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For Simone Bui, educated in Paris, trained in the law, reared in what would be upper-class circumstances in the U.S., a rural town in Arkansas presents frustrations. "In Viet Nam it was a good life," she says. "Even in the middle class you could hire at least two people to help you. Here I'm a bit of everything—cook, barmaid, what you call domestic engineer. And sometimes I get lonesome."
The Buis are well enough off that she can sometimes fly to Arlington, Va., to see her sister, or even, occasionally, to Brussels to visit her three brothers and catch up on her law studies. She has accepted the fact that her career plans must be postponed. "We are lucky because my husband had the training," she says. "It's good for him, but it's not good for me." There are few people in Wilmot for the sophisticated, ambitious and rather restless Simone to share her feelings with. The resentments she candidly voiced about life in Wilmot at first provoked understandable criticism. Now she prudently tries to keep them to herself.
Like many others of their class in Wilmot, the Buis send their school-age children (except for Tuyen) to a private academy 17 miles away, although the integrated public school is equally good academically. The new life in America is perhaps most puzzling for Loan, a pretty eighth grader at Montrose Academy. She is caught not only in the gap between childhood and adulthood, but in the breach between two continents and two races. "In Viet Nam, parents are strict with their children," says her mother. "They're taught to respect their elders. But that doesn't last in America." Discipline sets Loan apart in Wilmot, more than her appearance. Her classmates are free to come and go, and have few responsibilities. Loan is expected to help with the cleaning and cooking and taking care of the smaller children. But the old ways break down. Loan wears cutoff blue jeans and goes barefoot. She has proudly hung up in her bedroom a drawing of Snoopy that she made herself. "I let her do what American children do," says Simone, "but I won't let her go on a date with a boy. I wish she could see that we're not so strange."
Loan's room is decorated with stuffed toys, and pictures of the current crop of teen idols—Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett—are pinned to her bulletin board. But she often feels out of place here, confused by the racial tension in the schools, insecure about her own fledgling identity. So remote does her former life seem to her and her classmates that she is surprised when an American visitor recognizes the name Danang. She is even more astonished at the memories the name provokes. But she is only a teenager, a sheltered one, and she recalls little of the fighting. What she does remember is that "we had a big house in Saigon and there were banana trees in the yard. And the people looked just like me." —Anne Constable