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If I could, I'd give every college student a copy of the enduring essays "What Are You Going to Do With That?," by William Deresiewicz and "The Case for Breaking Up With Your Parents," by Terry Castle, stay with them until they read both essays completely, and tell them to re-read them on a yearly basis (I do), because I think that's almost all of what they need to hear. Scratch that, I'd pass copies to everyone and anyone:What Are You Going to Do With That?The question my title poses, of course, is the one that is classically aimed at humanities majors. What practical value could there possibly be in studying literature or art or philosophy? So you must be wondering why I'm bothering to raise it here, at Stanford, this renowned citadel of science and technology. What doubt can there be that the world will offer you many opportunities to use your degree?But that's not the question I'm asking. By "do" I don't mean a job, and by "that" I don't mean your major. We are more than our jobs, and education is more than a major. Education is more than college, more even than the totality of your formal schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school. By "What are you going to do," I mean, what kind of life are you going to lead? And by "that," I mean everything in your training, formal and informal, that has brought you to be sitting here today, and everything you're going to be doing for the rest of the time that you're in school.We should start by talking about how you did, in fact, get here. You got here by getting very good at a certain set of skills. Your parents pushed you to excel from the time you were very young. They sent you to good schools, where the encouragement of your teachers and the example of your peers helped push you even harder. Your natural aptitudes were nurtured so that, in addition to excelling in all your subjects, you developed a number of specific interests that you cultivated with particular vigor. You did extracurricular activities, went to afterschool programs, took private lessons. You spent summers doing advanced courses at a local college or attending skill-specific camps and workshops. You worked hard, you paid attention, and you tried your very best. And so you got very good at math, or piano, or lacrosse, or, indeed, several things at once.Now there's nothing wrong with mastering skills, with wanting to do your best and to be the best. What's wrong is what the system leaves out: which is to say, everything else. I don't mean that by choosing to excel in math, say, you are failing to develop your verbal abilities to their fullest extent, or that in addition to focusing on geology, you should also focus on political science, or that while you're learning the piano, you should also be working on the flute. It is the nature of specialization, after all, to be specialized. No, the problem with specialization is that it narrows your attention to the point where all you know about and all you want to know about, and, indeed, all you can know about, is your specialty.The problem with specialization is that it makes you into a specialist. It cuts you off, not only from everything else in the world, but also from everything else in yourself. And of course, as college freshmen, your specialization is only just beginning. In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.Again, there's nothing wrong with being those things. It's just that, as you get deeper and deeper into the funnel, into the tunnel, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember who you once were. You start to wonder what happened to that person who played piano and lacrosse and sat around with her friends having intense conversations about life and politics and all the things she was learning in her classes. The 19-year-old who could do so many things, and was interested in so many things, has become a 40-year-old who thinks about only one thing. That's why older people are so boring. "Hey, my dad's a smart guy, but all he talks about is money and livers."And there's another problem. Maybe you never really wanted to be a cardiac surgeon in the first place. It just kind of happened. It's easy, the way the system works, to simply go with the flow. I don't mean the work is easy, but the choices are easy. Or rather, the choices sort of make themselves. You go to a place like Stanford because that's what smart kids do. You go to medical school because it's prestigious. You specialize in cardiology because it's lucrative. You do the things that reap the rewards, that make your parents proud, and your teachers pleased, and your friends impressed. From the time you started high school and maybe even junior high, your whole goal was to get into the best college you could, and so now you naturally think about your life in terms of "getting into" whatever's next. "Getting into" is validation; "getting into" is victory. Stanford, then Johns Hopkins medical school, then a residency at the University of San Francisco, and so forth. Or Michigan Law School, or Goldman Sachs, or Mc­Kinsey, or whatever. You take it one step at a time, and the next step always seems to be inevitable.Or maybe you did always want to be a cardiac surgeon. You dreamed about it from the time you were 10 years old, even though you had no idea what it really meant, and you stayed on course for the entire time you were in school. You refused to be enticed from your path by that great experience you had in AP history, or that trip you took to Costa Rica the summer after your junior year in college, or that terrific feeling you got taking care of kids when you did your rotation in pediatrics during your fourth year in medical school.But either way, either because you went with the flow or because you set your course very early, you wake up one day, maybe 20 years later, and you wonder what happened: how you got there, what it all means. Not what it means in the "big picture," whatever that is, but what it means to you. Why you're doing it, what it's all for. It sounds like a cliché, this "waking up one day," but it's called having a midlife crisis, and it happens to people all the time.There is an alternative, however, and it may be one that hasn't occurred to you. Let me try to explain it by telling you a story about one of your peers, and the alternative that hadn't occurred to her. A couple of years ago, I participated in a panel discussion at Harvard that dealt with some of these same matters, and afterward I was contacted by one of the students who had come to the event, a young woman who was writing her senior thesis about Harvard itself, how it instills in its students what she called self-efficacy, the sense that you can do anything you want. Self-efficacy, or, in more familiar terms, self-esteem. There are some kids, she said, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because it was easy." And there are other kids, the kind with self-efficacy or self-esteem, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because I'm smart."Again, there's nothing wrong with thinking that you got an A because you're smart. But what that Harvard student didn't realize—and it was really quite a shock to her when I suggested it—is that there is a third alternative. True self-esteem, I proposed, means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. True self-esteem means recognizing, despite everything that your upbringing has trained you to believe about yourself, that the grades you get—and the awards, and the test scores, and the trophies, and the acceptance letters—are not what defines who you are.She also claimed, this young woman, that Harvard students take their sense of self-efficacy out into the world and become, as she put it, "innovative." But when I asked her what she meant by innovative, the only example she could come up with was "being CEO of a Fortune 500." That's not innovative, I told her, that's just successful, and successful according to a very narrow definition of success. True innovation means using your imagination, exercising the capacity to envision new possibilities.But I'm not here to talk about technological innovation, I'm here to talk about a different kind. It's not about inventing a new machine or a new drug. It's about inventing your own life. Not following a path, but making your own path. The kind of imagination I'm talking about is moral imagination. "Moral" meaning not right or wrong, but having to do with making choices. Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.It means not just going with the flow. It means not just "getting into" whatever school or program comes next. It means figuring out what you want for yourself, not what your parents want, or your peers want, or your school wants, or your society wants. Originating your own values. Thinking your way toward your own definition of success. Not simply accepting the life that you've been handed. Not simply accepting the choices you've been handed. When you walk into Starbucks, you're offered a choice among a latte and a macchiato and an espresso and a few other things, but you can also make another choice. You can turn around and walk out. When you walk into college, you are offered a choice among law and medicine and investment banking and consulting and a few other things, but again, you can also do something else, something that no one has thought of before.Let me give you another counterexample. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago that touched on some of these same points. I said, among other things, that kids at places like Yale or Stanford tend to play it safe and go for the conventional rewards. And one of the most common criticisms I got went like this: What about Teach for America? Lots of kids from elite colleges go and do TFA after they graduate, so therefore I was wrong. TFA, TFA—I heard that over and over again. And Teach for America is undoubtedly a very good thing. But to cite TFA in response to my argument is precisely to miss the point, and to miss it in a way that actually confirms what I'm saying. The problem with TFA—or rather, the problem with the way that TFA has become incorporated into the system—is that it's just become another thing to get into.In terms of its content, Teach for America is completely different from Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or Harvard Medical School or Berkeley Law, but in terms of its place within the structure of elite expectations, of elite choices, it is exactly the same. It's prestigious, it's hard to get into, it's something that you and your parents can brag about, it looks good on your résumé, and most important, it represents a clearly marked path. You don't have to make it up yourself, you don't have to do anything but apply and do the work­—just like college or law school or McKinsey or whatever. It's the Stanford or Harvard of social engagement. It's another hurdle, another badge. It requires aptitude and diligence, but it does not require a single ounce of moral imagination.Moral imagination is hard, and it's hard in a completely different way than the hard things you're used to doing. And not only that, it's not enough. If you're going to invent your own life, if you're going to be truly autonomous, you also need courage: moral courage. The courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone's going to say and do to try to make you change your mind. Because they're not going to like it. Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in with everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made—or failed to make. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus famously say, about growing up in Ireland in the late 19th century, "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."Today there are other nets. One of those nets is a term that I've heard again and again as I've talked with students about these things. That term is "self-indulgent." "Isn't it self-indulgent to try to live the life of the mind when there are so many other things I could be doing with my degree?" "Wouldn't it be self-indulgent to pursue painting after I graduate instead of getting a real job?"These are the kinds of questions that young people find themselves being asked today if they even think about doing something a little bit different. Even worse, the kinds of questions they are made to feel compelled to ask themselves. Many students have spoken to me, as they navigated their senior years, about the pressure they felt from their peers—from their peers—to justify a creative or intellectual life. You're made to feel like you're crazy: crazy to forsake the sure thing, crazy to think it could work, crazy to imagine that you even have a right to try.Think of what we've come to. It is one of the great testaments to the intellectual—and moral, and spiritual—poverty of American society that it makes its most intelligent young people feel like they're being self-indulgent if they pursue their curiosity. You are all told that you're supposed to go to college, but you're also told that you're being "self-indulgent" if you actually want to get an education. Or even worse, give yourself one. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn't self-indulgent? Going into finance isn't self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn't self-indulgent? It's not OK to play music, or write essays, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is OK to work for a hedge fund. It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it's not selfish at all.Do you see how absurd this is? But these are the nets that are flung at you, and this is what I mean by the need for courage. And it's a never-ending proc­ess. At that Harvard event two years ago, one person said, about my assertion that college students needed to keep rethinking the decisions they've made about their lives, "We already made our decisions, back in middle school, when we decided to be the kind of high achievers who get into Harvard." And I thought, who wants to live with the decisions that they made when they were 12? Let me put that another way. Who wants to let a 12-year-old decide what they're going to do for the rest of their lives? Or a 19-year-old, for that matter?All you can decide is what you think now, and you need to be prepared to keep making revisions. Because let me be clear. I'm not trying to persuade you all to become writers or musicians. Being a doctor or a lawyer, a scientist or an engineer or an economist—these are all valid and admirable choices. All I'm saying is that you need to think about it, and think about it hard. All I'm asking is that you make your choices for the right reasons. All I'm urging is that you recognize and embrace your moral freedom.And most of all, don't play it safe. Resist the seductions of the cowardly values our society has come to prize so highly: comfort, convenience, security, predictability, control. These, too, are nets. Above all, resist the fear of failure. Yes, you will make mistakes. But they will be your mistakes, not someone else's. And you will survive them, and you will know yourself better for having made them, and you will be a fuller and a stronger person.It's been said—and I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's an idea that's worth taking seriously—that you guys belong to a "postemotional" generation. That you prefer to avoid messy and turbulent and powerful feelings. But I say, don't shy away from the challenging parts of yourself. Don't deny the desires and curiosities, the doubts and dissatisfactions, the joy and the darkness, that might knock you off the path that you have set for yourself. College is just beginning for you, adulthood is just beginning. Open yourself to the possibilities they represent. The world is much larger than you can imagine right now. Which means, you are much larger than you can imagine.The Case for Breaking Up With Your ParentsShall I be ashamed to kill mother?—Aeschylus, The Libation BearersTime: last year. Place: an undergraduate classroom, in the airy, well-wired precincts of Silicon Valley University. (Oops, I mean Sun-Kissed-Google-Apps-University.) I am avoiding the pedagogical business at hand—the class is my annual survey of 18th-century British literature, and it's as rockin' and rollin' as you might imagine, given the subject—in order to probe my students' reactions to a startling and (to me) disturbing article I have just read in the Harvard alumni magazine. The piece, by Craig Lambert, one of the magazine's editors, is entitled "Nonstop: Today's Superhero Undergraduates Do '3000 Things at 150 Percent.'"As the breaking-newsfeed title suggests, the piece, on the face of it, is anecdotal and seemingly light-hearted—a collegiate Ripley's Believe It or Not! about the overscheduled lives of today's Harvard undergraduates. More than ever before, it would appear, these poised, high-achieving, fantastically disciplined students routinely juggle intense academic studies with what can only seem (at least to an older generation) a truly dizzy-making array of extracurricular activities: pre-professional internships, world-class athletics, social and political advocacy, start-up companies, volunteering for nonprofits, research assistantships, peer advising, musical and dramatic performances, podcasts and video-making, and countless other no doubt virtuous (and résumé-building) pursuits. The pace is so relentless, students say, some plan their packed daily schedules down to the minute—i.e., "shower: 7:15-7:20 a.m."; others confess to getting by on two or three hours of sleep a night. Over the past decade, it seems, the average Harvard undergraduate has morphed into a sort of lean, glossy, turbocharged superhamster: Look in the cage and all you see, where the treadmill should be, is a beautiful blur.I am curious if my Stanford students' lives are likewise chockablock. Heads nod yes; deep sighs are expelled; their own lives are similarly crazy. They can barely keep up, they say—particularly given all the texting and tweeting and cellphoning they have to do from hour to hour too. Do they mind? Not hugely, it would seem. True, they are mildly intrigued by Lambert's suggestion that the "explosion of busyness" is a relatively recent historical phenomenon—and that, over the past 10 or 15 years, uncertain economic conditions, plus a new cultural emphasis on marketing oneself to employers, have led to ever more extracurricular add-ons. Yes, they allow: You do have to display your "well-roundedness" once you graduate. Thus the supersize CV's. You'll need, after all, to advertise a catalog of competencies: your diverse interests, original turn of mind, ability to work alone or in a team, time-management skills, enthusiasm, unflappability—not to mention your moral probity, generosity to those less fortunate, lovable "meet cute" quirkiness, and pleasure in the simple things of life, such as synchronized swimming, competitive dental flossing, and Antarctic exploration. "Yes, it can often be frenetic and with an eye toward résumés," one Harvard assistant dean of students observes, "but learning outside the classroom through extracurricular opportunities is a vital part of the undergraduate experience here."Yet such references to the past—truly a foreign country to my students—ultimately leave them unimpressed. They laugh when I tell them that during my own somewhat damp Jurassic-era undergraduate years—spent at a tiny, obscure, formerly Methodist school in the rainy Pacific Northwest between 1971 and 1975—I never engaged in a single activity that might be described as "extracurricular" in the contemporary sense, not, that is, unless you count the little work-study job I had toiling away evenings in the sleepy campus library. What was I doing all day? Studying and going to class, to be sure. Reading books, listening to music, falling in love (or at least imagining it). Eating ramen noodles with peanut butter. But also, I confess, I did a lot of plain old sitting around—if not outright malingering. I've got a box of musty journals to prove it. After all, nobody even exercised in those days. Nor did polyester exist. Once you'd escaped high school and obligatory PE classes—goodbye hirsute Miss Davis; goodbye, ugly cotton middy blouse and gym shorts—you were done with that. We were all so countercultural back then—especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the early 1970s were still the late sixties. The 1860s.The students now regard me with curiosity and vague apprehension. What planet is she from.But I have another question for them. While Lambert, author of "Nonstop," admires the multitasking undergraduates Harvard attracts, he also worries about the intellectual and emotional costs of such all-consuming busyness. In a turn toward gravitas, he quotes the French film director Jean Renoir's observation that "the foundation of all civilization is loitering" and wonders aloud if "unstructured chunks of time" aren't necessary for creative thinking. And while careful to phrase his concerns ever so delicately—this is the Harvard alumni magazine, after all—he seems afraid that one reason today's students are so driven and compulsive is that they have been trained up to it since babyhood: From preschool on, they are accustomed to their parents pushing them ferociously to make use of every spare minute. Contemporary middle-class parents—often themselves highly accomplished professionals—"groom their children for high achievement," he suspects, "in ways that set in motion the culture of scheduled lives and nonstop activity." He quotes a former Harvard dean of student life:This is the play-date generation. ... There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don't get to do that now. Busy parents book them into things constantly—violin lessons, ballet lessons, swimming teams. The kids get the idea that someone will always be structuring their time for them.The current dean of freshmen concurs: "Starting at an earlier age, students feel that their free time should be taken up with purposeful activities. There is less stumbling on things you love ... and more being steered toward pursuits." Some of my students begin to look downright uneasy; some are now listening hard.Such parental involvement can be distasteful, even queasy-making. "Now," writes Lambert, parents "routinely 'help' with assignments, making teachers wonder whose work they are really grading. ... Once, college applicants typically wrote their own applications, including the essays; today, an army of high-paid consultants, coaches, and editors is available to orchestrate and massage the admissions effort." Nor do such parents give up their busybody ways, apparently, once their offspring lands a prized berth at some desired institute of higher learning. Lambert elaborates:Parental engagement even in the lives of college-age children has expanded in ways that would have seemed bizarre in the recent past. (Some colleges have actually created a "dean of parents" position—whether identified as such or not—to deal with them.) The "helicopter parents" who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to "snowplow parents" who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way.•Now, as a professor I have had some experiences with "hel­icopter" parents, and were weather patterns on the West Coast slightly more rigorous, I'm sure I would have encountered "snowplow" parents as well. Indelibly etched on my brain, I tell the class, is a phone call I received one winter break from the aggrieved mother of a student to whom I had given a C-minus in a course that fall. The class had been a graduate course, a Ph.D. seminar, no less. The woman's daughter, a first-year Ph.D. student, had spoken nary a word in class, nor had she ever visited during office hours. Her seminar paper had been unimpressive: Indeed it was one of those for which the epithet "gobsmackingly incoherent" might seem to have been invented. Still, the mother lamented, her daughter was distraught; the poor child had done nothing over the break but cry and brood and wander by herself in the woods. I had ruined everybody's Christmas, apparently, so would I not redeem myself by allowing her daughter to rewrite her seminar paper for a higher grade? It was only fair.While startled to get such a call, I confess to being cowed by this direct maternal assault and, against my academic better judgment, said OK. The student did rewrite the essay, and this time I gave it a B. Generous, I thought. (It was better but still largely incomprehensible.) Yet the ink was hardly dry when the mother called again: Why wasn't her cherished daughter receiving an A? She had rewritten the paper! Surely I realized ... etc. One was forced to feign the gruesome sounds of a fatal choking fit just to get off the phone.Did such hands-on parental advocacy—I inquired—trouble my students? My caller obviously represented an extreme instance, but what did they think about the wider phenomenon? Having internalized images of themselves (if only unconsciously) as standard-bearers of parental ambition—or so Lambert's article had it—their peers at Harvard didn't seem particularly shocked or embarrassed by Ma and Pa's lobbying efforts on their behalf. According to one survey, only 5 to 6 percent of undergrads felt their parents had been "too involved" in the admission process. Once matriculated (there's an interesting word), most students saw frequent parental contact and advice-giving as normal: A third of Harvard undergraduates reported calling or messaging daily with a parent.Yet here it was—just at this delicate punctum—that I found myself reduced (however briefly) to speechlessness. Blindsided. So how often do my students—mostly senior English majors, living in residential dorms—text or talk to their parents? Broad smiles all around. Embarrassed looks at one another. Whispers and some excited giggling. A lot. Well, how much exactly? A lot. But what's a lot? They can't believe I'm asking. Why do I want to know? I might as well be asking them how often they masturbate. And then it all comes tumbling out:Oh, like, every day, sometimes more than once.At least two or three times a day. (Group laughter.)My father e-mails me jokes and stuff every day.My mother would worry if I didn't call her every day. (Nodding heads.)Well, we're always in touch—my parents live nearby so I go home weekends, too.Finally, one student—a delightful young woman whom I know to be smart and levelheaded—confesses that she talks to her mother on the cellphone at least five, maybe six, even seven times a day: We're like best friends, so I call her whenever I get out of class. She wants to know about my professors, what was the exam, so I tell her what's going on and give her, you know, updates. Sometimes my grandmother's there, and I talk to her too.I'm stunned; I'm aghast; I'm going gaga. I must look fairly stricken too—Elektra keening over the corpse of Agamemnon—because now the whole class starts laughing at me, their strange unfathomable lady-professor, the one who doesn't own a television and obviously doesn't have any kids of her own. What a freak. "But when I was in school," I manage finally to gasp, "All we wanted to do was get away from our parents!" "We never called our parents!" "We despised our parents!" "In fact," I splutter—and this is the showstopper—"we only had one telephone in our whole dorm—in the hallway—for 50 people! If your parents called, you'd yell from your room, Tell them I'm not here!"After this last outburst, the students too look aghast. Not to mention morally discomfited. No; these happy, busy, optimistic Stanford undergrads, so beautiful and good in their unisex T-shirts, hoodies, and J.Crew shorts; so smart, scrupulous, forward-looking, well-meaning, well-behaved, and utterly presentable—just the best and the nicest, really—simply cannot imagine the harsh and silent world I'm describing.•At the time, I wasn't sure why this conversation left me dumbfounded, but it did. It stayed with me for weeks, and I told numerous pals about it, marveling again at the bizarreness of contemporary undergraduate life. One said she talked to her mother five times a day! In the moment, the exchange had awakened in me a fairly dismal psychological sensation I'd sometimes felt in classes before (one hard to acknowledge, so out of step with official norms does it seem): namely, that teaching makes me feel lonely. Not all the time, but enough to notice. Lecturing before students, I will suddenly feel utterly bereft. A cloud goes over the sun. Though putatively in charge, I'm estranged from my charges—self-conscious, alone, in a tunnel, the object of attention (and somehow responsible for everything taking place) but unable to speak a language anyone understands. I feel sad and oppressed, smothered almost, slightly panicky. It's a sensation one might have in an anxiety dream—the sort in which you feel abandoned and overwhelmed and without something you desperately need. They've gone away and left me in charge of everything. At least in my own head, it's the sensation of orphanhood.One rallies, of course. Professor Freakout soldiers on and the feeling dissipates. The business of the day returns. But the psychological cloud can remain for a while, like a miasma. By asking my students a lot of intrusive and impertinent questions, I concluded afterward, I'd obviously brought this grisly mood on myself. Their charming, fresh-faced, matter-of-fact responses—yes, they were just as busy as their Harvard counterparts, but, yes, they also managed to stay in (surprisingly) close touch with parents (i.e., they loved and were loved in return)—had somehow triggered my orphan-reflex. I had only myself to blame. I chastised myself for having temporarily forgotten that students today—not just those at Harvard or Stanford, of course—live in a new, exciting, exacting "24/7" world, one utterly unlike (mentalité-wise) the one I inhabited as an undergraduate. They seem reasonably content with their lot; in fact appear to take the endless "connectivity" for granted—the networking, blogging, Skyping, Facebook posts, Twitter feeds. And why shouldn't they? Have they ever known anything else? None of it made me happy, but neither was I particularly happy with myself.Now, lest one wonder, I should say upfront I am not an orphan—or at least not in the official sense. At the time of writing, both my parents are still alive—in their mid-80s, but frail, beginning to fail. They don't live together. In fact, despite residing less than a mile apart, they haven't laid eyes on one another for almost 40 years. Not even by accident in the Rite Aid store. Don't ask. They've had five rancorous marriages between them. I haven't seen my father more than 10 or 12 times over the past decade. That my recurrent sense of psychic estrangement—not to say shock at my students' hooked-in, booked-up, seemingly bountiful lives—might be in some way connected with these Jolly Aged P's is a topic that would no doubt require a posse of shrinks to explore thoroughly. But even without reference to private psychodrama, I think I now at least half-grasp the reason why my students' overscheduled lives, so paradoxically conjoined (I felt) with intense bonds with parents, discombobulated me so thoroughly.Unsurprisingly, orphanhood—that painful thing—has everything to do with the case. Orphanhood conceived, that is, in the broadest sense: as a metaphor for modern human experience, as symbol for unhappy consciousness, as emblem of that groundwork—that inaugural experience of metaphysical solitude—that Martin Heidegger deemed necessary for the act of philosophizing. About orphanhood conceived, in other words, as a condition for world-making—as both the sorrow and creative quintessence of life.Now that's a bit of a mouthful, I realize, so let me explain it in simpler terms. If you teach the history of English and American literature (as I've done most of my life), it's safe to say you will end up, among other things, a state-of-the-art Orphan Expert. Not that it's that hard. You don't need to go back very far in literary history, after all, to find a plethora of orphaned or quasi-orphaned protagonists. At the outset of the play bearing his name, Hamlet, poor mite, might best be understood, after all, as a sort of half-orphan—indeed, a half-orphan with an unconscious wish to become a full-service orphan. If not downright matricidal, he seems aggrieved enough by his mother's perceived betrayals to wonder if hastening her demise might not make life at Elsinore Castle rather more enjoyable for everybody concerned.And what is Milton's Paradise Lost if not one of Western culture's great parables of self-orphaning? Along with the Oresteia and the Oedipus plays, it's a sort of poetical primer on how to forfeit the love and care of one's Creator in a few outrageous, easy-to-follow steps. Satan's not really to blame for the mess: He's just a figment, the kid who sticks chewing gum on the table leg. Adam and Eve know perfectly well what they are doing when they eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They want to eat it. And when they are seen, misery-ridden, leaving life in the Garden behind ("They, hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow,/ Through Eden took their solitary way"), they carry with them all the pathos of suddenly abandoned children. They have no mother, presumably, and their Father is dead to them. Worse yet, they are wise orphans; they recognize their own culpability in their loss. Cosmically amplifying their sorrow is the sickening, banal, no-way-back knowledge that they've brought their banishment on themselves. Daddy took the T-Bird away. But we should never have been driving it in the first place.Yet for English speakers, it's in classic Anglo-American fiction—in the novel, say, from Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding to Dickens, Eliot, Twain, James, Woolf, Hemingway, and the rest—that the orphaned, or semi-orphaned, hero or heroine becomes a central, if not inescapable, fixture. Something about the new social and psychic world in which the realistic novel comes into being in the late 17th and early 18th centuries pushes the orphan to the foreground of the mix, makes of him or her a strikingly necessary figure, a kind of exemplary being. (By "orphan" I likewise include those characters—call them "pseudo-orphans"—who believe themselves to be orphans, but over the course of the narrative discover a mother or father or both.) So memorably have these "one of a kind" characters been drawn, we often know them by a single name or nickname: Moll, Tom, Fanny, Becky, Heathcliff, Jane, Pip, Oliver, Ishmael, Huck, Dorothea, Jude, Isabel, Milly, Lily, Lolly, Sula.Even if you haven't read the books in which these invented beings appear, you've probably heard of them and their stories; may even have a rudimentary sense of what they are like as "people" (self-reliant, footloose, attractive, curious, quick-thinking, lucky, tricky, a mischief-maker, the proverbial black sheep ... and so on). Alarmingly enough, orphaned protagonists appear regularly in stories written explicitly for children: Witness Little Goody Two-Shoes, Pollyanna, Heidi, Little Orphan Annie, Kim, Mowgli, Bilbo, Frodo, Anne (of Green Gables), Dorothy (she of Toto and Auntie Em), Peter (as in Pan), Harry (as in Potter). And needless to say, these parentless juveniles are usually the heroes or heroines of the books in which they appear. They may be wounded or fey or uncanny (what do we make of the vacant circles that Little Orphan Annie has for eyes?), yet they are also resilient, charismatic, oddly powerful.•Thus the first of two big lit-crit hypotheses I'll advance here: More than love, sex, courtship, and marriage; more than inheritance, ambition, rivalry, or disgrace; more than hatred, betrayal, revenge, or death, orphanhood—the absence of the parent, the frightening yet galvanizing solitude of the child—may be the defining fixation of the novel as a genre, what one might call its primordial motive or matrix, the conditioning psychic reality out of which the form itself develops.Now, even though I've made a talking point of it, what's important here is not merely the frequency with which orphaned heroes and heroines appear in fiction since the 18th century. Yes, from Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel onward, the phenomenon has inspired some brilliant commentary. In one of the most profound books on fiction ever written, Adultery in the Novel, Tony Tanner associates the orphan trope with the early novel's tendency toward diagetic instability—its ambiguous, unsettled "ongoingness" and resistance to closure:The novel, in its origin, might almost be said to be a transgressive mode, inasmuch as it seemed to break, or mix, or adulterate the existing genre-expectations of the time. It is not for nothing that many of the protagonists of the early English novels are socially displaced or unplaced figures—orphans, prostitutes, adventurers, etc. They thus represent or incarnate a potentially disruptive or socially unstabilized energy that may threaten, directly or implicitly, the organization of society, whether by the indeterminacy of their origin, the uncertainty of the direction in which they will focus their unbonded energy, or their attitude toward the ties that hold society together and that they may choose to slight or break.Like the Prostitute or Adventurer, the Orphan embodies the new genre's own picaresque "outlaw" dynamism.Precisely because the 18th-century orphan-hero is usually untried, unprotected, disadvantaged (not to mention misinformed or uninformed about his or her parentage), he or she can function as a sort of textual free radical: as plot-catalyst and story-generator—a mixer-upper of things, whose search for a legitimate identity or place in the world of the fiction at once jump-starts the narrative and tends to shunt it away from didacticism and any predictable or programmatic unfolding of events.A flagrant example of such jump-starting occurs in Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722). Here it is precisely the eponymous heroine's putative orphanhood (she knows only that her mother, whom she presumes to be dead, was a thief and gave birth to her in Newgate Prison) that catalyzes, among other scandals, one of the novel's most titillating (if outlandish) episodes: Moll's shocking marriage-by-mistake to her own brother. (Only well into their marriage, after she and her brother have several children, will Moll realize that her chatty mother-in-law, his mother, is also her mother—long ago transported to America, but still alive and flourishing.) Defoe purports to moralize in Moll Flanders—in his Preface he describes his narrative as free of "Lewd Ideas" and "immodest Turns"—a work "from every part of which something may be learned, and some just and religious inference is drawn." Yet bizarrely, through some inscrutable narrative magic, the very mystery in which Moll's birth is shrouded triggers one of the novel's most perverse and sensational incidents. What on earth are we meant to "learn" from it? Don't ever get married, in case your spouse is really your long-lost brother or sister?Yet Moll Flanders also illuminates a perhaps more profound aspect of the orphan narrative: its austere embedding of a certain hard-boiled psychological realism. Even when the hero or heroine recovers a lost parent, that person can shock or mortify. The "orphan mentality" can persist, alas, post-reunion. Thus Moll finds out that, yes, as she's been told, her mother is a raddled old Newgate jailbird, with the livid mark of the branding iron on her hand. Now, for most of us, such a revelation—even barring incestuous ramifications—would be disillusioning, to say the least. Imagine: After years of loneliness, of longing for a tender maternal embrace, you finally, miraculously, locate your birth mother: She turns out to be a convicted felon. A whore. A liar and check-kiter. A crystal-meth addict. No help there; she's way worse off than I am.•Freud famously described the "family romance" as the childhood fantasy that one's parents aren't,in actuality, one's real parents—that one was switched in the cradle, left in a basket on the doorstep, found under a cabbage leaf or the like, and that one's real father and mother are persons of great wealth, beauty, and high station, a king and queen, perhaps, who will someday return to reclaim you and love you in the way you deserve. He thought such fantasies especially likely to develop at the birth of a sibling, when anger at the parents—for introducing a presumably odious rival into the family circle—is at a height. Real parents are disparaged; imagined parents idealized. The scenario in Moll Flanders reads like a sendup of the Freudian romance: almost a spoof on it. It's not simply that the lost-and-found parent turns out to be disappointingly "trashy." She's quite shockingly trashy—sneaky, disingenuous, a terrible old crone with false teeth, sleazier than you even thought possible. But you're stuck with her, it seems, for life, unless you can find a way to write her back out of your story.If one wanted to be fancy, one might dub this familial antiromance the "emotional drama of the post-Enlightenment child." Moll does not cease to be "orphaned" having rediscovered her mother; on the contrary, she abandons her (and the brother-husband), and resumes her solitary adventuring. And while she will re-encounter the brother later—indeed inherit the Virginia plantation he and the mother have established—Moll never sees her mother again. The maternal reappearance alters little or nothing in the heroine's inner world: Psychologically speaking, Moll is as alone at the end of the fiction as she was when she started. She's what you might call a self-orphaner, an orphan by default. Evasive, secretive, deeply intransigent—one of life's permanentorphans.In the broad, even existential, sense of the term I deploy here, orphanhood is not necessarily reducible to orphanhood in the literal sense. At least metaphorically, virtually any character in the early realist novel might be said to be an orphan—including, paradoxically, many of those heroes and heroines who have a living parent (or two), or end up getting one, as Moll Flanders does. A feeling of intractable loneliness—of absolute moral or spiritual estrangement from the group—may be all that it takes. You don't need to have been abandoned by a parent in the conventional sense, in other words, to feel psychically bereft.Indeed, from a certain angle—and thus my second big lit-crit hypothesis—the orphan trope may allegorize a far more disturbing emotional reality in early fiction: a generic insistence on the reactionary (and destructive) nature of parent/child ties. The more one reads, the more one confronts it: Whatever their status in a narrative (alive, dead, absent, present, lost, found), the parental figures in the early English novel are, in toto, so deeply and overwhelmingly flawed—so cruel, lost, ignorant, greedy, compromised, helpless, selfish, morally absent, or tragically oblivious to their children's needs—one would be better off without them. You might as well be an orphan.Julia Kristeva remarks somewhere (my wording may not be exact) that "in every bourgeois family group there is one child who has a soul." And thus we meet them, in novel after novel: not only those who go literally motherless and fatherless, but also the children "with souls" who, for precisely that reason, will be persecuted by their foolish parents or parental stand-ins; ostracized, abused, made to submit to some hellish moral and spiritual reaming-out. Ruthlessly, imperviously, the realistic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries compulsively foreground this "orphaning" of the psyche; shape it into parable, and in so doing (I think) dramatize the painful birth of the modern subject—that radically deracinated being, vital yet alone, who goes undefined by kinship, caste, class, or visible membership in a group.Witness, for example, the predicament of the eponymous heroine at the outset of Samuel Richardson's august and appalling masterwork, Clarissa. (Published in 1748, Clarissa, for those of you who haven't read it, is the greatest novel ever written in any language.) Now although the young and virtuous Clarissa Harlowe has grown up, presumably happily, at Harlowe-Place surrounded by her "friends"—i.e., both of her parents, two siblings, and several uncles—as the novel opens, she's just been "orphaned" in the emotional sense: profoundly, inexplicably, and shatteringly rejected. (Ironically, the word "friend" in the 18th century can not only mean someone outside the family circle whom one likes or loves, but also a member, simply, of one's immediate family circle.) When Clarissa refuses to marry the man of her father's choice, a rich and grasping Gollum-like creature named Solmes (one always imagines him with webbed feet), her "friends" morph abruptly, and nightmarishly, into domestic dungeon-masters. They revile Clarissa and threaten to disown her; they lock her up in her room for days and refuse to see her or read her letters; they forbid her contact with anyone who might help her; her father curses her. As they prepare to marry her off to Solmes "by force," she seems ever more like one of the victim-children in fairy tales, the designated family sacrifice.Now Richardson critics over the past few decades have tended to skate past these terrifying opening scenes in order to concentrate on Clarissa's sufferings later at the hands of Lovelace, the charming sociopath and would-be rescuer who seduces her. Yes, Lovelace's depredations later are spectacular and obscene—he kidnaps her, drugs her, rapes her while she is drugged, and ultimately hounds her to death. Yet even before Lovelace enters the novel (or so I have always felt), Richardson has already saturated the novelistic mise-en-scène with an even more unnerving and absolute kind of horror. "Home" is the primordial horror-show in this novel—a place of dehumanization and soul-murder from which the child, to save herself, must somehow escape. Count the Harlowes, likewise, among the ghastliest fictional parents outside Greek tragedy—all the more so because they speak the language of sentimental bourgeois feeling. Even as they subject their daughter to unspeakable torments, they "love" Clarissa, they say; that is why she must be so brutally forced to obey.Yet one finds these dire mamas and papas everywhere in early fiction—even comic fiction. They are omnipresent in works by Fielding, Smollett, Burney, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Ann Radcliffe. Even Jane Austen, arguably, offers an indictment of parents as harsh as that in the Gothic fiction of Shelley or Radcliffe. Witness the foolish, manipulative, greedy, or otherwise profoundly unsatisfactory mothers and fathers in Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. Austen typically veils the inadequacy, even malice, of her fictional parent-figures by festooning them with comic trappings: We laugh at the absurd Mrs. Bennet, the whinging Mr. Woodhouse, even the monstrous Sir Walter Elliot—the vain, pomaded, rank-obsessed father of Anne Elliot, heroine of Persuasion. (Mothers are often long-dead in Austen, and as in many other works by women from the period, the heroine is obliged to live with a cold, oppressive, or dissociated father.)In real life, having any of these narcissistic nongrown-ups for a parent would be a nightmare come true. They induce bewilderment and a sense of genetic incommensurability. How can Emma—brilliant, coruscating, kind—be the child of the dull, mewling, psychotically self-centered Mr. Woodhouse? Austen's heroines, in particular, are often especially changeling-like—sleek, witty, perceptive misfits, who appear oddly unintegrated into whatever (usually reduced) version of the family unit the novelist has devised for them.What to do with the parents who fail us so abysmally? Perhaps the most drastic solution is to imagine a fictional world from which parents have simply been erased—psychically blanked out—absolutely, and long in advance of any narrative unfurling. Charlotte Brontë's books are a terrifying case in point. They project worlds in which estrangement, loss, and silence about the past seem the precondition for narrative itself. Brontë omits the "back story"—or provides only a fatally impoverished one. Neither of her best-known narrators, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, has a living father or mother: Jane's parents have died of typhus; of Lucy's we know nothing at all. Both heroines seem to emerge out of, and continually slip back into, an amorphous, staggering, irrevocable loneliness. One senses in their aphasia about the past some suppressed horror. Reading Lucy's glassy-eyed narrative, in particular, is like listening to someone who's had a head injury, or suffers from post-traumatic amnesia.We quickly learn not to expect any answers; some submerged trauma is itself the given, the starting point. Crucial information will never be forthcoming. For these are orphan-tales, drawing us, ineluctably, into a domain of emptiness and pain. Yes, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe may know their own names—first and last both. (Many fictional orphans don't.) But, affectively speaking, everything else has gone blank. The system crashed long ago. Not only have they no parent or guardian to point to, they seem to have no idea—emotionally, spiritually—what words like "mother" and "father" might mean.•So what—you may be wondering—has all this gloomy business to do with my frantic, ambitious, madly multi-tasking students? With helicopter Moms and Dads? With so-called Velcro parents? The ones who keep messaging 24/7? Surely I don't wish to link all the ultra-depressing things one encounters in literature—O, the horror, the horror, etc.—with the banal, addictive, anodyne back-and-forth of contemporary student life? Hello, you have 193 new messages. Checking for software updates. Your start-up disk is almost full. Hey, it's Mom. I was just wondering if you'd had time yet to. ...Or do I?My answer must be both circumspect and speculative. I don't wish, on the one hand, to sound like someone nostalgic for pain—a relic, a loneliness-junkie, a cheerleader for real-world orphanhood, or (when you get right down to it) a proponent of Orestes-style matricide or patricide. (Not usually, anyway.) On the other hand, I can't help but wonder if we haven't lost the thread when it comes to understanding part of what a "higher education" ideally should entail. Pious college officials yammer on about the need for students to develop something they (the officials) call "critical thinking" and thereby gain intellectual autonomy: a foothold on adulthood. But I'm wondering if it isn't time to reaffirm an idea that "critical thinking" begins at home, or better, withhome—which is to say, that each of us at some point needs to think (dispassionately, daringly) about the "homes" from which we emerge and what we really think of them.Do you owe your parents your obedience? Your deference? Your love? Your phone calls? The questions sound harsh because they are. But our Skype-ridden times may require a certain harshness.Some of the primal myths of our culture—as the greatest artists and writers have always intuited—seem to authorize violence, real or emotional, between the human generations. Francisco Goya's sublime and horrific masterpiece, "Saturn Devouring His Son" (ca. 1819-23), depicts a shocking event in Greek mythology—the cannibalistic murder by the primeval Titan god Kronos (Saturn, in the Roman version) of one of his children. Having received a prophecy that he will be overthrown by one of his own offspring, Kronos devours each of his five children at birth. His wife Ops manages to save their sixth child, Zeus, only by hiding him away on Crete and feeding Kronos a stone in swaddling clothes in place of the newborn. Kronos is fooled and later, this same Zeus, father of the new Olympian gods, overthrows his father, as predicted.An image to shock and awe, undoubtedly, but also one of the great paintings made in that period we call the Enlightenment: that revolutionary era (say, roughly, 1660-1820) during which—for better or for worse—Western culture began to shake off some of the more baleful and stultifying aspects of the Judeo-Christian past and reimagine itself as "modern."The central insight of the period? It's so familiar to us, perhaps, that we have lost sight of its momentousness: that individual human beings are endowed with critical faculties and powers of moral discernment, and as a result, have a right, if not the obligation, to challenge oppressive, unjust, and degrading patterns of authority. Over the course of the 18th century and into the 19th, more and more educated men (and a few brave women) felt intellectually empowered enough to criticize previously sacrosanct "received ideas": traditional religious beliefs, established forms of government, accepted modes of social, legal, and economic organization, the conventional dynamics of family life, relations between men and women, adults and children—all those cognitive grids through which we customarily make sense of the world.At its most potent, the critique was severe—world-changing. A host of Enlightenment freethinkers—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith—articulated it in passionate and various ways: that the venerable cognitive models human beings had mobilized over the centuries to explain "the nature of things" were often nothing more than self-reinforcing and barbaric "superstition." Taken for dogma, these man-made belief systems had produced a host of ills: savage religious and political strife, the commercial exploitation of the many by the few, the enslavement and genocidal killing of masses of people, the degradation of women, children, animals, and the natural world—century upon century, in fact, of unfathomable global suffering.In his iconic essay of 1784, "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant put it thus:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!Not that Kant imagined any cultural enlightenment to be easy or bloodless—especially given the seemingly intractable human proclivity for business as usual:Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.I confess: I first read those words over 25 years ago, and they have never ceased to thrill me.I understand the orphan-narratives of literature the same way I do Goya's painting and Kant's exhortation: as imaginative vehicles designed to shock us into "critical thinking" about those Titan figures we call our parents, and the larger psychosocial forces they so often (wittingly or unwittingly) represent. The intimate authority of parents is, after all, the first kind of authority most of us experience; the parental command the first utterance we recognize as that which must be obeyed. Pain and suffering, we soon learn, will result from our disobedience.And soon enough, most of us become adept at shaping our wishes according to a system of superimposed demands. We learn as young children to control the way we eat, drink, and eliminate waste; we learn to clean our own bodies; we learn under what circumstances it is appropriate to yell or scream or cry, and when we must be silent. Later on, "adult" society will impose further, ever more complex demands. Thus we internalize all those second-order codes of behavior associated with the educational, political, religious, and economic domains within which we all attempt to function, with lesser or greater success.Yet might it not be the case that true advances in human culture—the real leaps in collective understanding—typically result from some maverick individual action—some fundamentaldisobedience on the part of the individual subject? Such maverick actions often disturb—precisely because they need to get our attention. We have to be jolted out of complacency. The greatest artists invariably disrupt and disturb in this way. Like many of the novelists I've been describing, Goya gives us a shocking scene of intergenerational violence—but he does so, precisely, I wager, to force us to confront some of the deepest and hardest feelings we have—about parental authority and its rightful scope, about family violence, about the power of the old over the young, about the role of paternalism in society and government, about whether or not, indeed, those people we designate as "fathers" (priests, doctors, political leaders, scientists) or "mothers" (nurturers, apple-pie makers, self-sacrificing soccer moms, iPhone FaceTime partners, Mama Grizzlies, Tiger Mothers) really Know Best, about whether it is incumbent upon us to exert ourselves against them.You don't have to be a professor, I think, to see Goya as a radical naysayer—a human being horrified by a certain bestial and soul-destroying kind of parental authority. The focus in the "Saturn" painting is on paternal despotism; but elsewhere in Goya's oeuvre we find, too, a frightful bevy of murderous mothers—notably in Los Caprichos (1799), a suite of fantasy-engravings depicting monstrous witches, crones, goats, and owls engaged in child-torture of different sorts. The questions Goya raises remain awful and unremitting, more than 200 years later. Is the rule of life eat or be eaten, even if what you consume is your own child? (One of the most terrible things about "Saturn Devouring His Son" is surely the fact that the headless, half-eaten "child" has the proportions not of a newborn infant, but of an adult human being.) Should we resist our creator's authority? When and how and why? Or should we let ourselves be murdered in his name? When and how and why?Such questions lie at the heart of great literature too. What the early novel dramatizes, it seems to me, is nothing less than a radical transformation in human consciousness—the formation of a new idea. For better or worse, the ferocious, liberating notion embedded in the early novel is that parents are there to be fooled and defied (especially in matters of love, sex, and erotic fulfillment); that even the most venerated traditions exist to be broken with; that creative power is rightly vested in the individual rather than groups, in the young rather than the old; that thought is free. The assertion of individual rights ineluctably begins, symbolically and every other way, with the primal rebellion of the child against parent.So where are we today? Are we in the midst of some countertransformation? A rolling back of the Enlightenment parent-child story? Are we returning to an older model of belief—to a more authoritarian and "elder centric" world? The deferential-child model has dominated most of human history, after all. Maybe the extraordinary Enlightenment break with the age-old commandment—honor thy father and thy mother—was temporary, an aberration, a blip on the screen.My own view remains predictably twisty, fraught, and disloyal. Parents, in my opinion, have to be finessed, thought around, even as we love them: They are so colossally wrong about so many important things. And even when they are not, paradoxically, even when they are 100 percent right, the imperative remains the same: To live an "adult" life, a meaningful life, it is necessary, I would argue, to engage in a kind of symbolic self-orphaning. The process will be different for every person. I have my own inspirational cast of characters in this regard, a set of willful, heroic self-orphaners, past and present, whom I continue to revere: Mozart, the musical child prodigy who successfully rebelled against his insanely grasping and narcissistic father (Leopold Moz­art), who for years shopped him around the courts of Europe as a sort of family cash cow; Sigmund Freud, who, by way of unflinching self-analysis, discovered that it was possible to love and hate something or someone at one and the same time (mothers and fathers included) and that such painfully "mixed emotion" was also inescapably human; Virginia Woolf, who in spite of childhood loss, mental illness, and an acute sense of the sex-prejudice she saw everywhere around her, not only forged a life as a great modernist writer, but made her life an incorrigibly honest and vulnerable one.In a journal entry from 1928 collected in A Writer's Diary, Woolf wrote the following (long after his death) about her brilliant, troubled, well-meaning, tyrannical, depressive, enormously distinguished father—Sir Leslie Stephen, model for Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and one of the great English "men of letters" of the 19th century:Father's birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one had known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books—inconceivable. ...The sentimental pathology of the American middle-class family—not to mention the mind-warping digitalization of everyday life—usually militates against such ruthless candor. But what the Life of the Orphan teaches—has taught me at least—is that it is indeed the self-conscious abrogation of one's inheritance, the "making strange" of received ideas, the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom.

Q. Were there any U.S. soldiers who claimed their children that they had with Vietnamese women in the Vietnam War? What happened to the ones that were left behind?A. Multiple articles regarding Amerasians treatment after the war, what led to the American Homecoming Act of 1987, and a look back 25 years later.40 years after the Vietnam war ended, the children of U.S. soldiers are looking for their dads.Legacies of warForty years after the fall of Saigon, soldiers’ children are still left behindPhotos by Linda DavidsonStories by Annie Gowen, Published: April 17, 2015Vo Huu Nhan was in his vegetable boat in the floating markets of the Mekong Delta when his phone rang. The caller from the United States had stunning news — a DNA database had linked him with a Vietnam vet believed to be his father.Nhan, 46, had known his father was an American soldier named Bob, but little else.“I was crying,” Nhan recalled recently. “I had lost my father for 40 years, and now I finally had gotten together with him.”But the journey toward their reconciliation has not been easy. News of the positive DNA test set in motion a chain of events involving two families 8,700 miles apart that is still unfolding and has been complicated by the illness of the veteran, Robert Thedford Jr., a retired deputy sheriff in Texas.When the last U.S. military personnel fled Saigon on April 29 and 30, 1975, they left behind a country scarred by war, a people uncertain about their future and thousands of their own children. These children — some half-black, some half-white — came from liaisons with bar girls, “hooch” maids, laundry workers and the laborers who filled sandbags that protected American bases.They are approaching middle age with stories as complicated as the two countries that gave them life. Growing up with the face of the enemy, they were spat on, ridiculed, beaten. They were abandoned, given away to relatives or sold as cheap labor. The families that kept them often had to hide them or shear off their telltale blond or curly locks. Some were sent to reeducation or work camps, or ended up homeless and living on the streets.They were called “bui doi,” which means “the dust of life.”Forty years later, hundreds remain in Vietnam, too poor or without proof to qualify for the program created by the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 that resettles the children of American soldiers in the United States.Now, an Amerasian group has launched a last-chance effort to reunite fathers and children with a new DNA database on a family heritage Web site. Those left behind have scant information about their GI dads — papers and photographs were burned as the Communist regime took hold, and memories faded. So positive DNA tests are their only hope.New season, fresh hopesMotorcycles and scooters crowd the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. (Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)Ho Chi Minh City in spring. The apricot flower trees, symbol of the spring festival of Tet, are in bloom. A never-ending parade of motorbikes swirls around traffic circles. High-end stores such as Gucci sparkle near chain restaurants such as KFC. There’s scant evidence of the U.S. military presence, save for a rusting helicopter in the yard of a museum devoted to communist glory.But family secrets are buried like land mines.Trista Goldberg, 44, is a Pilates instructor from New Jersey, proud to call herself Amerasian, and founder of a group called Operation Reunite. She was adopted by a U.S. family in 1974 and found her birth mother in 2001. Two springs ago, she arrived at a house in Ho Chi Minh City where 80 people had gathered to provide DNA samples. She hopes to use potential matches to help make the case for about 400 whose applications for U.S. visas are pending further verification.“With a twist of fate, I could have been one of the ones who stayed back,” she said.Operation Reunite Returns Amerasians to VietnamMore than 3,000 Vietnamese orphans were evacuated from Vietnam in the chaotic final days of war. The lives of the rest changed with the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987, which allowed 21,000 Amerasians and more than 55,000 family members to settle in the United States.The “dust of life” suddenly became “gold children.” Rich Vietnamese paid to buy Amerasians, only to abandon them once they arrived in the United States, according to the former U.S. Marine and child psychiatrist Robert S. McKelvey, who wrote “The Dust of Life: America’s Children Abandoned in Vietnam.”In part because of such fraud, the United States tightened its screening procedures, and the number of immigrant visas issued dropped dramatically. Only 13 were issued last year.Nhan had traveled from his home in An Giang for Goldberg’s DNA collection session. He is a quiet man, a father of five with a third-grade education, a wide smile and ears that stick out slightly.His mother had told him he was the son of a soldier when he was about 10.“Why do kids tease me all the time? I get so upset, sometimes I want to hit them, ” Nhan recalled saying. “She paused for a while and told me I was a mixed kid. She looked sad, but my grandparents said they loved me the same. It didn’t matter.”After Nhan and the others gave DNA samples, they settled back to see whether this new technology would give them a chance at the old American dream.Making contactTop: Vo Huu Nhan, an Amerasian born to a Vietnamese mother and an American G.I. (Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)Bottom: Old photos of Bob Thedford as an officer in the Army during the late '60s. (Photo courtesy Vo Huu Nhan)In the fall, Bob Thedford’s wife, Louise, a genealogy buff, logged on to her account with Family Tree DNA, which is cooperating with Goldberg’s effort, and saw a surprising result. It was new information for her husband, a father-son link. The son was Nhan.Louise had long suspected that her husband might have had a child from his days as a military police officer in Vietnam in the late 1960s. She had found a picture of a Vietnamese woman tucked inside his wallet shortly after they wed.The news was more of a shock to their daughter, Amanda Hazel, 35, a paralegal from Fort Worth.“To be honest, the first thing I thought was, ‘Are you sure this isn’t a scam?’ ” Hazel recalled.But pictures of Nhan arrived a short time later. He was the image of his late grandfather, Robert Thedford Sr., a Navy veteran who had fought in World War II. “You look so much like your grandfather PawPaw Bob,” Bob told his son.Thedford, a strapping Tarrant County deputy sheriff known as “Red” for his auburn hair, had met Nhan’s mother while he was at Qui Nhon Air Base. His memories of her are hazy, and his family said he rarely spoke of the war.“He would never sit down and lament on it,” his stepson, John Gaines, recalled. “When I asked him, ‘Did you ever shoot someone?’ he said, ‘Yes, but you have to understand there are reasons behind that, and it’s part of war. I’m not going to sit here and explain to you what that’s like.’”As Thedford was teaching Hazel to swim and ride a bike in suburban Texas, Nhan was growing up on his grandparents’ pig farm, swimming in the river and getting caught stealing mangoes. The disparity in their lives was not lost on Thedford.“He just kept saying, ‘I didn’t know,’ ” Gaines said. “ ‘I didn’t know how to be there, or I would have been there. All I can tell you is I was surprised, and I hate finding out 45 years later.’ ”Tentative contacts followed, although Nhan speaks no English and does not have a computer. E-mails were exchanged through intermediaries, packages followed. Nhan sent sandals he had made and conical paddy hats; the Thedfords sent Nhan a $50 bill and Texas Rangers gear. “Is there anything you need?” Robert Thedford kept asking.Then there was the emotional first Skype call, when both men cried seeing each other for the first time.“He looked like me,” Nhan said after. “I felt like I connected with him right away.”But last August, Thedford, 67, who had previously been treated for skin cancer, fell ill again. The cancer had spread, and he had a series of operations, the most recent on April 3. As the Texas family rallied to care for him, Vietnam receded.‘My son in Vietnam’Dang Thi Kim Ngan, right, interprets for Vo Huu Nhan, center, as he Skypes with his half-sister Amanda Hazel. (Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)Recently, Nhan Skyped with Hazel from a dusty computer in the back of a friend’s sewing supply shop in Ho Chi Minh City. She spoke from her living room, her dogs running about.Nhan asked how his father was doing.“He’s doing good. He can sit up in a chair now. They’re working with him,” Hazel said. “I feel bad not connecting sooner, but Mom and Dad think about you and talk about you all the time.” Thedford had been showing pictures of Nhan to the nurses in the hospital and saying, “This is my son in Vietnam.”Nhan submitted the results of his DNA match to the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City in December 2013, asking for a reconsideration. But he has not heard back. A State Department spokesman said that privacy laws prevent discussion of any case.Hazel says that the family is all for helping Nhan immigrate to the United States, even as she knows that the transition would be difficult. “It’s going to totally throw him for a loop,” she said.But for now, theirs is a story without an end, the way the war itself is a wound that never completely healed. The story keeps spiraling forward, like the DNA double helix that brought them together.Nga Ly Hien Nguyen in Vietnam and Magda Jean-Louis and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.Amerasians in Saigon 1985 & 1987 including Kim NguyenJim LauriePublished on Feb 1, 2016Amerasian children were a fixture on the streets of Saigon from 1980 to 1987. Most had a very hard time; no parents and they were regarded as outcasts in society. Finally by 1988-1990, the US and Vietnamese governments agreed to allow nearly all to settle in the United States. Under the American Homecoming Act of 1988, about 23,000 Amerasians and 67,000 of their relatives entered the United States. These are excerpts of video shot in 1985 and 1987.Vietnam: A Tale of 'Miss Saigon,' Two Kims, Children of Dust and More Than 30 Years (huffingtonpost.com)Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left Behind (2013)SALTILLO, Miss. — Soon after he departed Vietnam in 1970, Specialist James Copeland received a letter from his Vietnamese girlfriend. She was pregnant, she wrote, and he was the father.He re-enlisted, hoping to be sent back. But the Army was drawing down and kept him stateside. By the time Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, he had lost touch with the woman. He got a job at a plastics factory in northern Mississippi and raised a family. But a hard question lingered: did she really have his child?“A lot of things we did in Vietnam I could put out of my mind,” said Mr. Copeland, 67. “But I couldn’t put that out.”In 2011, Mr. Copeland decided to find the answer, acknowledging what many other veterans have denied, kept secret or tried to forget: that they left children behind in Vietnam.Their stories are a forgotten legacy of a distant war. Yet for many veterans and their half-Vietnamese children, the need to find one another has become more urgent than ever. The veterans are hitting their mid-60s and early 70s, many of them retired or infirm and longing to salve the scars of an old war. And for many of the offspring, who have overcome at least some of the hurdles of immigration, the hunger to know their American roots has only grown stronger.“I need to know where I come from,” said Trinh Tran, 46, a real estate agent in Houston who has searched in vain for her G.I. father. “I always feel that without him, I don’t exist.”By some estimates, tens of thousands of American servicemen fathered children with Vietnamese women during that long war. Some of the children were a result of long-term relationships that would be unimaginable to the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where interaction with local people was minimal. Others were born of one-night stands. But few of the fathers ever met their offspring, and fewer still brought them home to America.After the war, those children — known as Amerasians — endured harsh discrimination and abject poverty in Vietnam, viewed as ugly reminders of an invading army. Shamed by reports of their horrible living conditions, Congress enacted legislation in 1987 giving Amerasians special immigration status. Since then, more than 21,000, accompanied by more than 55,000 relatives, have moved to the United States under the program, and several thousand more have come under other immigration policies.Many arrived expecting to be reunited with their American fathers. But the United States government did not help in that cause, and only a tiny fraction — perhaps fewer than 5 percent — ever found them.So many Amerasians continue to search, typically working with little more than badly translated names, half-forgotten memories and faded photographs.And some veterans are doing the same, driven by heartache, or guilt, to find sons and daughters. “It’s like the mother who gives up their kid for adoption,” said George Pettitt of Wales Center, N.Y. “You just never stop thinking about it.”Mr. Pettitt, 63, enlisted in the Army after dropping out of high school and was in Vietnam by age 19. During his year there, he developed a relationship with a Vietnamese woman who did laundry for soldiers. Soon she was pregnant.“I was taking comfort in having a girlfriend like that,” he said. “I never meant for her to get pregnant.”He returned home to western New York, lost touch with the woman, got a job driving trucks and raised a family. But when he retired for health reasons in 2000, he found himself haunted by memories of the child he left behind — a boy, he believes. He paid a man to look in Vietnam, but the trail went cold. This year, a woman in Virginia called to say she thought her husband might be his son. But a DNA test was negative.“I was hoping this was it,” he said. “I just feel so guilty about all this.”Yet against the odds and despite the many years, children and fathers sometimes find each other.Cuong Luu was born in Vietnam, the child of an American soldier who met his mother when she cleaned his apartment. The soldier left Vietnam before Mr. Luu was born, and his mother lost contact with him. Soon after, she married an American who worked for the military. He moved the family to the Virgin Islands when Mr. Luu was a toddler.Mr. Luu inherited many of his father’s features, and in the black neighborhood of St. Thomas where he grew up, he was taunted for being white. His mother also shunned him, he said, perhaps ashamed of the hard memories he evoked.At the age of 9, he was in a home for delinquent boys. By 17, he was living on the street, selling marijuana and smoking crack. At 20, he was in prison for robbing a man at gunpoint. When he got out, his half sister took him to Baltimore, where he resumed selling drugs.PhotoJames Copeland and Tiffany Nguyen, his daughter, who was born after he left Vietnam. Credit Lance Murphey for The New York TimesBut then he had a daughter with a girlfriend, and something inside him changed. “I worried I would just go to jail and never see her,” he said of his daughter, Cara, who is 4.Long plagued by questions about his identity, he decided he needed to find his biological father to set his life straight. “I wanted to feel more whole,” said Mr. Luu, 41. “I just wanted to see him with my own two eyes.”The quest became an obsession. Mr. Luu spent every night on his computer, hunting unsuccessfully until he realized he had spelled the name wrong: it was Jack Magee, not McGee.He discovered references to a Jack Magee on a veterans’ Web site and, through Facebook, tracked down a man who had served in the same unit. “What do you want from Jack Magee?” the man asked. “I just want a father,” Mr. Luu replied. “Your dad wants to talk to you,” the man wrote back not long after.Mr. Luu had his DNA tested, and it was a match. In November, Mr. Magee, a retired teacher from Southern California, visited Mr. Luu on his birthday. An awkward relationship, full of possibility but not untouched by resentment and wariness, was born.Mr. Magee now calls his son weekly, checking to make sure he is still working in his job cleaning hospital rooms in Baltimore. He also shipped a used Toyota Corolla from California to Mr. Luu, who had been commuting by bus.“I was stunned he was out there,” Mr. Magee, 75, said in an interview.Now that he has found his father, Mr. Luu said, he feels stronger. But the discovery, he has realized, has not solved his problems. What can a former felon do to make a better living? Go to college? Start a business? Drug dealing remains a powerful temptation.“I just wish I had met him before,” Mr. Luu said. “He could have taught me things.” " Recover the past" , Vietnam vets last battle to find his amerasian childBrian Hjort, a Danish man who has helped Mr. Luu and other Vietnamese track down their fathers, says Amerasians often have unrealistically high expectations for reunions with fathers, hoping they will heal deep emotional wounds. But the veterans they meet are often infirm or struggling economically. Sometimes the relationships are emotionally unfulfilling.“I try to tell them: I can’t guarantee love,” Mr. Hjort said. “I can only try to find your father.”Mr. Hjort, 42, is among a small coterie of self-trained experts who have helped Amerasians track down fathers, mostly pro bono. An industrial painter from Copenhagen, he first met Amerasians while traveling through Vietnam and the Philippines two decades ago and was struck by their desperate poverty.One asked him to find a friend’s father, and to his amazement he tracked the man down even though he had no knowledge of military records. News of Mr. Hjort’s success traveled rapidly through Amerasian circles, and he was soon besieged with pleas for help. Moved by the Amerasians’ suffering, he took on more cases, charging only the cost of his trips to Vietnam. He created a Web site, fatherfounded.org, that brought more requests than he could handle.Working in his spare time, he has found scores of fathers, he estimates. Some had died, and many others hung up on him. A few have threatened to sue him. But perhaps two dozen have accepted their children. And in recent years, veterans, too, have begun asking for help. James Copeland was one.In 2011, Mr. Copeland, by then retired, began reading about Amerasians’ miserable lives in Vietnam. Appalled, he decided to search for his own child.He found Mr. Hjort and sent him money to visit Vietnam. Armed with a few names and a crude map, Mr. Hjort found the village where Mr. Copeland had been based and tracked down the brother of an Amerasian woman who was living in America and who Mr. Hjort believed was Mr. Copeland’s daughter.Mr. Hjort sent a photograph of the woman and her mother to Mr. Copeland, and his heart jumped: he instantly recognized the mother as his old girlfriend. His hands were shaking with excitement as he dialed the daughter’s number and asked: “Is this Tiffany Nguyen?”In the coming days, he visited her, her mother and her three brothers in Reading, Pa., where she runs a nail salon at the Walmart. Ms. Nguyen and her three children spent Thanksgiving 2011 with him in Mississippi. For a time, they talked nightly, and she told him about how her mother had protected her from abuse in Vietnam, about their struggles to adapt to the United States, about how she had studied older men at the Walmart, wondering if one of them was her father.“There were a lot of years to cover,” Mr. Copeland said. “I can sleep a lot better now.”But the reunion has also brought him unexpected heartache. His wife became furious when she discovered that he had a Vietnamese daughter, and she demanded that he not visit her. He refused: Ms. Nguyen is his only biological child. After 37 years of marriage, he and his wife are separated and considering divorce, he said. His wife did not respond to efforts to reach her for comment.Mr. Copeland now helps Mr. Hjort contact veterans they believe are fathers of Amerasians. In his patient drawl, Mr. Copeland calmly tells them his story and urges them to confront the possibility that they, like him, have Vietnamese children.But if they dodge his calls or hang up, he continues to leave messages — with children, with spouses, on answering machines. They need to know, he said.“Some people, they just want to move on and forget it,” he said. “I don’t see how they can do it. But there’s a lot of them that I’m sure that’s the case. They just want to forget.”Father searching for amerasian child 2012-13, 12 casesExploring Stories Behind the Amerasian Experience After the Vietnam War | PBS EducationSEPTEMBER 27, 2017Before beginning this project, I did not know very much about the Vietnam War. Events such as the Tet Offensive and Operation Babylift were events I had heard about, but my knowledge of the events was vague. Since my parents lived through the war as children and came to America as refugees, I have always wanted to learn more about the people and history behind the war. It was important to me to discover what my parents experienced.Vietnamese Amerasians were merely children during the post Vietnam War era. Their American servicemen fathers left Vietnam. Their Vietnamese mothers would often abandon them or send them to orphanages. They were discriminated against and abused due to their appearance. This treatment is only some of what they had to go through when while still living in Vietnam.A Second Chance in the U.S.Fortunately, Robert J. Mrazek, a U.S. Congressman, flew to Vietnam after hearing about an Amerasian boy, named Le Van Minh, who needed medical help.. After seeing the horrid living conditions the Amerasian children endured and how they wanted to “go to the land of [their] father,” Mrazek decided to find a solution. He would eventually come to author the Amerasian Homecoming Act. As a result, the Vietnamese Amerasians, along with their families, were allowed a second chance at life and immigrated to the U.S.Even though I am of Vietnamese descent, I initially did not have any knowledge of Vietnamese Amerasians and their incredible stories. After intensive research and speaking to my parents, who interacted with Amerasians while they were still living in Vietnam, I realized that they had suffered way too much to not be mentioned in a history textbook. Amerasians also had a great impact on both the Vietnamese and American people. Almost 100,000 people immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. and they are now living in better conditions, becoming productive and contributing members of society.A School Project Inspires a Deeper DiveAlthough creating a National History Day project at my school is part of a class assignment for juniors, I created a project as an extracurricular activity when I was a sophomore. The History Day program provides students with the opportunity to dive into a topic and dig deeper than a student would during an average history course.To begin my project, I spent numerous hours researching. I gathered background information on Vietnamese Amerasians and the impact of the Amerasian Homecoming Act. I visited the Watson Library at the University of Kansas, where I found numerous newspaper articles and books from their databases and library. I also researched in other libraries. I contacted two Vietnamese Amerasians that came to America through Operation Babylift and the Amerasian Homecoming Act. Then, I had to write my script, a 500 word process paper with an annotated bibliography, and create my documentary.A Homecoming Act DocumentaryI thought that the topic of U.S. Congressman Robert Mrazek’s stand for Amerasians could be expressed most clearly through a documentary. I used iMovie to create my project and found video clips, images, and music that complemented the information provided. Through this documentary, viewers are enlightened about the agony Amerasians went through and the positive results from Mrazek’s Amerasian Homecoming Act.After working on this project, my determination to learn more about the Vietnam War grew stronger. Meeting Amerasians and hearing their stories made me want to continue to deepen my understanding about their struggles. Today, since most Americans do not know about the Vietnam War, Amerasians and the impacts of the Amerasian Homecoming Act, I feel like it is important topic for young people to examine.Kim Vu is a junior in Seaman High School in Topeka, Kansas. She is currently involved in band, Math Club, Key Club, SHARP Committee, Scholar’s Bowl, Student Council, Writing Center, and Track and Field inside of school. Outside of school, she is involved in the youth folk choir and volunteer at my church and at food banks. Kim won National History's Day Vietnam War Era Prize with this documentary.KIM VU High School StudentAmerasian PhotosThe American Homecoming Act or Amerasian Homecoming Act, was an Act of Congress giving preferential immigration status to children in Vietnamborn of U.S. fathers. The American Homecoming Act was written in 1987, passed in 1988, and implemented in 1989.The act increased Vietnamese Amerasian immigration to the U.S. because it allowed applicants to establish mixed race identity by appearance alone. Additionally, the American Homecoming Act allowed the Amerasian children and their immediate relatives to receive refugee benefitsAbout 23,000 Amerasians and 67,000 of their relatives entered the United States under this act.While the American Homecoming Act was the most successful program in moving Vietnamese Amerasian children to the United States, the act was not the first attempt by the U.S. government. Additionally the act experienced flaws and controversies over the refugees it did and did not include since the act only allowed Vietnamese Amerasian children.BackgroundIn April 1975, the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese forces. Refugees from Vietnam started to arrive in the United States under U.S. government programs. In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act (PL 97-359). The law prioritized U.S. immigration to children fathered by U.S. citizens including from Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, the law did not provide immigration to mothers or half-siblings, only to Amerasian children. Amerasians would generally have to coordinate with their American fathers in order to obtain a visa. This provided a challenge for many since some fathers did not know they had children or the fathers may not be claiming the children. If the Amerasian children did not have documentation from the American father, then they could be examined for “American” physical features by a group of doctors. Additionally, since the U.S. and Vietnam’s governments did not have diplomatic relations, the law could not be applied to Vietnamese Amerasian children. Essentially the Amerasian Immigration Act did little for Amerasian children and even less for Vietnamese Amerasian children.As a way to address Vietnamese Amerasian children, the U.S. government permitted another route for Vietnamese-born children of American soldiers to the United States. The children would be classified as immigrants, but would also be eligible to receive refugee benefits. The U.S. and Vietnam governments established the Orderly Departure Program (ODP). The program is housed in the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). The ODP created a system where South Vietnamese soldiers and others connected to the U.S. war effort could emigrate from Vietnam to the United States. Initially the Amerasian children had to have documentation from their American fathers to be issued a visa, however the program eventually expanded to individuals that did not have firm documentation. The Orderly Departure Program moved around 6,000 Amerasians and 11,000 relatives to the United States.EnactmentOn August 6, 1987, Rep. Robert J. Mrazek [D-NY-3] introduced the Amerasian Homecoming Bill (H.R. 3171). The bill was cosponsored by 204 U.S. representatives (154 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and 1 Independent). In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act (PL 100-200). The law took effect on March 21, 1988 and allowed Vietnamese Amerasians born January 1, 1962 through January 1, 1976 to apply for immigrant visas until March 21, 1990. Additionally the legislation removed immigration quotas and reduced legal barriers for Vietnamese Amerasians’ immigration. As a result of the act around 20,000 Amerasian children left Vietnam. Prior to the Amerasian Homecoming Act, many Amerasian children faced prejudice in Vietnam sometimes referred to as bui doi (“the dust of life” or “trash”). However, after the act many of these children would be called “golden children” since not only could the Amerasian children move to the United States, but so could their families. The act allowed the spouse, child, mother, or the next of kin of the Amerasian child to emigrate. The act was significant, because it allowed applicants to establish mixed race identity by appearance alone.Immigration processThe American Homecoming Act operated through the Orderly Departure Program in the respective U.S. embassies. U.S. Embassy officials would conduct interviews for Amerasians children and their families. The interviews were intended to prove whether or not the child’s father was a U.S. military personnel. Under the American Homecoming Act, Vietnamese Amerasian children did not have to have documentation from their American fathers; however, if they did their case would be processed quicker. The approval rating for Amerasian applicants was approximately 95 percent. The approved applicants and their families would go through a medical exam. The medical exam was less extensive than other immigration medical exams. If they passed, the U.S. would notify Vietnamese authorities and would process them for departure. The Amerasians would then be sent to the Philippines for a 6-month English language (ESL) and cultural orientation (CO) program. Once the Amerasians arrived in the United States they would be resettled by private voluntary agencies contracted with the U.S. State Department. Some Amerasians gave accounts that some “fake families” approached them as a way to immigrate to the United States. The U.S. Attorney General in conversation with the U.S. Secretary of State submitted program reports to the U.S. Congress every three years.ControversiesWhile the American Homecoming Act was the most successful measure by the United States to encourage Amerasian immigration, the act faced controversies. A primary issue was the act only applied to Amerasian children born in Vietnam. The American Homecoming Act excluded Korea, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. While Amerasian children from outside Vietnam could immigrate to the United States, they could do so only if their fathers claimed them. Most fathers did not recognize their children, especially if they were born to sex workers. In 1993, a class action lawsuit was filed in the International Court of Complaints to establish Filipino Amerasian children’s rights to assistance. The court ruled against the children, stating they were the products of sexual services provided to U.S. service personnel. Since prostitution is illegal, there could be no legal claim for the Filipino Amerasian children. Amerasian advocacy groups are actively attempting to gain recognition for Amerasian children through legal and legislative measures.There were other concerns facing the American Homecoming Act by the Vietnamese immigrants. Some accounts include a Vietnamese woman who attempted to claim American citizenship for her Amerasian son, but the father denied the relationship and responsibility by calling her a prostitute. Since sex workers were largely excluded, many children were unable to participate in the program. In the 1970s, the U.S. cut refugee cash assistance and medical aid to only eight months. Many Amerasian children account of their struggles in public school and very few attended higher education.Amerasian children who stayed in their respective countries found difficulties. Many of the children faced prejudice since their fair skin or very dark skin, blue eyes, or curly black hair would quickly identify them as Amerasian. Additionally the children faced judgment from the new socialist Vietnamese officials and other neighbors since their features positioned them as reminders of the “old enemy.”Amerasian Homecoming Act – 25 Years LaterThe Amerasian Homecoming Act, which passed into law in December 1987 and went into effect a few months later, began with a photojournalist, a homeless boy in Vietnam, and four high school students in Long Island, New York. Twenty five years later, almost 100,000 people have immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. as a result of the AHA.First, a bit of background. One of the great tragedies of the Vietnam War is the story of the Amerasians–children of U.S. servicemen and Vietnamese women. There are tens of thousands of such children. In Vietnam, they were known as “children of the dust” because they were considered as insignificant as specks of dust, and many (if not most) suffered discrimination, abuse, poverty, and homelessness. Although the fathers of these children were United States citizens, the children did not qualify to immigrate to the U.S. The situation was complicated by the absence of diplomatic relations between the government of the United States and the government of Vietnam. Ten years after the war, the situation for the Amerasians seemed hopeless. A 2009 article from Smithsonian Magazine describes what happened next:In October 1985, Newsday photographer Audrey Tiernan, age 30, on assignment in Ho Chi Minh City, felt a tug on her pant leg. “I thought it was a dog or a cat,” she recalled. “I looked down and there was [Le Van] Minh. It broke my heart.” Minh, with long lashes, hazel eyes, a few freckles and a handsome Caucasian face, moved like a crab on all four limbs, likely the result of polio. Minh’s mother had thrown him out of the house at the age of 10, and at the end of each day his friend, Thi, would carry the stricken boy on his back to an alleyway where they slept. On that day in 1985, Minh looked up at Tiernan with a hint of a wistful smile and held out a flower he had fashioned from the aluminum wrapper in a pack of cigarettes. The photograph Tiernan snapped of him was printed in newspapers around the world. The next year, four students from Huntington High School in Long Island saw the picture and decided to do something. They collected 27,000 signatures on a petition to bring Minh to the United States for medical attention.They asked Tiernan and their congressman, Robert Mrazek, for help.Mrazek began making phone calls and writing letters. Several months later, in May 1987, he flew to Ho Chi Minh City. Mrazek had found a senior Vietnamese official who thought that helping Minh might lead to improved relations with the United States, and the congressman had persuaded a majority of his colleagues in the House of Representatives to press for help with Minh’s visa.Minh came to the U.S., where he still lives. but once he got to Vietnam, the Congressman realized that many thousands of Amerasian children were living in Vietnam, often in terrible conditions. Congressman Mrazek resolved to help these children. The result was the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which went into effect in early 1988.The AHA allowed Amerasians to come to the United States as lawful permanent residents. They are not considered refugees, but they do receive benefits (such as financial assistance and housing) normally reserved for refugees. In an important way, the law was quite succcesful–as a result of the AHA, approximately 25,000 Amerasians and about 70,000 of their family members immigrated to the United States.However, the law was not a success by all measures. For one thing, not all Amerasians in Vietnam learned about the AHA, and so many people who might have qualified to leave Vietnam were unable to do so.Another problem was fraud. One type of fraud involved people who claimed to be Amerasian, but who were not (there was no easy way to tell who was an Amerasian, and many decisions were made based on the person’s physical appearance). However, the more pervasive problem of fraud involved “fake families.” These were people who attached themselves to the Amerasian immigrants’ cases in order to come with them to the U.S. In many cases, the Amerasians agreed to this fraud because the fake families would pay the Amerasians’ expenses. Without this assistance, the Amerasians could not have afforded to immigrate. The extent of the fraud is unknown, but a November 1992 GAO report found that in 1991, about 20% of applicants were rejected for fraud. By 1992, 80% of applicants were rejected for fraud.A final problem–though perhaps this is not a problem with the AHA itself–is that many Amerasians had a tough time adjusting to life in the United States. A 1991-92 survey of 170 Vietnamese Amerasians found that some 14 percent had attempted suicide; 76 percent wanted, at least occasionally, to return to Vietnam. As one advocate put it, “Amerasians had 30 years of trauma, and you can’t just turn that around in a short period of time.”Of course, Amerasians did far better here than they could have in Vietnam, but given their difficult lives back home, the adjustment was often not easy. According to the Encyclopedia of Immigration:In general, the Amerasians who came to the United States with their mothers did the best in assimilating to American society. Many faced great hardships, but most proved resilient and successful. However, only 3 percent of them managed to contact their American fathers after arriving in the United States. By 2009, about 50 percent of all the immigrants who arrived under the law had become U.S. citizens.Now, Amerasians host black tie galas to celebrate their success as a unique immigrant community. And even in Vietnam, where they were vilified for many years, negative feelings towards Amerasians have faded.Finally, on a personal note, my first job out of college was for a social service agency that did refugee resettlement, and so I worked with Amerasians (and others) for a few years in the early 1990s. Of the populations we served, it seemed to me that the Amerasians had been the most severely mistreated. Many were illiterate in Vietnamese and spoke no English. They were physically unhealthy, and they had a hard time adjusting. Twenty five years after the AHA, it seems that Amerasians are finally achieving a measure of success in the United States. Their long journey serves as a reminder that persecuted people need time to become self sufficient. But the Amerasians–like other refugee groups–are well on their way to fully integrating into American society.The Children They Left BehindChildren of the Vietnam War (smithonianmag.com)Vietnamese Amerasians in America : Asian-NationVietnamese Find No Home Here in Their Fathers' Land (NYT 1991)1989 The Dust of Life: The Legal and Political Ramifications of the Continuing Vietnamese Amerasian Problem (elibrary.law.psu.edu)They came here as refugees. Now the U.S. may be deporting some Vietnamese nationals.Vietnamese deportees and Amerasians Thanh Hung Bui , from left, and Cuong Pham, from center, speak to U.S. lawyer and Vietnamese-American Tin Nguyen at a cafe in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on April 19, 2018.James Pearson / ReutersA few days before Christmas last year, Cuong Pham boarded a plane in Texas to fly to his home country of Vietnam, he said.He had last visited the country about a decade before, but this time, Pham wouldn't be returning to the U.S., where his wife and three children live. He was being deported.Pham didn’t want to go back, he said, “because all my life is in the U.S. It's not here.”I want to go back to my family, my wife and children…. I don’t even know what I’m going to do next.Pham was one of a small number of Vietnamese nationals who were deported last December despite a bilateral agreement that apparently excludes them from being deported, according to several immigration and civil rights advocates.In 2008, the U.S. and Vietnam signed a repatriation agreement that explicitly excludes Vietnamese nationals who arrived in the U.S. before July 12, 1995 — the date the two countries reestablished diplomatic relations — from being subject to deportation. Many of those who arrived before that date were refugees of the Vietnam War.But civil rights and immigration groups say they believe that seven Vietnamese nationals who arrived in the U.S. before 1995 were deported late last year and early this year.“Many of them have never been back to Vietnam and many of them don’t have any family there,” Phi Nguyen — litigation director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta (Advancing Justice-Atlanta), which earlier this year filed a lawsuit challenging the detention of Vietnamese nationals not covered under the 2008 agreement — said. “The idea of being returned to a place that they are no longer connected to is causing a lot of fear in the community, especially when people who are in this situation have felt safe for the last several years and have been able to rebuild their life here and create families here.”'AMERASIAN' HOMECOMINGPham, 47, was born in Vietnam and grew up there until he was 20 years old, immigrating to the United States in 1990, he said. The son of a U.S. serviceman, Pham said he came to the U.S. under the Amerasian Homecoming Act, a law that allows some Vietnamese nationals whose fathers were U.S. citizens as well as their next of kin to immigrate to the U.S.Pham received his final order of removal in 2009 following two convictions, he said. In 2000, he was convicted of indecent assault and battery of children under 14, a sex crime. In 2007, he was convicted of driving under the influence.Vietnamese deportee and Amerasian Cuong Pham , 47, who was deported from the U.S., poses outside his former house, where he lived before he fled to the U.S., in central Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on April 20, 2018.Kham / ReutersSince arriving in Vietnam, Pham has settled in a rural area of the country he described as a “jungle” where there is no running water. He said he has had difficulty in securing a job over the last four-and-a-half months as employers have rejected his inquiries based on his multiracial status. His wife has provided him with some financial assistance, but is also working to support their three children.“For me, right now it’s a very, very hard time,” he said by phone from Vietnam. “I want to go back to my family, my wife and children…. I don’t even know what I’m going to do next.”Reuters last month reported that former U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius said a “small number” of people protected by the repatriation agreement have been sent back.Osius did not respond to a request for comment.As Cambodian deportations resume, community looks for ways to copeImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Brendan Raedy said in an email that “both countries maintain and continue to discuss their respective legal positions relative to Vietnamese citizens who departed Vietnam for the United States prior to July 12, 1995.”The U.S. Department of State did not directly address the deportations when contacted by NBC News. Department spokesperson Ambrose Sayles said that the removal of aliens subject to a final order of removal, particularly those who pose a danger to national security or public safety, is a top priority for the U.S. government.“We continue to work closely with Vietnamese authorities to address this issue. ... The U.S. Government and the Vietnamese Government continue to discuss their respective positions relative to Vietnamese citizens who departed Vietnam for the United States,” Sayles said in an email.'IT'S ENTIRELY UP TO VIETNAM'Bill Ong Hing, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco who specializes in immigration law and policy, said that agreements such as the one between the U.S. and Vietnam that should exempt certain individuals from deportation are not law, but rather serve as guidelines that don't necessarily need to be followed.“In spite of the agreement, it's entirely up to Vietnam,” he said. “What usually happens is that the receiving country is not willing to take the people. But if the receiving country is willing to take the person, then there's not much that can be done about that.”A receiving country could be pressured into accepting or decide to accept deportees for various reasons, Hing noted.'Never too late to change': In deportation limbo, Tung Nguyen wants to help fellow felonsHe said it has been and remains uncommon for the repatriation of individuals protected under such agreements to be deported. Whether or not this trend continues is dependent on the Trump administration and ICE offices that prioritize which individuals to deport, he said.As of December 2017, there were more than 8,600 Vietnamese nationals residing in the United States subject to a final order of removal, 7,821 of who have criminal convictions, according to ICE. As of April 12, ICE has removed 76 Vietnamese nationals to Vietnam in fiscal year 2018 and had 156 Vietnamese nationals in detention.Raedy said that in calculating these figures, ICE does not track the year that immigrants with final orders of removal came to the United States.In fiscal years 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, the United States deported a total of 186 Vietnamese nationals, according to ICE data.Vietnamese deportee and Amerasian Cuong Pham , 47, who was deported from the U.S., uses his mobile phone while having a coffee in central Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on April 20, 2018.Kham / ReutersNguyen, the litigation director, said it is uncertain whether this is the first time Vietnamese nationals who arrived prior to 1995 have been deported, but that it is the first time her organization is aware of an effort to deport the individuals in large numbers since the 2008 agreement.Despite the group that has been deported, it does not appear as though Vietnam is willing to accept all pre-1995 Vietnamese nationals who have final orders of removal, Nguyen said.The lawsuit filed by Advancing Justice-Atlanta — along with Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus, and the law firm Reed Smith LLP — alleges that at least 45 pre-1995 Vietnamese nationals are being detained without due process.It also stated that "the U.S. government claims that Vietnam is now 'willing to consider' repatriation of Vietnamese who came to the United States before July 12, 1995.”The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vietnam did not respond to a request for comment.Nonprofits sue over immigration detention of Vietnamese nationals who came as refugeesDeportations of the seven pre-1995 Vietnamese nationals follow detentions in the community that took place last year.In early 2017, community organizations sent out an alert following the detention of about 40 Vietnamese nationals, Nancy Nguyen — the executive director of of the nonprofit VietLead, who is unrelated to Phi Nguyen — said.Pham was among those redetained early last year.The roundups prompted VietLead and several other groups to organize visits in November and December 2017 to a detention center in Georgia, Nancy Nguyen said. Through these visits, the organizations found that both pre- and post-1995 Vietnamese were being detained for prolonged periods of time. They also learned of six pre-1995 Vietnamese who had been deported.Phi Nguyen said ICE’s routine practice for decades was to release pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants within 90 days of their order of removal because the agency knew it could not deport them.The idea of being returned to a place that they are no longer connected to is causing a lot of fear in the community.But beginning in March 2017, ICE began re-arresting those nationals, the lawsuit said. In March and late October to early November, detainees arrested from across the country were sent to detention centers to be interviewed by the Vietnamese Consulate, the suit alleges.A possible victory came on April 17 for some Vietnamese class members represented in the lawsuit when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a provision in a federal law that makes it easier to deport immigrants convicted of certain crimes.“If someone got their deportation order based on one of the crimes covered, then they have the ability to re-visit their removal order,” Phi Nguyen noted.She added that the court's decision will have an impact on class members, but that their cases still need to be examined more closely.“The U.S. not following the agreement is just another sign of it breaking rules and breaking our families apart,” Nancy Nguyen said. “As an organization, we’re working to hold the U.S. accountable to its promises.”Once shunned by many, Vietnamese Amerasians now celebrate their heritage (a San Jose gala in 2008). At a similar gathering, many in the audience wept when an Amerasian family that had just arrived in the United States was introduced. (Catherine Karnow)Read more: Children of the Vietnam WarChildren of Vietnam War servicemen seek U.S. citizenshipRandy Tran walked quickly past the majestic domes and marble statues of Capitol Hill, looking for the Cannon House Office building and the people he believed could help him.Tran, a Vietnamese pop singer who lives in a Bay Area suburb and sleeps on a friend's couch, flew 2,900 miles to be here. He rehearsed what he wanted to say. His English was not perfect. He was afraid he would have just a few minutes to make his case.He had a 3 p.m. appointment in the office of a Wisconsin congressman. He was not exactly sure what the congressman did, but he was certain that this was a powerful man who could help untangle a political process that had ensnared him and thousands like him.Tran came to Washington on behalf of abandoned children of American soldiers and Vietnamese women, born during the Vietnam War and, like him, seeking citizenship in the country their fathers fought for.Called Amerasians, many were left to grow up in the rough streets and rural rice fields of Vietnam where they stood out, looked different, were taunted as "dust of life." Most were brought to the United States 20 years ago after Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which allowed the children of American soldiers living in Vietnam to immigrate. But citizenship was not guaranteed, and today about half of the estimated 25,000 Amerasians living in the U.S. are resident aliens.Tran lives in Hayward and travels the country crooning pop songs to Vietnamese fans at restaurants and concert halls. But he feels unsettled."I feel like I belong nowhere," said Tran, whose father was an African American whose name he likely will never know, but who gave him the mocha-colored skin so different from other Vietnamese."If I go to Little Saigon, they say, 'Are you Vietnamese? You look black.' If I go to the American community, they say, 'You're not one of us. You're Vietnamese.' "But most wrenching for Tran is his lack of citizenship, a constant reminder of being an outsider in what he considers his fatherland."Our fathers served for the country, fought for freedom," Tran said. "I am not a refugee, but I am being treated as one. We are Americans."Tran and 21 other Amerasians flew to Washington, D.C., for three days in July to lobby for the Amerasian Paternity Act. It would give Amerasians born during the Vietnam and Korean wars automatic citizenship, rather than requiring them to pass tests in English.Most of them had never been to Washington. Some purchased their first suits for the trip. Some spoke no English at all.Tran does not know his age. On paper he is 34, but he guesses he is closer to 37.His mother left him in an orphanage in Da Nang when he was days old. A few years later, a woman in a nearby village adopted him to help care for her cows. She refused to let him call her "mother."The neighbors gawked at his dark skin; the village children yanked his curly hair. At night he would dream that his hair had turned straight and that he could pour a liquid over his body to turn his face pale. He would hide behind the bamboo mat he slept on."They looked at us like we were wild animals, not people," Tran said.When the Homecoming Act passed in 1988, thousands of Vietnamese who wanted to escape the Communist government used the Amerasians as a device to flee. At 17, Tran was sold to a family for three gold bars. When the family got to America, they asked Tran to leave their home. He moved in with a friend's family.Like Tran, many Amerasians lacked the English skills, education and family connections that had helped other Vietnamese refugees assimilate. Many did not attend school in Vietnam and arrived in America illiterate. Many migrated to Vietnamese communities where they were once again shunned. Some turned to drugs or gangs.They received eight months of government assistance, including healthcare, English lessons and some job training. But the government did not help Amerasians locate their fathers, and funding for the program ended in 1995.In Washington, Tran and the other Amerasians crowded into a friend's house. There was Vivian Preziose from Queens, whose father brought her to the U.S. when she was 10. There was Jimmy "Nhat Tung" Miller from Seattle, who found his father a couple of years before the man died. There was Huy Duc Nguyen from Dallas, whose only clue about his father is that his last name sounds something like "Sheffer."They mapped out their plans. Preziose passed out 435 folders containing a letter she wrote. The next day they would deliver a folder to every congressional office. They also had appointments on Capitol Hill, so they rehearsed what they would say.Some stumbled over their words. Preziose encouraged them to speak from their hearts. Nguyen reminded them not to wear jeans. Tran advised them to speak slowly.A year ago, few of the Amerasians knew one another. That changed when Nguyen went to a screening of a documentary about Amerasians stuck in Vietnam and met others like him. They talked about helping those still in Vietnam and started reaching out to Amerasians across the country. They knew of Tran from his singing.Tran urged them to lobby for the citizenship bill, sponsored by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose). In September 2007, they formed the Amerasian Fellowship Assn., which now has 5,000 members.They had grown up haunted by a raw sense of being thrown away by their parents. Now mostly in their 30s and 40s, they came together for political reform, and along the way formed a community for those who felt invisible.The day after they handed out the folders, Tran anxiously waited on the marble steps of the Cannon building for his team to arrive.By the time they got to Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner's office (R-Wisconsin), they were five minutes late.They met a man in a tan suit with a faint smile.Tran introduced himself and began describing the difficulties faced by Amerasians. Many cannot speak English, he said, making it difficult to pass the citizenship test.The meeting lasted less than 25 minutes -- not enough time for Tran to say that he was not allowed to go to school in Vietnam, that while he tended to the cows he would peer through the schoolhouse windows at the students learning to read.Tran thought the man seemed confused why they were there. But he promised to do what he could to help.It wasn't until the man handed out his business card that Tran realized he wasn't talking to the congressman from Wisconsin. He was talking to a staffer."I didn't know who he was," Tran said. "I just knew we wanted to meet him. I wanted to tell our story."There is a lot Tran does not understand. He's not sure which of the two houses of Congress the bill is stuck in or why it is taking so long to become law. When he and other Amerasians met with Lofgren in the Capitol building, he thought they were in the White House.Lofgren warned the group that it was unlikely the bill would pass this year. But she promised to reintroduce it next year.Some of the Amerasians decided to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, believing the names of their fathers might be inscribed on the wall.Tran decided not to go. He has no clues as to who his father is. When Tran walked past an older black man on the street, he turned and looked.He still wonders why his mother left him to suffer in Vietnam. Once, it was a source of deep anger. But his fury turned to sympathy when he learned about the harsh conditions during the war, the stigma of having a child out of wedlock with an American.Perhaps she gave him away hoping he would have a better life. He once wrote a song called "After the War." When he performs it before Vietnamese audiences, they are often brought to tears.Tran later wrote an e-mail to the staffer. He mistakenly identified the man as "Mrs." He also sent along an English translation of the lyrics of "After the War."He has yet to hear back. But he has faith that America will come through, [email protected]

Initially when I started at Capital One in the Fredericksburg, VA call center, I was immediately hooked, yes, I drank the kool-aid. It WAS an amazing company to work for & Rich and Nigel were amazing employers that actually at one time cared about the happiness of their employees and the Culture was incredible. The hiring standards were VERY high, for instance the 28 people that made up the 2 hiring classes when I started training were THE cream of the crop and I was VERY PROUD to say that I was one of 28 out of 1,200 applicants. At some point about 5 years in, they began just hiring bodies to fill seats. Even worse, rather than promote from within, as had always been the case, someone had the bright idea to bring in a lot of outsiders (primarily people with a military background - and remember, this was pre 9/11 and pre war so it was not in an attempt to support veterans). The problem was that these folks “off of the street” had not been introduced to the AMAZING CapOne culture and because they were filling senior management roles just as soon as their 6 week Customer Service training was completed (basically they went through the training just to know how to operate the many operating systems & software that we were currently using. You would have to log into about 7 programs at the start of each shift - Old school software with names like Grumpy, Bashful, Unisys, Lotus ccMail, as well as our newest windows based program that I shall not mention in case it is still in use). So now the 6 or 7 highest ranking individuals in the call center had NO background in banking & no knowledge or belief in the culture that had, up until that point, worked successfully. The previous culture inspired happy associates and you don't have to be a genius to know that happy associates were productive and successful associates. Bringing in this “crop” of outsiders who had NEVER spent time “in the trenches” or on the phones with the cardholders, therefore they had no clue in how lead & motivate their subordinates. Then suddenly it was all about an “era of change”, these new comers (basically NOBODIES, yet they were a small group of “2nd in command”, reporting only to the Site Director) enacted a coup, forcing the amazing Site Director (who by the way had started ON THE PHONES, fresh out of school, back when we were Bank of Virginia, issuing MasterCharge cards, working her way up the ranks). Ariana was an amazing, inspiring woman to work for. The same could not be said for this group of “new comers” that insisted upon basically throwing the old culture out the window. All associate incentives such as quality assurance bonuses, quarterly & annual performance review raises or bonuses, advancement opportunity, commissions for sales of card related products (oh yes, we were expected to turn our cost center into a profit center so we were suddenly expected to make sales at the close of every call) It wasn't long before WE were hosting visitors from India, training them how to do our jobs. I'll bet you can guess what happened from there … YEP, soon after the completion of construction for not one, but two gorgeous new office buildings were soon standing empty, as the Indians that we were training to provide customer service to our customers took that knowledge back to India with them, used their new found knowledge to train hundreds more of their co-workers and our jobs were outsourced, while individuals with names like Mohammed, Raj, Punjab, Taija, Manditha, etc were trying to convince callers that their names were Mike, Chuck, John, Sara and Michelle through their very heavy accents. And yes, the few employees that remained in the Fredericksburg office were offered buyouts OR “some type” of position in the Richmond offices (approximately 60 miles south), although the positions were not guaranteed to be in a department that they were used ro working in or in a job that they could be happy in. My, oh my, what ever happened to the culture that Rich Fairbanks & Nigel Morris spread in their great vision for this once incredible company? What happened to the town hall meetings & annual Roadshows that were HUGE productions, where Rich & Nigel would stand before us, congratulate us ALL for having an exceptional year, pass out Capital One emblazoned wind suits, gift EVERY associate 50 shares of company stock, only to tell us the following year that the company had enjoyed a great deal of growth & the stocks had split 3 ways - so we now owned 150 shares of conpany stock. In that day, Busch Gardens had been rented for the Virginia employees (we had seen growth by opening a Seattle, WA office, as well as an office in Texas). But with the “new think tank” that had been hired to comprise the Senior Management staff, gone were the face to face meetings with our “owners” (Rich & Nigel), gone were the bonuses & gifts like the wind suits etc. And eventually GONE were the associates that filled those two beautiful new buildings, which I might add, sat empty for quite awhile. The culture of empowering each associate to bring forth new ideas (in fact contests were held to develop our newest marketing plans & card products). We were no longer empowered, we were expected to be robots without feelings, family lives, illnesses etc. It has been many years since I was a proud Capiral One associate … thank goodness, getting out before the ridiculous Viking commercials, the Alec Baldwin & Jennifer Love-Hewitt commercials etc where basically everyone asked “what's in your wallet?”. After watching the demise of our once well loved company, where we provided superior customer service to our Basic & Secured Card cardholders … I can honestly say that I got out before anyone wanted to know “what was in my wallet”. As for the “herd” of upper level management that wandered in off of the street, who knows what happened to them. At the time of my becoming disabled & unable to return to work, several of them had perished but were being replaced by more, this time, rather than former military, we were graced with “children” fresh out of college … again bypassing long-loyal associates who lived & breathed the “old” CapOne culture. It seems when they went through the 6 week training program, once again, the chapter on the CapOnw culture had been left out. What was once a MAJOR accomplishment to be selected as a Capital One Associate (28 out of over 1200 applicants) was now as easy as showing up with a pulse & a sonewhat adequate ability to read from a script. While the company seems to be thriving, as they have now entered automobile finance, mortgage & branch banking but at what cost? In my first 6 weeks of.training, and for the remainder of my first year, I joked.that I was indeed the equivalent of a “Stepford Wife” and so were so many of my co-workers. Noone EVER passed in the hallway without a smile & a hello. The area where we took our smoking breaks was abuzz with associates telling stories about calls they had endured that morning (and usually some well intemded advice from a more seasoned associate on how better to handle that particular issue the next time you encountered it). Thank you Rich Fairbanks and Nigel Morris for the very happy first 4 of my total of 6 years working for you. I hope & pray that you stopped hiring these upper level management positions from outside of the company and returned to empowering your existing associates and promoting from within. I just pray that you retained enough of your old associates that they remembered “the good old days” when we were one small building on Riverside Drive, where EVERYONE was greeted with a friendly good morning … and the Capital One culture was one of growth, happiness, productivity, creativity and empowerment. I would love to return to Capital One on a part time basis (due to my disability, I would only be able to work part time). One last cute story, during my 5th week at the company, we got to encounter our first company “celebration” (I believe for reaching 1 Million Cardholders AND obtaining Fortune 500 Status as a Top 100 Place To Work) in which our spouses were invited, there was an open bar, a table with a mountain of shrimp that stood as higg as my head & the shrimp were the size of my thumb. At the actual ”sit down dinner”, there was an Italian buffet. I bumprd into Mr. Rich Fairbanks & began a conversation with him about this being my 5th week in training/as an employee at Capital One and how blown away I was by the culture and generosity of the company (I left my first day of employment with full health coverage for myself & my husband, 3 weeks paid vacation from the very beginning, bereavement days, sick days, time & a half for OT wotked, double time for working minor holidays, triple time for working major holidays, plus “floating holidays” for wotking the normal government holidays, a pay differential for working nights and weekends, long term disability insurance, life insurance for both myself & my spouse, 401k matching with an automatic 3% contribution by the company even if I opted NOT to contribute, plus there were so many bonus structures & advancement opportunities). I know I had to be sounding like a babbling idiot rambling on to the poor man about HIS company. What happened next shocked & inspired me … he took the time to remember my name and said “Robbin, I am VERY happy to hear how happy you are here, I plan on coming back down in a few months & I will seek you out because I want to see the same joy in your eyes & hear the same excitement in your voice., I want to see it on you in a year & in even 5 years and I hope you have worked you way up the ranks, as far as you want to go by then” And HE DID search for me about 6 months later when he came down to the office. Then we spoke at Busch Gardens at the next Road Show about a year later, and the town hall meeting in 2 years, which by then I had been promoted to floor supervisor, then eventually got to mamage my own team. By then, it was no longer a “fun” environment. And believe me, I understand that we needed to promote a professional environment, but the final 2 years there for me were NOT the culture that Rich Fairbanks promoted in his town hall meetings and when he sought me out to check my progress. I am to this very day, honored that he took the time to either write down or remember my name and to seek me out to do a “temperature check” on at least 3 separate occasions. I am very sure that Mr. Fairbanks, while making money, is disappointed in what Capital One has become in simply tossing the culture that he & Mr. Morris built this great company on. If any of my former co-workers from the 1995 - 2002 range from the Fredericksburg Office (especially Riverside) - here’s a shout out and I hope you are all doing well. Would love to hear from you, especially Mr.Fairbanks.Respectfully submitted,Robbin Grover (formerly Talley during my tenure at Capital One)