By Victor Greto
You know it’s not your run-of-the-mill relationship when a man offers the woman he courts the ears of the enemy he’s killed, and the woman cuts off her right pinkie-finger above the knuckle to prove that she loves only him.
Love, though, is notorious for knowing how to cut through both culture and race.
It started when 17-year-old René Rodriguez met the diminutive 19-year-old Nguyen Thanh Binh — the name means “peace,” but you can call her Mimi — during the first of his nearly five tours of Vietnam in 1966.
He was a newly minted soldier with acne, and she worked at a gift shop at the base.
“Right away I fell in love,” René, 50, says. “She was terrified. I was the first American-Spanish she ever met. I was persistent. I would offer her ears I’d gotten in combat.”
He stops and offers one of the more unaffected understatements in the annals of romance.
“It wasn’t like holding hands.”
Mimi wasn’t impressed.
She came from an aristocratic family of 13 brothers and sisters. Her mother was French, her father a senator from the South Vietnamese province of Kien Hoa.
“I didn’t like him at first,” Mimi, 52, says. “I didn’t know what he wanted.”
Yet, after months of flirtatious give-and-take, Mimi eventually gave in, dated René, became pregnant and delivered the first of their two children, Marie, in 1967.
Soon after, however, both experienced a crisis after Mimi’s “friend” told René that Mimi was going back to a former boyfriend.
René got drunk that night, and Mimi, who didn’t speak English very well, could not explain to him how much she loved him, how wrong her friend was.
So she marched into the kitchen and sliced off part of her finger and brought it to him, shaking with frustration.
“See? See?” she cried to him in broken English, holding the finger in front of his face. “I was telling you the truth. Would I do this if I were lying?”
In 1971, they finally made it to the U.S., where they set up as a family in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
René’s father, a strict Puerto Rican immigrant who lived in New York, wanted to have nothing to do with his son’s Vietnamese wife.
“My father told me he was against the marriage,” René says. “ ‘Don’t you plan on bringing her back here,’ he told me.”
Still, he brought his wife and child to see his father when he arrived in the states. His father wasn’t interested, and never would be.
Mimi’s parents also were adamantly against the union.
But when Marie was born in Vietnam, the couple had made a deal with her parents, that they would help take care of the child if the couple wouldn’t leave the country.
At the time, Mimi lived with her sister. But when she and René finally received permission to leave Vietnam, they surreptitiously took the child from her parents and left.
“I didn’t speak English until I was 5 or 6,” Marie, 34, says. Instead, she acted as comfort and confidant to her mother, who consistently whispered her fears to her.
Marie, who looks like her mother, says she has gotten plenty of cruel comments when she told anyone her name.
“I don’t look like a Marie Rodriguez,” she says. “People called me ‘Little Chinese girl.’”
Because of that, she says, “I always wanted curly hair. Why didn’t I look more like my father?” she would ask herself.
René and Mimi’s other child, René Jr. — known as JR — looks more like his father, but when the family lived in Virginia, he received the taunts often reserved for Hispanic children.
“I got into a lot of fights,” JR, 28, says.
But being of a mixed heritage, he got it from all sides, not just whites.
When the family was stationed in Puerto Rico, JR stuck out because he didn’t speak Spanish and he looks, well, mixed. People have mistaken him for Hawaiian, Italian, even Japanese.
Because he was a military brat and is interracial, “I never had a place I could call home,” he says.
Except for the one René and Mimi provided.