Bui doi

The Vietnamese term bụi đời ("dust of life") refers to vagrants in the city, or, trẻ bụi đời to street children or juvenile gangs. From 1989, following a song in the musical Miss Saigon, "Bui-Doi" came to popularly refer to Amerasian children left behind in Vietnam after the Vietnam War.

The term bụi đời ("dust of life") originally referred to the starving people of the countryside taking refuge in towns, in the 1930s. The term trẻ bụi đời "young vagrants," now refers to street children or juvenile gang members. It is intended to bring to mind an image of a child abandoned and moving about without purpose, like dust. In Vietnamese, it has no racial connotation. Vietnamese refer to Amerasians as Mỹ lai (mixed American and Vietnamese), con lai (mixed-race child), or người lai (mixed-race person).

The connection to mixed-race parentage given in Western media, from connection with Miss Saigon, is not widely known in Vietnam today. The term bụi đời in Vietnam today refers to any people, but usually young men, who live on the street or live as wanderers. A related verb đi bụi ("go dust") means someone who has left their home, usually due to arguments with their family, to take on the bụi đời wandering or street life.

In the West, the term Bui-Doi became widely known from the use in the dialogue, and particularly the song title "Bui-Doi", of the 1989 musical Miss Saigon by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, which opened in 1991 on Broadway, and, until its closing in 2001, was the eleventh longest running Broadway musical in musical theater history. The song "Bui-Doi" had lyrics written by Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby, Jr. They took the term bụi đời to mean not Vietnamese street children, but the Amerasian offspring of American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers abandoned at the end of the Vietnam War.

The majority of mixed race people after the Vietnam war were Amerasians or children of Vietnamese mothers and military or civilian men from the United States. Amerasians born during the Vietnam War (1964–75) could be the issue of anything from long-term unions to rape. Due to the large sex industry brought on by the military economy, Amerasians were predominantly seen as off-spring of GI fathers and prostitute mothers. Life was frequently difficult for such Amerasians; they existed as pariahs in Vietnamese society. Often, they would be persecuted by the communist government and sometimes even sold into prostitution as children. Under the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1988, a Vietnamese Amerasian could obtain a U.S. visa on the basis of appearance alone. Amerasians gained the attention of con artists who claimed to be their relatives in the hope of obtaining visas. About 23,000 Amerasians immigrated to the U.S. under this act.

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Wikipedia