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Change Your Life! |
War orphans return to Vietnam to trace steps from past |
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News
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April 11, 2000
HO CHI MINH CITY, APR 10 (AP) - Timothy Hoye carries the photo album everywhere. It catalogues the important moments in his life: his arrival in the United States, birthdays surrounded by family, college graduation.
What's missing are his first four months in Vietnam before he was adopted. And that hole in an otherwise complete picture has always haunted him.
It's why he came back to Vietnam - one of 16 adoptees who have returned with their families 25 years after they were airlifted from Saigon as part of "Operation Babylift," the evacuation of 2,000 Vietnamese orphans, many fathered by American GIs, in the Vietnam War's final days.
They have come seeking a connection with the homeland they left so long ago. The two-week trip is a chance to bring life to the stories they have been told all their lives by their adoptive parents, to add flesh to the bare bones of their early histories.
Most Americans remember Operation Babylift as a series of poignant, tragic images just before South Vietnam fell to the communists on April 30, 1975: hundreds of babies loaded into boxes on giant cargo planes and tiny body bags from a flight that crashed moments after takeoff, killing 144, including 76 orphans.
But for the adoptee, a common history as half-Vietnamese orphans taken in by American families has been the starting point for a journey of discovery.
Over the past week, the group has made pilgrimages to the major stopping points on their journey out of Vietnam: the maternity hospital where some were born, the orphanages and nurseries where they were cared for, the U.S. Embassy where their visas were issued.
Hoye, 25, of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, had carefully packed his photo album before he left the United States.
"I brought it just in case I found someone who was a family member. I wanted to show them what I've been doing with my life," he said.
He clearly wants to find the mother who gave him up. Unlike many of the other orphans, Hoye arrived in the United States with a wealth of documents: a birth certificate, medical records, even X-rays. He knows where he was born, the name he was given, even his mother's name.
"I have all this information that I didn't know what to do with in the states. I wasn't just left on a corner. It's been leading me to think I might even find a family member," he said.
After a week of tracking through the orphanage where he lived and walking the corridors of the hospital named on his birth certificate, Hoye was philosophical.
"I didn't expect to find her, but I wanted to find out as much as I can about her," he said. "She made such a huge sacrifice to give me up. But I saw the room where I was most likely born. I've met the workers who cared for me. It's not closure, but it helps me to move on."
For many of the returnees, the trip was the first chance to reconnect with a now-strange land. The tour was structured to accommodate their desire to learn more about Vietnam's history and culture: There were trips to temples and pagodas, musical and dance performances and a cruise down the Perfume River in Hue.
For Michael Balske, 26, growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, made it more difficult to embrace his mixed-race identity.
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