Connect the Dots
Rochelle Riley makes some excellent points in this piece. She describes her nail tech, a Vietnamese immigrant, who is grateful for the opportunity to be able to work long hours so that he can make a decent life for himself and his family in the United States. He wonders why so many who were born here don't take advantage of achieving all they can. These opportunities are nonexistent in the worker's paradise of Modern Vietnam. So he and his mother left . . . without permission.He told me how, in 1987, his mother smuggled him and two of his brothers onto a boat so he could find a better life in a country she'd never seen. He was 14.But then she blows it.
She would not know for six months that he was alive, would not see for 16 years what he looked like. But a mother's love will lead her, by any means necessary, to save her children from rampant poverty, potential violence and relentless despair.
He said his mother could have been put to death for helping her boys escape.
Ten years after relations were normalized between the two countries, the United States is Vietnam's largest trading partner, and more than 1 million foreigners now visit the country each year. Vietnam's changing status could almost make some forget that from 1964-75, more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers and more than 1 million Vietnamese died in a messy, misguided war there.First of all, Ms. Riley should be reminded that all wars are messy. That doesn't make them wrong. Read about WWII some time, or the American Civil War or the American War of Independence. Messy, ugly affairs, all of them. As for being misguided, if we had stayed on and won the war instead of pulling the now popular amongst Democrats, cut and run strategy, her nail tech may have had opportunities for success in Vietnam. I won't even mention the bloodbath that followed after the north won. (Oops, I just did.)
Labels: immigrants, Rochelle Riley, Vietnam, War
posted by Harry @ 3:09 PM
CHALLAH AKBAR
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home