Hapa Singer Overcomes Discrimination
By Edith M. Lederer/AP

Growing up during the Vietnam War, Phuong Thao knew she was different. She was bigger than her classmates, and she had hair on her arms and white skin, all thanks to an American father she never had met.

She also could sing.

Years later, her deep-throated voice put her at the top of the country’s pop charts and has helped her conquer the discrimination that children of U.S. servicemen often face in Vietnam.

Phuong Thao, 32, and husband Ngoc Le, who also sings and composes many of their songs, have made two successful albums and have big plans for the future.

“We want to introduce Vietnamese music to Asia and then to the world,” she said during a break between shows at the Trong Dong nightclub. “It’s very difficult, but we dream—we try.”

Phuong Thao’s stage success is tempered by her private struggle to find out more about herself and her roots.

Raised by her grandparents in the Mekong Delta province of Sa Dec, now called Dong Thap, she never had enough to eat. Children on the street made fun of her because she was half-American.

She didn’t have a close relationship with her mother, and they never discussed her father.

“It was very delicate,” she explained. “I did not want to make her sad.”

In 1983, the U.S. government offered the children of American GIs—“Amerasians”—the opportunity to move to the United States. But Phuong Thao said she couldn’t bring her grandparents “who I love very much, so I decided not to go.’’

Years later, her mother applied to go under that program, but Phuong Thao again chose to stay, to pursue a singing career. Besides, she didn’t know if she could find her father in America.

In 1988, she moved to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to see if she could make it. She joined a group and a year later was on her way to stardom.

An American writer doing a story on Amerasians interviewed her in 1990 and asked whether she wanted help finding her father. She said yes.

“I wanted to know if he was alive or dead,” Phuong Thao said.

Her mother provided a name and the base near Sa Dec where her father had worked. Three years later, the writer reported success.

James Marvin Yoder, superintendent at a detention facility, lived in Farmville, Va. and since the war had married a woman who already had four children.

“He was at first surprised he had a daughter in Vietnam,” Phuong Thao said. “He did not know.”

But she said there was never any doubt they were related. Her mother said she looked like her father, and when he saw her picture, he agreed: “It’s my daughter.”

For three years, they wrote letters and chatted by phone. Finally, in November 1996, when she was 28, he came to Vietnam to visit.

“The first time I saw him, I cried like a child—like a child,” Phuong Thao said, her voice breaking with emotion. “The first time I touched my father—and he held me in his arms.”

She learned he was a military adviser at the base where her mother was a secretary. The U.S. military had a ban on dating Vietnamese women, believing many were communist Viet Cong. Yoder moved to another base, and they met again by chance on a Saigon street. A brief affair followed.

Yoder, now 61 and suffering from skin cancer, has invited her to meet the rest of his family. But she hasn’t been able to get approval from the U.S. and Vietnamese governments to visit with her husband and young daughter.

“If we went there as Amerasians, that would be easy. But I don’t want to go to the states on Amerasian status. I want to live here. So this is a problem,” she said. “My father is not in good health, so I worry.”