Amerasian - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• In the M*A*S*H episode "Yessir, That's Our Baby," the staff of the 4077th find an abandoned Amerasian baby and attempted to help her after Father Mulcahy warns that she will be mistreated at the orphanage. Although the staff initially decline his advice about leaving her with a reclusive monastic order, their own efforts to solicit aid from various organizations were bluntly rebuffed with frustrating regularity. This included a confrontation with a South Korean representative who pointed out the mortifying fact to the U.S. officers that their own government ignores the issue as well. Eventually, the staff leave the baby with the monks.

• The character of Mia Elliott played by Amerasian actress Nancy Hsueh, on the cancelled daytime soap Love is a Many Splendored Thing, was one of the first Amerasian soap opera characters.

• The Chuck Norris film Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988) depicted Amerasian children trapped in Vietnam; in the film, Norris is the father to an Amerasian child believing that his Vietnamese wife died during the Fall of Saigon.

• In the television show King of the Hill, it is revealed in an episode that the protagonist Hank has an Amerasian half-brother named Junichiro, the result of an affair between Hank's father and a nurse during his stay in post-World War II Japan.

• In the 1999 American Vietnamese language film Three Seasons, James Hager, played by Harvey Keitel, searches for his Vietnamese Amerasian daughter in hopes of "coming to peace with this place".

• The 2004 film The Beautiful Country is about an Amerasian boy (played by Damien Nguyen) who leaves his native Vietnam to find his father.

• Daughter from Đà Nẵng is a 2002 award-winning documentary film about an Amerasian woman who returns to visit her biological family in Đà Nẵng, Vietnam after 22 years of separation and living in the United States.

• In the graphic novel and movie Watchmen, "The Comedian" Edward Blake kills the mother of his unborn Amerasian child in a bar as the war is ending.

• The Clash's song "Straight to Hell" focuses on Amerasian children who were abandoned by their US military fathers during the Vietnam War.

• The musical Miss Saigon focuses on a young Vietnamese woman who falls in love with an American GI and later has his child after the Fall of Saigon.

• The 2010 Documentary Left By The Ship which aired on PBS Independent Lens in May 2012,follows 2 years in the lives of 4 Filipino Amerasians today, as the struggle to overcome the stigma related to their birth.