Battles at home

Only the Beautiful, by Susan Meissner, begins in 1938 with Roseanne Maras, a caretaker’s daughter at a Sonoma Valley vineyard who sees colors upon hearing sounds. The condition distracts her at school, and her parents urge her to keep it a secret and eventually allow her to leave school early. Years later, she recalls “A dim memory of my father praying at my bedside when I was little…. He pleaded for a miraculous favor…. For the colors to leave his daughter. He was afraid for me. People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust, they cannot love.”

After her parents die in an accident, the owners of the vineyard become guardians, keeping the 16-year-old on as a maid, and the family’s son remembers their childhood and her descriptions of the colors. She becomes pregnant and though she denies seeing colors, the guardians send her to a state home, where she is stripped of all possessions, including an amaryllis bulb that was a gift from the sister of her child’s father. Helen works as a governess for a family in Vienna with a disabled child and regrets her failure to recognize the depths of Nazi evils at the start of World War II and the inability to rescue her charge from the Nazis. The child dies soon afterward, and Helen devotes herself to rescuing and delivering other disabled children to Switzerland.

In California, an escape attempt by Roseanne fails, and soon after delivery, her infant is sent to an orphanage to await adoption. Roseanne is then sterilized by doctors who worry about her condition being hereditary, and she must wait until age 19 for release to a group home. Upon leaving, she softly tells the nurse, “It’s not right what you’re doing here…. I know you’re probably going to say what do I know about what is best for people, but I had to say this before I left.”

She settles in at the group home and finds work at a hotel, where she meets a neurologist who identifies her condition as synesthesia.

The narration resumes with Helen who returns to Vienna at the close of World War II and learns that the father of her young disabled charged arranged for his daughter's mercy killing to avoid experimentation and institutionalization. The father, a Nazi officer himself, argues that “Power like that can’t be stopped,” but Helen disagrees. “Of course it can…. It was stopped when the rest of the world finally said, ‘No more. But we waited too long.”

Helen returns to California and starts asking questions about Roseanne, a child she once befriended, challenging her sister-in-law, the vineyard’s owner, later the doctor who sterilized young women. “But how do you know her life was miserable…. What gives you the right to judge whose life has value and whose doesn’t as if you were–“ The doctor finishes for her: “As if I were God?” He goes onto defend himself to a woman who observed Nazi atrocities first-hand: “I’ve heard that before from people like you who haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

The doctor refuses to divulge information about Roseanne, but his son who lived on the premises at the time and originally alerted security to the inmate's attempted escape, provides details about the placement.

Helen learns that she is the child’s biological aunt, confronting the doctor and others that, though single herself, she should have been given the chance to adopt the baby. Those involved with Roseanne's case justify their actions by suggesting that they had far more work than time. When leads result in dead ends, Helen does not give up and does find Amaryllis, Roseanne's child, later becoming an activist, speaking out at churches and civic clubs about mistreatment of the disabled including forced sterilization: “I realized I had a story to share about the disabled children of Austria, and at the end of my tale was the perfect entrée to telling people what was happening right here in California….”

A publisher invites Helen to write a book about her experience, which leads to finding Roseanne and reconnecting the small family.

The novel, like Helen's activism, demonstrates the parallels between the Nazi quest for their version of a perfect population with US medical goals of reducing disabilities through sterilization and poverty associated with young unwed mothers. The historical research is solid, and the characters' circumstances ring true. But Roseanne and Helen - sensible, practical, motivated, generally unflappable and cooperative when confronting horrific injustice and bad luck - are idealized protagonists, almost too good to be true. Such choices perhaps make the story more bearable for readers.

The novel's acknowledgement points out that more than 20,000 people were sterilized in California between 1909 and 1964, one third of all the sterilizations nationwide.

"Eugenic laws in 32 states empowered government officials in public health, social work and state institutions to render people they deemed 'unfit' infertile, explain Nicole L. Novak and Natalie Lira for The Conversation. "California led the nation in this effort at social engineering." The magazine also reports that such programs also targeted specific ethnic groups. 

Protection

Lying is inevitable in the context of war, poverty, inequality.  The lying continues even when the context changes, wars end and years pass and comfort becomes the norm. 

Dust Child, a novel by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, describes the tough life for an Amerasian child born during the Vietnam War and abandoned by family members. 

The book follows three sets of characters, seemingly unconnected, during the war and its aftermath. The characters generally depend on lies and imagination to live with their choices, managing the shame and guilt and protecting other loved ones. 

Phong is an Amerasian child, born during the war and abandoned at an orphanage and later scorned by society and denied schooling due to his racial background. The taunts are even worse for him because his father was African American. The nun who cares for the boy dies and he lives on the streets, where he is soon caught for stealing and sent to a camp for reeducation. After serving time, a man befriends him, offering to help him apply for immigration to the United States, taking advantage of the Homecoming Act, signed in 1987 by then President Ronald Reagan. The catch: The man expects Phong to lie, claiming that he and his wife are close relatives so that they can join him. Immigration authorities discover the scheme, blocking Phong from reapplication. Years later, another man suggests that Phong and his family try again, and offers to assist in exchange for Phong’s life savings. Once again, the plan fails and Phong is resigned to remaining in Vietnam. 

Far away two sisters toil in their family’s rice fields in 1969, trying to help their parents pay off creditors and prevent loss of the family farm. A friend from school visits the village, wealthy and explaining  that she works for an American corporation with offices in Saigon. Once alone with her friends, she admits that she works in a bar and is paid to drink “tea” with American soldiers. The sisters, Trang and Quỳnh, follow the friend to the city, starting work in the club with good intentions after the manager assures the women that they can set firm ground rules. The sisters lie to their parents – planning to work just long enough to pay of the family debts. But the allure of making extra money is strong, and the job soon entails more than dancing, flirting and drinking.

Trang falls in love with a US soldier who sets her up in an apartment while failing to disclose that he has a fiancé waiting at home. Once she becomes pregnant, he abandons her and leaves the country without a good-bye. The sister, Quỳnh, works longer hours to cover expenses and arrange for the infant’s adoption. 

Dan is a Vietnam veteran who flew helicopter missions during the war and suffers from PTSD. Upon returning home, he convinces his fiancé that he simply evacuated injured soldiers and did not take part in attacks. He also keeps his affair with a Vietnamese woman and a subsequent pregnancy secret.  Linda, with the help of friends in Seattle’s Vietnamese community, arranges a trip to the country in 2016, expecting her husband to confront his fears.

Of course, the three sets were connected in the past, and reconnect again, in some obvious ways and one that is unexpected. Dan does not find his daughter, but he finds family.

The surviving sister reflects on her life along with the lies she still tells. “She had tried to live an honest life, but the war had given her no choice. It had forced her to make up a version of herself that was acceptable to others. In a way, making up stories had been the basis of her survival and her success. Her lies had enabled her parents to go on living, and now her lies would protect her sons, their families, her business, and herself.”  

The biggest lie remains a secret. Still the survivors who created those lies confront the truth on their own and forgive, and that provides a small measure of comfort and peace. 

About 100,000 Amerasian children were born during the war, a result of relationships between US soldiers and Vietnamese women. Many, like Phong, were left at orphanages, and most did not know the identity of their fathers, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Some fathers did not know about their children’s existence and others, like Dan, left the children behind anyway. Worries about a massacre of the children and their mothers went unfounded, but most Amerasians were banned from schools, destined to remain uneducated and unskilled. 

Neither country considered the children a priority, according to Smithsonian Magazine: “'The care and welfare of these unfortunate children...has never been and is not now considered an area of government responsibility,' the U.S. Defense Department said in a 1970 statement. 'Our society does not need these bad elements,' the Vietnamese director of social welfare in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) said a decade later.” 

Vietnam and the United States were enemy countries, preventing travel and relationships. Only a small percentage of Amerasians managed to locate their fathers or other family members despite DNA tests, legal aid groups and ample advertising.

Lying and time can protect old secrets. 

Orphans

  

The Koran  prioritizes care for orphans: “And give to the orphans their property, and do not substitute worthless (things) for (their) good (ones), and do not devour their property (as an addition) to your own property; this is surely a great crime.”   

But children are helpless against greed, explains Fatimah Asghar in When We Were Sisters. After three girls lose their parents – the mother to illness, the father murdered – a maternal uncle takes control, not because of love or duty but rather he covets the government social security checks issued to each month.

He prohibits the girls from meeting his wife and two sons and instead sets them up in a small, filthy room in an apartment building that he owns, assigning equally vulnerable neighbors to provide day-to-day care. That daughters are less valued than sons is apparent from the start, and the girls sometimes maintain they are brothers or mother-sisters.

The uncle issues strict rules and, not wanting to be bothered by incidentals, teaches them how to forge his name for school paperwork. They attend school and can pursue activities as long as they are free. A neighbor reads the Koran with them, and when money runs low, the girls literally take to the street near the neighborhood mosque, begging for grocery money as orphans. The uncle is furious, yet also realizes that members of the mosque will gladly donate money to support the orphans. He uses those donations and the hundreds in Social Security payments to provide home renovations and comforts for his own family.   

The story is told from the point of view of the youngest, Kausar, who idolizes her two sisters, literally referring to them as gods. In turn, they regard her as useless and annoying. The young protagonist relays life disappointments, her serial abandonment and grief in a matter-of-fact way.

Early on, a Pakistani couple, undocumented and poor, selflessly love and care for the girls. The uncle's discovery that the girls sleep with the couple at night when frightened triggers a fight. The uncle scolds, “They’re not your kids,” and their beloved Meemoo retorts, “So whose kids are they?” Wary that the man's defiance might disrupt his schemes, the uncle accuses the couple of inappropriate behavior and kicks them out of their home. He then interrogates the girls about sex and relies on unstable young women to watch over the sisters.    

Once the oldest girl reaches puberty, the uncle stops arranging for caregivers, mostly leaves the sisters alone. The girls lie to classmates about home life, and teachers and neighbors fail to notice three girls struggling on their own, often hungry and unkempt. The oldest manages to hold the truncated family together, and the youngest admits, “I need an adult. And I don’t know how to get one.”    

On a lifelong search for a mother figure, Kausar contents herself with make believe: “We’re mothered by everything because we know how to look for the mothering, because we know a mother might leave us and we’ll need another mother to step in an take its place.”  With poignant and exquisite detail, the child describes relishing the warmth of the sun, shade from the tree, the smell of cookies, the street signs that guide when it’s safe to walk, a cloud of dust, or grass not yet trampled - all as mother's love.  Her constant anticipation distances her from others: “What no one will ever understand is that the world belongs to orphans, everything becomes our mother” and “All the mothers in the world reach out to the motherless.” A simple touch from siblings is overwhelming, and she thinks, “you’re held, you’re held, you’re held.”  

At one point, the youngest asks whether a sister still a sister when a mother dies? Kausar increasingly struggles to communicate fears, dreams and identity issues with sisters who are not much older than her. Each daughter dreams of escape, a better life, but the youngest has far less experience with love, motivation, trust – with basic routines and normality. She readily accepts chaos and cruelty from her interactions. At one point, she notes that Allah asks us to make language: “We assumed we meant the same thing when we spoke, because we said the same words. But. We were wrong. We were so wrong.”

Oddly enough, the youngest daughter gets along better with the uncle than her sisters do, and at one point, he urges Kausar to reconcile with a friend after an argument. “Don’t let the small things become the big things,” and she remembers that advice years later at his funeral. 

But a child who grows up without a mother can’t be depended on to understand what is small or big, right or wrong.