television teen idol. Johnny Depp's appeal for teenage American girls was such that he moved quickly into a movie career, starring John Water's Cry-Baby (1990) and Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990) in rapid succession.

A new cop named Dennis Booker (Richard Grieco) joined the young crime busters in the program's second season, and Grieco also became a teen idol in short time. Richard Grieco in turn moved into 21 Jump Street spin-off Booker (1989-90). H.T. Ioki eventually disappeared from the show, but not before revealing in one episode that he was not Japanese American but Vietnamese American! He had adopted the more acceptable Ioki identity to bury the painful memory of his past and begin life anew in the United States.

Vietnamese American actor Dustin Nguyen scored a coup of sorts in an ABC movie titled Earth Angel (1991). In this made-for-television fantasy, a ghost from the high school class of '62 returns from the dead to help mortal friends in matters of the heart. Peter Joy (Nguyen), a "geek" who works at a pet shop, wins the affection of the cute and popular Cindy Boyd (Rainbow Harvest). Cindy had been wooed by a macho jock named Mike (Brain Krause), but in the end asks Peter to attend the big prom with her. In a scene that violates the TV taboo against an Asian male having intimate physical contact with a white female, Peter Joy is shown kissing Cindy Boyd. As they dance cheek-to-cheek, Cindy's heavenly guardian Angela (Cathy Podewell) watches approvingly from the clouds above.

Perhaps because the movie is so obviously a fantasy, the interracial contact is deemed palatable. And because the nerdy Peter Joy is a "geek," he poses less of a sexual threat to white manhood, although his name hints otherwise. Indeed, it is a bashing that Peter receives at the hands of bully Mike that earns him the sympathy and loving affection of Cindy. In a television environment wherein only white males can choose freely among nonwhite females as sex partners, Earth Angel is noteworthy for its depiction of a romantic relationship between an Asian man and a Euro-Americna woman.

In Down Home , Tran Van Din (Gedde Watanabe) works as chief cook and bottle washer in a cafe on McCrorey's Landing, located on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Watanabe once more plays the dingy, madcap Asian, a role that he has virtually defined, beginning with the film Sixteen Candles (1984) and later in the sitcom Gung Ho (1986-87). Kate McCrorey (Judith Ivey) is a former big-city executives who has returned home to help out with the family business, and it is she who serves as ringmaster for a three-ring circus of wisecracking layabouts. Tran funcions as little more than a buffoon in this abysmally fatuous situation comedy. In one scene, Tran dresses in a grass skirt, cowboy boots, and a coconut-shell bra for a going-away party.

A separate episode has Tran protecting his visiting sister Trini (Kimiko Gelman) from the amorous intentions of Drew McCrorey (Eric Allen Kramer). Tran's overprotectiveness of his sister's virtue is generalized to include all men, who are assumed to be sexual predators. In an otherwise silly and uninspiring episode, Tran's latent prejudice against a white man dating his Asian sister supplies the serious subtext. It proves to be much ado about nothing, however. It is actually Drew whom Tram wants to protect, for the Vietnamese cook had mistakenly understood that his sister works in a "whorehouse" instead of a "warehouse."

In the episode described above, the specter of so-called reverse prejudices appears when it seems that Tran might be keeping his convent-educated sister Trini from Drew simply because he is white. This subtle twist of logic allows the majority fair-weather liberal viewer to indulge in the fantasy that minorities are equally guilty of racist attitudes and discriminatory behavior. But this exercise in liberal guilt relief has no basis in fact, given that immigrant Vietnamese fisherman, crabbers , and shrimpers working on the Gulf Coast of Texas have been met with vicious racial hostility. In certain instances, Vietnamese Americans have been subject to outright racial attacks. In 1979, for example, a well-known accident took place in Seadrift, Texas, that resulted in the shooting death of a white fisherman. In retaliation, three Vietnamese vessels were burned, a home firebombed, and the attempted bombing of a local packing plant forced most of its Vietnamese American employees to leave town. The Ku Klux Klan became involved after the Vietnamese crabbers accused of the shooting were acquitted of the charge.

In keeping with the inherent liberal pluralist ideology of most network TV programs, that the McCroreys would employ a Vietnamese immigrant at all implies that diverse group have been admitted and settled into American sociey with little problem. But as the many documented clashes between Vietnamese Americans and whites reveal, a consistent pattern of racial hostility shatters the liberal mythology of a program such as Down Home . In creating the inane Tran Van Din character and placing him in a Texa Gulf Coast setting, the producers and writers of Down Home exploit actually existing racial violence, revise its implications, and deflect it into innocuous comedy. Thus the historically complete and accurate Euro-American (often violent) responses to economic and competition with Vietnamese immigrants is occluded through harmless entertainment.