Invisible Threads

“Invisible Threads,” the April gathering in Boulder, Colo., of members of the Vietnamese adoptee group, warmed our hearts and brought hope. During these days we were able to individually share family adoption files. Susan Carol McDonald and I worked in one of the four nurseries in Saigon. “Asian stork” Ruth Routten got to meet and talk with Mary Ann, an adoptee whom she had brought from Saigon to Denver, and to show Mary Ann her page in Ruth’s escort book. I had worked on Mary Ann’s adoption processing in Saigon, and so when she introduced herself, I was thrilled to get to be with her and her adoptive mother.

Through the years, beginning in 1985, we former Saigon volunteers have organized reunions of adoptees and Vietnam motherland tours. Several adoptive parents, families of adoptees and Saigon volunteers happily participated in this gathering. Some adoptees had never attended an event and were warmly, enthusiastically welcomed to our April get-together.

Devaki Murch (named Mimosa in the Saigon nursery) created the concept and transformed the East Window Gallery in Boulder into a showcase of pictures, documents and artifacts from Operation Babylift for those adoptees who were escorted to adoptive families throughout Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States from 1967 through 1975. Boulder was the headquarters of the Friends For All Children Vietnamese adoption program during that era.

Adoptees gathered in both organized and spontaneous groups to tell their stories of being adopted into Caucasian families during and after an unpopular war in their birth country and what it was like being the only Asian in their schools. Reunions and tours to their land of birth have helped to discover their ancestral history and culture. During motherland tours they have developed lasting friendships. A Vietnamese author who had been a refugee led a workshop on “How to write your story,” resulting in some very deep sharings.

The various service careers and avocations to which these adoptees are committed are truly inspiring: nurses, educators, mental health professionals, a pharmacist and a school bus driver. Our Lysander (from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) directs a program in Vietnam working with Christian pastors in that country to send medical doctors and dentists to be of service.

Several adoptees have created an organization in cooperation with Australian adoptees to seek out women who relinquished a child during the war in order to advance DNA testing and reunite birth relatives with adoptees. The Vietnam Red Cross Society is working with them. Another small group is working to create a stone memorial outside Saigon in remembrance of those who perished in the Operation Babylift crash on April 4, 1975.