SECTION 4: ii

PATTERNS OF POVERTY AND PREJUDICE

A PROFILE IN STRESS MISMANAGEMENT

by Hugh M. Lewis

Before continuing my somewhat overwrought monologue, I wish to pause for a brief intermission to review some of the patterns that I have been involved with. I have referred to networks of need as patterns of interdependency of basic needs from the bottom to the apex of Abraham Maslow’s need hierarchy. These networks are open ended and limited only by how much one person is willing or able to give and receive. They have an inherent ceiling, in terms of how many contacts one individual or family can maintain on a basis of trust to transact an exchange and reciprocity. Having a big family in a sense diversifies the number of possible contacts. Families and individuals are nodal in these networks, serving as collection centers, hoarding units, and to the extent of their openness, as potential reservoirs for basic resources. As mentioned these resources are as much intangible as material or monetary or help—including emotional, physical, and cognitive resources, not to mention spiritual reinforcement. When there are many sundered families, there are adopted kinfolk and surrogate family. These diverse networks of need define patternings of interdependency in the face of chronic, unalleviated deprivation and stress. Food, money, video-tapes, information, services, transportation and love are the most important commodities of exchange.

Oscar Lewis (Oct. 1966) identifies numerous characteristics of what he describes as the culture of poverty, as distinct from poverty itself, actually "a subculture of the Western social order."

It is not my intention to quibble over relative semantics of the meaning of either poverty or of culture. Oscar Lewis’s formulation has come under much criticism and controversy as a somewhat derogative ascription. I will refer to rather to what I call patternings of poverty, that are defined by networks of need and patterns of interdependency. Not surprisingly these are structural patternings in the availability and disquisition of basic human resources, and so it makes sense to refer to a structure of poverty. I refrain from the use of culture of poverty because I have not found any necessary universal body of symbolism that are associated and define what is poverty as a distinct symbolic complex.

To the extent that the networks of need that I observed among the Vietnamese refugees were well rooted within the ethos of traditional Vietnamese culture and character, then it would make sense to refer to traditional Vietnamese culture as a culture of poverty, but this is patently absurd as Vietnamese culture has a well cultural and symbolic heritage. It may have been a culture adapted to some forms of chronic resource deprivation, and in a limited and very relative sense may have been an impoverished culture, but by no means was it ever a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating culture of poverty.

The structure that determined characteristic patternings of poverty like the networks of need and patterns of interdependency, may actually be a kind of anti-structure. It is a marginal condition of existence, leading to many ritual reversals which eventuate in patterns of crime, prostitution, abuse, etc., that are normally prohibited and proscribed within the normal power structure. It is a condition in which most people who become entrapped cannot escape, do not have the means, the resources, or the competencies, to crawl out of the hole. Whether or not their children do is a moot point—a few will, most won’t. There is more than a little chance and circumstance involved in the perpetuation of this structure of poverty. Values adopted under such conditions or perpetual deprivation are survival values. Poverty is not defined by any particular set of symbolism, but rather a lack of symbolism. The symbolism that is available flood through the media channels or filter down somewhat haphazardly from the normal power structure. There may be cultural sub-groupings of poverty which build themselves around a particular body of symbolism, perhaps like the Hells Angels. But I myself am impoverished, and have been so most of my existence on planet earth, and yet I have granted myself a rather enriched symbolic life. I have had friends who are solid middle class and yet are as culturally deficit and symbolically depraved as any poor, dispossessed person who could ever hope to be.

In the reification of the notions of culture and of poverty what we are referring to is actually the labeling and the stereotype of poverty. In this sense of patternings of poverty, and their underlying structure, are socio-cultural by patternings of prejudice, of in-group/out group exclusion. I have come face to face with these patternings in serving as a culture broker for families like #5 and Lotus, in a wide variety of settings, inn hospitals, doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, in stores, on the streets, in the neighborhood, even in homes. I myself have been subjected to such discrimination and projective prejudice and so feel it under my skin. It is a stereotype that no matter what you do, how well you fix yourself up, how nice you are, or behave, how sincere and struggling you are, it does not matter. Money breeds power, screens of opportunity and unequal advantage. Being poor is being dispossessed forever without any of these things. 

The stereotype of poverty, with all its connotations of dirtiness, depravity, inherent inferiority, stupidity, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as those caught in its grips begin acting out its own prejudices and discrimination. The low self-esteem, shattered egos, the anomie and social pathology, all go hand-in-hand to reinforce the patternings of prejudice. In dealing with Lotus the most prejudiced I encountered was in her own slum by her own people who were worst off than Lotus—they were fully engaged on prophetically acting out the stereotype of poverty. It tied into racial prejudice and racism. Lotus had an unusually dark complexion and I know deep down it bothers her immensely. One evening she even put a whitening cream on her face to try to look more "beautiful" for me—why, just because my skin is white.

The color bar has been skewed to vertical and erased a little bit, but it still exists. I would love to delineate these patterns of poverty and prejudice, which are inseparable and interdependent, if it were in the scope of this work. Let me only say that I reserve my discrimination and prejudice for the few thousand upper class families who control most of humankind’s resources, and of their narrow minded, myopic cadre who threaten all life on earth with extinction. Patterns of poverty and prejudice are a kind of social race of stereotypes of inherent social superiority and inferiority. After Lotus did that to and for me I bought her a see through plastic make up pouch and a mirror so that she could organize all her cosmetics that she normally carried around in a plastic shopping bag.

If there really is a kind of "culture of poverty" then it is more aptly turned around as a kind of "poverty of culture," something not necessarily related directly to actual structural poverty rather it is a poverty of symbolism, a poverty of sentience, a poverty of being out of sympathetic tune and touch with one self and with others, and hence with existence and reality itself. It is an existential poverty of being that is not necessarily associated with educational attainment. Education amounts to a little more than cultural imperialism for those who are too poor to use it for their own enrichment. It is a kind of proletarian poverty that George Orwell so aptly elucidates in his anti-utopian 1984. It is the poverty of the superficial and the superfluous, the almighty pleasure principle, of immediate gratification and consumerism. It is the poverty of the band-wagon, the fad, the meaningless slogan, the pop song, or the commercial one who can’t get out of one’s head. It is the poverty of the John Wayne movie, of the Boulevard race, the fast-lane rush, the TGIF and Christmas Holidays and Chain Restaurants and Modern Shopping Malls. It is a cultural poverty which afflicts rich and poor alike. The saddest thing I have seen has been to watch a newly arrived refugee family, living in a make-shift shack whose roof was caving in, getting hooked onto the mainline of American television—the almighty opiate of the masses, the "Soma" of the mythology of Modernism.

I have mixed feelings about the effects of media imperialism—it goes hand in hand with cultural imperialism and capitalist colonization of the human soul. I have no doubt it has a tremendous impact upon Lotus’s young boys, who rise and shine early every morning to daily round of commercialized cartoons which sell the same toys during the commercials as are featured in the shows, and which apotheosize violent little G.I. Joe’s, Rambos, Capt. America’s and Robots. The impact such commercialism and programming has upon Lotus is more difficult to determine, more subtle and sophisticated. Even before buying a car for herself and her children she wanted to buy a bigger and better color television—"so the kids can watch the cartoons in the morning." The television is constantly on, even if nobody is paying any attention to it. There is no doubt that the Vietnamese refugee learns a great deal about American and Western culture through television, but mostly they learn about their culture of poverty, and the quality of what he/she learns is at best dubious. How they integrate what they see and hear into their own symbolic universe remains another question. The things that are portrayed positively are not necessarily regarded positively by the refugee. On the other hand there is an important adaptive function which the often pirated Vietnamese language video tapes play—they provide screens of projection and mirrors of reflection for the internal, psychic and symbolic conflicts which threaten to overwhelm the individual and family of refugees.

Every household I have been in spite of their poverty has a video recorder, and these Chinese and Vietnamese movies are by far the most frequently watched and enjoyed by the whole family—from grandparents who are fascinated with their magic and engrossed in their soap operatic melodrama, to Lotus and Mrs. #5 and daughter Rose who cry for hours as they pour over the "mother movies," to Mr. #5 and other adults who get into the Machismo role and into the traditional Vietnamese theater and music, to the children who delight and reenact the Kung Fu stunts. Serialized versions contain hours of family melodrama. The entrancement of the boob tube, its total engrossing aura of fantasy and reality, as it captures the full bore attention of the average refugees, is always astonishing. It is not wise to either overestimate or underestimate the subliminal, hypnotic and emotional influence television and video has upon the refugee and his/her family. It is undoubtedly the best, easiest, cheapest and quickest escape possible from their existential plight of poverty. But it is a weak escape, ephemeral, transient, temporary, that never provides a solution for their existential problems.

In speaking of a structure of poverty and its patterning, there are several recurrent characteristics that are relevant to the impoverishment and plight of Lotus and her young boys. Strongly correlated with chronic poverty are early pregnancy, single mother families, disinherited and unwanted children, abuse patterns, impulse control disorders, low education, low achievement motivation, high levels of prejudice, stress mismanagement, mental disorder, social disorders, and institutionalization. There is a pervasive mistrust or distrust of human interrelationships and many of the facets of the system, there is thus grand disillusionment that comes from deprivation, desperation and desolation. Poverty is the sink of death and slow destruction and gradual, suffering, and inevitable death are its consequences. If there is no such thing as a "culture of poverty" then there is most certainly a psychological complex of poverty and psycho-social interaction with the structure of poverty. And in the final analysis this psychological complex of characteristics relates to human meaning loss, symbolic dissociation and disintegration, and symbolic disorientation, disorganization and disorder of human reality. This is why it is a cultural phenomenon—it is anti-symbolic and anti-cultural.

It is tragic for me to feel compelled to frame my personal phenomenology of the existential plight of Lotus and her sons. When one extends oneself in genuine human interrelationship one must bear all the risks, hurt, pain, and sorrow such involvement might, and as often as not, entail. My love for Lotus and empathy and sympathy for her plight extends beyond the bounds of normal, rational human understanding, and yet in order to think about it, to express and communicate it, I must manufacture some kind of reified rational framework most suitable to organize my phenomenological experiences. There is a happy side to the suffering of Lotus and her children—for in her existential struggle for survival, for her children’s survival, there is much human dignity and respect in spite of circumstances and human needs and weaknesses. In this spirit to survive I can only rejoice.

I first met Lotus in the health interview with my condescending, class conscious interpreter. The door was wide open and people were coming in and out. Her boys were crawling all over me. It was a single bedroom slum apartment with holes in the walls, bars on the screenless windows, and a filthy carpet that was the only thing Lotus complained about. The slum lord who was doing superficial improvements to the "outside" told me to buy Lotus brushes for her broken down vacuum cleaner, explaining "These people are clever, but the government should never have brought them here, for they do not know how to live in the city." He himself was a first generation German immigrant who came after World War II. On the walls were children’s drawings and many female images. One was a big poster of a big red rose with dewdrops, reading "I love Mom."

She kept a hanging plant that had been cultivated to grow along string across the living room, growing in a fish bowl in which a goldfish swam. Lotus and her three young boys slept in two old beds in the same bedroom. On the wall was a broken telephone, and near it, my name and phone number I had given to her when I made the appointment for the interview. She told us that she had killed in one week thirty rats in her kitchen. I have seen them myself darting beneath the furniture. Her pride was a king size refrigerator she had just bought—a Cadillac of refrigerators. There was a great deal of transference and "cathexis" during the interview (were me and the interpreter really authority symbols who had come to help her in her plight?) She cried for her sister who did not love her. She cried for having been abandoned by her husband for two years nowhere to be found. She was quite obviously severely depressed—sleeping most of the day, unable to sleep many nights. I was more genuinely moved by her condition than any other household I interviewed. I propositioned her to become my key informant so that she could help me in my field study and I could provide some kind of support for her.

I enrolled her in Adult Education ESL class and every morning at 8:00 I would drive down and pick her and her kids and take her to class while I baby sat the children. I would take them to a park and play with them. Baby-sitting was at first an overwhelming experience. The first week the middle boy, four years old, wandered off from the playground and got lost, throwing me and the park authorities into a panic. He was found in a near by open field. Gradually as the weeks passed I got the handle of how to deal with them—packing picnic lunches, making lemonade so that I would not have to drop change at every coke machine they spotted. I learned the lay out of all the nearby parks—the better ones and the lousy ones, and I learned about all the neat toys kids are up to nowadays. The kids had to be literally shown how to play in the playground—the swings, slides, see-saws and how to make castles in the sand. Adults take so much for granted. I elaborated a myth about a dragon in the nearby lake who liked to eat little boys, and of tigers and monkey children hiding in the cypress trees. The boys would go on about these things for hours. I would pick up Lotus at noon and then take them for lunch or shopping before returning them home. Lotus gradually introduced me to the homes of her Old Uncle, her Young Uncle, her Sister, and some of her friends.

I would visit her some days. Often she would not want to go to school. She frequently went to her doctor, who was her good friend who prescribed for her medicine for her ailments, headaches, stomach aches, body aches, which no one could diagnose. She had her head x-rayed three times and yet there was nothing organically wrong. This is a common pattern of expression of depression and general somatization of symptoms of stress among the refugees, which I will explain briefly. I believed many of them suffered from disorder, especially Lotus and Mr. #5.

One Sunday I came to her home early, to find that someone had beaten her up. There were bruises all over her head and body, and she was feeling pretty down. I took them to the beach to walk along the shore and pier. She was obsessed with the fish the fisherman were catching, especially a sizable shark some Vietnamese had caught with a hook and chain. She told me that two women neighbors had beaten her up when she complained to them about their children. She accepted it stoically and with self pity, though her eyes were red with tears. I took her shopping at a Vietnamese grocery store and she cooked me egg-rolls while I drew big eagle tattoos on her son’s bare backs and arms with a felt tip marker and moustaches on their faces.

I would bring her to visit at my house with my mother. She instantly started calling her "Mom" and the children "Grandma." She would make egg rolls and cook for her. We began visiting the #5 family in their new residence, her Old Uncle, Sister and Young Uncle. Her sister and her husband, with their new born child, had a fight in their home with the husband’s sister and brother over allowing Lotus to visit her Sister. Lotus put up her Sister’s family in her small apartment for a month until they fund a new place to live.

I day I visited them to crack steamed crab in lemon sauce and pepper on newspaper on the floor. The door was wide open, and when I turned around I noticed all the neighbors were staring and glowering at me from across the way. I have seen those neighbors regularly go fishing bringing home buckets of the small rock crabs and mussels that line the rocks of the jetty. They would crack them and eat them in front of their apartment. I once saw a little girl with a live little rock crab in her hand she was ready to devour. Those people were unemployed, and took on young teenage boarders. There were maybe twelve in a single bedroom slum apartment. They would sit around all day in dilapidated stools in front of their apartment, at night they would drink and make noise. I wondered whether some of those crabs and mussels they were eating might not have been contaminated with some kind of lead or mercury poisoning. I gave them a beautiful photograph of their happy little children but it did no good. They hated me, Lotus, her sister, "Clear Water," and probably everyone else. When I left that afternoon to go home there were seven or eight teenage boys standing around outside Lotus’s door all giving me very deadly stares. I walked past them and said hello.

The next time I visited Lotus I brought her Young Aunt who wanted to solicit her wonderful Vietnamese vegetables she cultivated in her back yard. The young boys across the way were saying very ugly things to Lotus and her Sister and Young Aunt, and dropped their pants at them. I became very upset and went across and confronted them. They were surprised and backed down. They were after all so short and scrawny looking. In the meantime Lotus’s sister called the police One boy would not shut up and continued menacing us, yelling ugly things at Lotus. He had no shirt on and had a dragon tattooed on his shoulder and breast—a nice looking tattoo. Ha had a stick in his pants. Lotus’s friend Sam issued from her bedroom, a first for me, and grabbed a kitchen knife and both were swearing and threatening each other. The boy backed down. Samuel told me never to come to visit Lotus anymore. The police-woman came and we filed a report. Later this young boy, who was quite irrational when I tried to talk to him, was jailed for breaking into a car. These boys were part of a gang that eventually was implicated with the murder of a Vietnamese mother in the area—they blew off her head with a .45.

The next time I took Lotus to visit the #5 family Samuel was lying on her bed. He told me " I thought I told you never to see Lotus again." I told him that I didn’t do things that other people wanted me to just because they don’t like it. I took Lotus to visit #5 and brought her home. I reasoned Lotus and Sam had a thing going with each other, I didn’t want to interfere—though Lotus never ever mentioned it to me and would always act like nothing ever happened. One day I was in the area doing the health survey with my blind friend who acted as an interpreter in Spanish and he needed to go to the bathroom. I took him to Lotus’s apartment and surprised her and a man she was with whom I never saw before. They were on her bed together, and she came out wearing a nightgown and he was only wearing shorts. I have seen three or four different men with Lotus and never fully understood the relationship she had with them. When I would visit her she would frequently be solicited by telephone by some strange man. Her relationship with Samuel was the most enigmatic. He was not the children’s father, but there was an extraordinarily strong emotional bond between Lotus and the youngest two-year-old child and between this child and Samuel. Later "Clear Water" told me that Lotus and Sam had been living together. He would buy the children token presents occasionally, especially the youngest, whom I didn’t care for because I thought him a spoiled little brat. He seemed to do next to nothing to help Lotus, except to occasionally loan her his car, always conditionally. She would use this car to visit me unexpectedly. She would deny there was anything between her and Sam and more and more started come on to me sexually.

From the beginning I sought to define our friendship on a rather cool and distant basis. She could not deal with this and continually resisted. My sexual rejection of her was a tremendous blow to her female ego and affected her very deeply. I felt sorry for her and in the emotional transference of our relationship grew more and more attracted to her. It was definitely not a "love at first sight" overnight occurrence. Our relationship developed slowly over many months. The last time I took her to her ESL class she felt my sexual rejection of her. I was preoccupied with my summer school classes and other things, and she flew into a state of disassociation. She took her youngest baby and cuddled him into her arms and took off walking down the street. I took the other two children home to a neighbor and brought Mrs. #5 and myself to try to get her into the car—she was totally unresponsive, even to the traffic on the street—she resisted all our efforts, crying, clutching her child, saying that nobody loved her. We finally managed to get her in the car and drive her home. Later that afternoon at her friends she wanted me to tell her I loved her. I told her I liked her and cared for her and her kids but if she ever pulled that nonsense on me again I would never see her again. She really frightened me that day.

I ended it with her for over a month when I realized that she and Samuel had been living together. I decided it was better to break it off. She kept calling me though and because I wanted to continue my field study, I decided to see her again. I would not go to ther apartment though, and would only pick her and her kids up in the street and take them places. At Christmas time I bought her a silk Ao Dai, a traditional Vietnamese women’s dress worn mostly for special occasions. Twice I took her in it to different Church congregations with the #5 family. It was her female pride with big hand-embroidered roses on it, very beautiful. The relationship again reached a breaking point as I could no longer driving down into her slum neighborhood and picking her up and dropping her off without being able even to visit her in her own apartment because of many people’s petty prejudices. I myself fell into a darkness and did not want to do anything more.

Lotus decided she wanted to relocate, which I had wanted her to do from the first time I met her. Mr. #5 found a nice two bedroom apartment for her near his place, effectively isolated from the cultural sphere of little Saigon. He helped move her in and it cost over $1,000 to get moved in. The rent was less than she was paying for her one bedroom slum pad and it was twice as spacious. I bought, built and gave to her many things to fill up her apartment. I would go to visit her a couple of times a week, take her shopping for groceries or whatever, take her to my home or little Saigon, have dinner with her, take her children to the park. Samuel was still seeing her—we clearly did not like each other.

It seemed as though Lotus was wanting a commitment from me to live with her and to eventually marry her which I was unwilling to give her because from the beginning I realized she and Sam had a relationship going between them and because it did not fit my role as a student ethnographer. I did not like Sam because I felt he was using Lotus without helping her in any way. Mr. #5 warned me that Lotus was seeing too many boyfriends and did not like Sam even when he knew him in the ghetto. Sam ignored the two older boys, often hitting them, and lavished total attention upon the youngest. Lotus was more and more pressuring me to live with her—we had several falling outs—but there was a strange, sympathetic attraction between us. When my school ended I stayed with her for two weeks until one morning Child Abuse Authorities came to question her. I did not want to be implicated in accusations I had nothing to do with. If someone had been abusing the children no one told me and it was difficult to judge. Anyway I did not want to jeopardize her welfare privileges by staying with her, and I had to finish this thesis that I was working on. Needless to say within two weeks the relationship between Lotus and myself had ended—Sam was still hanging around, lurking behind stage. I still knew nothing about him although he seemed to know everything about me. I told her I did not want to see her anymore, and threw her into great sadness even with Samuel around—the best man won.

I still do not understand fully the life of Lotus, though I have speculated over it many times. Her mother was Chinese who was a business woman in Chinese medicine. Her father had long since been dead. Her mother fled from the North in 1954—they were Catholics. She was well to so—they had four "homes"—two in resort cities, Phung Tau on the coast and Dalat in the mild highlands, and one in Saigon and one in Lotus’s home town. Lotus as a child was spoiled by her well to do mother. She regularly traveled between their "homes."

Lotus had only a sixth grade education in war torn Vietnam. The signs of the war, and its symptoms of stress are still apparent with Lotus, such as the startle response from any loud, sudden unexpected noise. One night I was with her she suddenly became completely dissociated from immediate reality--strangely confusing me as well, as if I was suddenly transported into the "twilight zone", a very scary feeling, and she was in another place and time. Lotus was very concrete in her thinking, and very egocentric. She could not do any arithmetic division and only the most simple multiplication. Yet she was not unintelligent. She only lacked the education to give her intelligence symbolic expression, and thus she was well rooted to traditional Vietnamese ethos. She could not even fill out a job application form, much less deal with a complex job.

In her existential frustrations she could sometimes be very severe with her children in a way only Vietnamese parents can, and yet she was always and ever a good and loving mother—giving her children anything and everything. I am passing no moral judgment upon her actions, or human needs and "frailties" in the plight of her poverty. She came by boat with her young husband, they spent thirty days at sea adrift. Two children she brought along died of deprivation and exposure. She can barely talk of these experiences. She wants most only a husband who will love her unconditionally, for me an impossible task, and a home for her children. This is something apparently beyond Sam’s means to provide for her, or beyond my own means. Her husband she describes as weak, with a proclivity to gambling with his friends. There are two sides to the story of any divorce. It was not a divorce, a permanent, informal separation. Sam and Lotus were not married, only living together in a little slum apartment.

Lotus was not necessarily even promiscuous. If she had sexual relationships with different men it was more an exchange of needs, emotional, even material, or in kind—to borrow a car, a little spending cash, a little sexual pleasure, whatever. But there is always the label and the prejudices that go along with it. Such patterns of poverty are not uncommon—one man visiting many women, one woman having many men. It is a means of diversifying and maximizing access to basic human resources in a situation of chronic, across the board deprivation. Lotus certainly was never a hooker. Our much vaunted ideals of romantic true love and of monogamous matrimony are quite ethnocentric and unrealistic within a context of structural poverty.

What bothers me more is that Lotus regularly and deliberately deceived me, telling me only as much as she wanted me to know, or what she thought I wanted to know. She would always tell me I did not know her and she had things to tell me when she learned to speak English better. She believed that as long as I could not prove her deceit, even though all the behavioral evidence contradicted things she told me, then I had to give her the benefit of a doubt, to believe in her, in her good intentions more than her actions or words, and to trust her, in whatever she did, in the most fundamental and unconditional of ways. She had a fundamental distrust of "secondary institutions," she believed the electric company was trying to bilk her on her fees. When I finally called her bluff and broke up with her, she rationalized what was happening to protect her destroyed female ego.

Trust itself is a relative thing, different for a Vietnamese person than it is for an American. We in the West have a preconceived ideal of an absolute truth which is supposed to guide all our ethical behavior. People of the East see truth and falsehood in more relative terms, conditional to extenuating circumstances. Lotus would punish her children not for lying or doing wrong but "for not listening", not "obeying" and especially for getting caught doing something wrong. Consequently, doing something wrong for them was not intrinsically bad, but only wrong if they are discovered. Therefore any little rule is entirely flexible and conditional, to be bent to prevailing circumstances, to be tested to the limit of tolerance. Lotus would not immediately punish her children, but only inconsistently when what they were doing wrong went beyond her tolerance, and then punishment would flow strong.

In coordination of human interrelationships, in mediating these networks of human needs, each individual, and each family is involved in capitalizing for personal profit within the rules of the system—any information to assist this coordination is of utmost value. A Vietnamese person will tell you only what he/she wants you to know, or thinks you want to know. This is rationalized as respect and politeness—but it has its roots in a social obsession in controlling, monitoring and manipulating the flow of critical information which may or may not affect one’s position within the chains of interdependency. It is very basic to the socialization process and subconscious. It explains this strong proclivity to gamble. Mr. #5 will gamble for 24 hours straight. There is much money exchanged on such occasions. 

Children at the youngest age are ritualized into gambling. The object of gambling is information control—to control the cards in one’s hand, to figure out the cards in other’s hands, and to remember what is already being played and what must remain in the deck. Bluffing and being bluffed become critical plays in social interrelationships. Everyone is doing it, but as long as no one calls the bluff, nothing is wrong. Calling the bluff can be both the crime and the strategy for success. In Kung Fu, so avidly watched, Kung Fu is a sympathetic power, a force that comes through secret knowledge of a special technique, a skill that confers power in the give and take of social interrelationships.

Kung Fu bouts are interminably long and complicated—the blows delivered are emotional blows to the ego—and they frequently resolve with one person withdrawing or conceding defeat. The fighting is more a dance of dialectical harmony than direct conflict—the person who has the stronger Kung Fu is in greater harmony with its power and eventually overcomes the counterpart who is in weaker harmony. As a form of competition it is more indirect, played by mutual rules. One can bluff as much as one remains within a formal network of mutual politeness, respect, and harmony. This brings to mind a difference between Kung Fu fighting and the Western gunfight. Unlike Kung Fu which is a relative power, the gun is absolute power, the winner is faster, the loser dies. This is the difference between the notion of Western independence and Eastern "interdependence". Independence is a fundamental emotional dichotomy between self and other, between yes and no, truth and falsehood. It is one single gunfight or a series of gunfights for absolute emotional independence—a final, unequivocal declaration of identity. Interdependence is a Kung Fu battle in which competing egos are locked in perpetual battle, delivering many small emotional blows—an exchange of relative power, a give and take without clear finish.

A common American stereotype of a Vietnamese is that they cannot be trusted, or they are deceitful. Vietnamese rationalize it as a form of politeness behavior wishing to avoid direct confrontation. Americans prize being direct, assertion of independent power. Vietnamese put a premium on indirection, ruse, tact, interdependent power. Vietnamese on the other hand commonly believe Americans cannot be trusted—cannot be depended upon consistently. This mutual mistrust bespeaks a fundamental difference of value orientations between the ethos of being Vietnamese and the ethos of being American. It eventually undermined the relationship between Lotus and myself. Neither of us were wrong, neither were right in our rationalizations of the relationship. Time and again I have watched the functioning of extreme interdependency among her kids. They are inextricably tied up in each others needs and gratification. There is a continual struggle and competition between them. What one gets, the others need. They are so entangled in each other and are rarely self-satisfied or happy. They are of course exceptional children in that they are starved for parental guidance, love and attention which Lotus alone, in her plight, is unable to fully care for. And yet it never once dawns on any one of them to separate themselves from the other, to create their own space, their own peace. As soon as one of them starts to do so, the others soon become intruding and violating the peace. Identification is familial, not personal, and interdependent, not dependent.

By Western standards Lotus might be characterized as an extremely "dependent" personality, though by Vietnamese standards she might just be a normal Vietnamese female caught up in abnormal circumstances. She slept in the same bed as her mother, sister, and her girlfriend until she was well into her teens. There was near complete identification between her and her mother—her mother took care unconditionally of her every need. Now her mother is dead, her sister has declared her independence, and her closet girlfriend remains in Vietnam. Both her and her sister feel tremendously sympathetic about the death of their mother. Now her sister has a husband to tend to her every need, but Lotus’s husband forsook her and now Lotus is bereft any family at all. Lotus only wants unconditional love and acceptance, inspite of her frailties and because of her needs that were more than myself or Sam or her Husband or anyone else can give to her. Her young Sister’s future is still in the making; in a tragic way Lotus epithet has already been written.

Lotus’s strong dependencies are rooted in the structure of her past, her poverty, her plight, her cultural character, but they also give rise to strong symbolic and psycho-social needs and dependencies. Dependency itself is no absolute reification, it is rather a relative understanding of human needs rooted in the structure and symbolic expression of human interrelationships. Independence and interdependence form a dialectical continuum in which the one is always measured against the other.

In my conceptualization of the plight of Lotus, early on I discovered a frame-work that is rooted in a psychiatric interpretation of human behavior. This is a form of "culture shock" which heavily afflicts the Vietnamese refugees in distinctive patterns. Lotus suffers from this complex quite severely, as do many of the other Vietnamese I have met. For the most part they suffer in their own privacy, in the comfort of their own homes wherever they may be for a homeless refugee. This is the general somatization of delayed stress disorder and of adjustment disorders that is the principle diagnostic symptoms of "neurasthenia and depressive neurosis." The general clinical picture is one of psychological, symbolic failure to adjust adequately to dramatic and often traumatic social changes and disruptions, by a continuous, unmitigated piling up and compounding of repeated and various psycho-social stresses, in turn hindering effective implementation of effective psycho-social coping mechanisms and adaptive behavioral repertories, often in turn inducing further stress causing events. The net result is a vicious cycle of chronic, unnecessary suffering, sometimes culminating in untimely death.

Many people suffering from this disorder will have chronic physical symptoms and go to the doctor complaining of really felt stomach and chest pains, aching joints and back pains, headaches and dizziness, loss of memory or hallucinations, and the physician will be at a complete loss to diagnose the origins of the complaints—finding no physiological explanation—the doctors frequently suspect them of malingering, hypochondria and ignorance, and thus fail to provide the proper medical care. Patients, frightened by an impersonalness of a world they hardly understand, much less trust, are discouraged from seeking the kind of therapy they really need.

The DSM III lists diagnostic criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as the prior existence of a recognizable stressor, re-experiencing the trauma, a delayed impairment of involvement and responsiveness to the external world, exaggerated startle responses, sleep disturbances, guilt of surviving when others have not, or about behavior required for survival, difficulty concentrating, avoidance patterns, and "intensification of symptoms by exposure to events that symbolize or resemble the traumatic event." 

This disorder is usually delayed until anytime after six months of the original experience, and may be postponed indefinitely until the conditions become ripe for its development, and can recur unpredictably for as long as the person survives, happening anytime when induced subconsciously by environmental stimuli symbolically related to the original trauma. In this it represents a peculiar form of sympathetic magic when like causes like.

This disease leads to further impairment of adjustment to change—a gradual decline in social and psychological adaptive functioning resulting in minimal or a-social patterns of involvement and hence leading into such intense arenas as psychotic schizophrenia and anti-social criminality.

This disorder is closely associated to the adjustment disorder defined as "maladaptive reaction to an identifiable psycho-stressor," as indicated by "impairment of social or occupational functioning" or "symptoms that are in excess of a normal and expectable reaction to the stressor." The difference is that the former involves an abnormal reaction to an unusually traumatic event, and in this sense is to be considered primary, while the latter involves only an exaggerated but temporary reaction to not uncommon psycho-social stressors—a secondary response of culture shock. 

But the former also implies the latter in its delayed onset, and chronic impairment of adaptive functioning, and subsequently involves further adjustment disorders on a vicious spiral of reciprocating impairment of "normal" adaptive functioning. There is significant correlation and casual interconnection between these disorders and anxiety disorders, neurasthenic depression, hysteria, somatoform disorders like simple conversion reactions, and hypochondria, with fictitious disorders, malingering, and dissociative disorders like fugue, multiple personality, depersonalization, psychotic syndromes like schizophrenia and catatonia, and impulse control disorders like gambling, fits of violence, wife or children battering, and even organic mental disorders like senility.

The point is that traumatic or abnormally severe stressors in the environment opens the door way to mental illness in general, through the sudden and severe fracturing of basic symbolism by which a person and his culture organize and conceptualize about reality. Once the door is opened, the dark passageway to insanity leads down a corridor of many alternative possibilities for symptomatic symbolic expression. Descriptive labels and categories may fall into a neat diagnostic framework, but especially deviant and idiosyncratic individual behavior and symbolism cross-cuts any neat organization of symptoms in a polythematic manner. An individual may suffer a plethora of differential symptoms, perhaps sort of "distinctive features" of a particular complex of culture and character, which only loosely and most generally fits any strict diagnostic pattern or stereotypical label.

This does not imply psychogenic causes as a model for explaining phenomena of group deviance, deviant groups or of groups of deviants (i.e. sub-cultures, underclasses, out groups, or the mentally ill) Most of the originating psycho-social stresses are rooted in chronic frustration of environmental limitations, internal symbolic contradictions, abrasive circumstances of unalleviated deprivation, catch 22’s of bureaucratic red tape and hypocritical double standards, the deceit between the said and the done, double binds, deprivation or over stimulation of the senses, over crowding, trauma, and the drama of dehumanization. There is as much correlation between low socio-economic status, social alienation and anomie social mobility and out-group labeling and identification. There is really a cybernetic process between psychogenic disorder and sociogenic stress which is mediated by the presence of contradictory, inimical symbols or the absence of integrated, synthesizing symbolism.

Typical symptoms characteristic to such a disorder in a Vietnamese cultural milieu, is quite different from the patterning of mental disorder predominating in other cultures. In Oriental medical theory mind and body are not strictly dichotomized—harmony rather than domination of nature is sought. Psychological and physiological problems and answers are undifferentiated, resulting in a strong avoidance reaction to labels of mental illness with subsequent social withdrawal, avoidance patterning, and somatization of symptoms of stress. Vietnamese characteristically "hide their emotions". I spent many a sleepless nights with Lotus silently crying, tears straining down her stoic face, expressionless, contemplating suicide and the losses of her family. "I want to visit my mother," "I want to return home," "I want to see Mom."

  There are three distinct sets of psycho-social stresses identifiable in the Vietnamese refugee experience: the Vietnam conflict, the migration experience itself, and the culture shock of having to assimilate functionally at least into American mainstream society. The result of these three sets of stresses piling upon one another has been a psychic numbing, a living death and incapacity to feel, and cultural desymbolization, a disintegration and increasing confusion and ambiguity of culturally relevant symbolism and hence an incapacitation of effective communication, coordination or transmission of culture. In large part of the refugee immigrants are lacking in a well integrated cultural base-line upon which to draw relevant symbolism in their survival—ethnization is the development of a new complex of such survival symbolism.

The past catches up with the refugee right on the verge of settling into a new way of life. There is a need to accommodate to a new alien host environment in the face of psycho-social impairment. They have to participate in routines foreign to their native ways, requiring a different prioritization of values and hence frame reevaluation—punctuality, geographical mobility, familial separation and new individual values of independence, assertiveness and verbal competence in a foreign language. They usually enter at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder with few if any resources or screens of opportunity, soon finding their false expectations and illusions of quick success and immediate reward crushed beneath the alienation and apathy of the harsher realities of American "modern way of living"—the capitalist economic imperative of survive or sink. They suffer almost overwhelming sense of desperation, desolation ad disillusionment, which becomes deep depression. During the very period in which it is most critical to be flexible and adaptive, ready to catch any and all opportunities, they find themselves instead in a state of motionless depression, a kind of lithargic lack of motivation to achieve much of anything, with an overwhelming desire to return home.

The family in Vietnam was perhaps the bulwark of Vietnamese culture and character. It provided the psycho-social identity, security and support from stress. It is also the primary Vietnamese mechanism of adaptation. It offers a screen of opportunities to pull economic and human resources for common goals, mutual advantage and cooperative sharing, and served as the primary mechanism for reconciliation and resolution of stress and psychic conflict.

The first generation Vietnamese-American family has been thrice blighted by three plagues of psycho-social stress—not only the individual but the very fabric of his/her culture suffers from stress related disorders. I have witnessed cases of familial depression, hysteria, psycho-somatization, etc. The family fabric was disintegrated and virtually destroyed by total warfare and forced internal migration. In emigrating abroad, many families were further sundered—leaving behind, probably forever, many loved ones; siblings, children, parents, spouses, kin and friends. The remnants of surviving refugee families thread-bare, are then overwhelmed by the stresses of adjustment, survival acculturation and enculturation into a different and often irreconcilable way of life.

  Infra-familial discord and disharmony arises in a social network stressing nuclear families, familial separation, and personal dependence. The stresses of urban living, of a continuous stream of petty, everyday hassles, of having to make enormous expenditures of time, energy and money just to keep up with an increasing cost of living. These minor stresses compound and confound to produce situations of intense personal and interpersonal aggravation, frustration, intolerance, provocation and aggression, infra-familially among people who traditionally lived very closely together.

In sum, the automatic necessity of coping with immediate existential problematics of survival, causes a delay and eventual magnification of stress related symptoms which becomes expressed eventually through somatization and depression. A long train of episodes compounds stress until even the bulwark of Vietnamese culture, such adaptive, symbolic coping mechanisms, filial piety, breaks down and psychological disorder blends into familial disorder and social discord. Whole families are stressed out—persecutory guilt trips are laid on one another as family members blame each other for their plight and inability to resolve only vaguely understood, mostly unconscious, problems. The iceberg is stress, and the inability to manage stress or its suspected causes, due to the breakdown of the traditional coping mechanism—the family—in a radically altered social setting. Stress becomes a "social dis-ease" as well as a psychiatric disorder, and has its own little vicious circle.

Self-destruction, whether overt or covert in form, is one final consequence of a long vicious cycle of unresolved stress and psycho-social conflict. The net outcome is maladaptive to the point of self-destruction. Somatization of symptoms of stress related psychic disorders might be looked at as a form of nonverbal body language—a distorted form of unconscious communication designed to affect some form of adaptive, symbolic transformation that is unachievable and inexpressible in a conscious form. Emotions and feelings which need to come out, which are normally channeled through cerebral, cognition, self-reflection or "insight oriented talking therapy" will eventually emerge in somatic, physical, underground fashion. After all, the emotions, embodied in complex symbolism, are the strings tying together mind and body. In this sense even stress related disorders and its consequences can be viewed as a kind of symbolic and cultural coping mechanism gone awry.

In conclusion of my overextended story, I wish to mention only in passing that my interpretation of the plight of Lotus and of her phoenix people in general is inescapably ethnocentric, as hard as I may try to transcend the symbolic boundaries of my own consciousness, I am always brought back to earth in the limitations of my own ego. It is possible that an emic, Vietnamese interpretation exists for this same plight, one perhaps symbolically embodied in the epic by Nguyen Du The Tale of Kieu, a tragic love story.

Female and male are interdependent symbolisms in a mythological dialectic lying at the heart of human culture. Neither is complete without the other, and only together can there be a synthesis. Deceiving themselves, they deceive one another, thus is the story always told. Man and Woman stand together as the beginning and ending of the great circle of human nature. Within human nature is the great ground of universal sympathy.