Mai Finds Home in Paradise

‘It’s like she’s always been my daughter. It all seems very natural.’

--Barry Huntoon, father of Tran Thi Tuyet Mai

When he walked into Tan Son Nhut Airport in Ho Chi Minh City and saw her for the first time, the Vietnam War veteran thought his heart would burst.

He had waited 15 years for this moment. It had haunted him, consumed him and anguished him almost every waking hour and restless night. It had exhausted his savings, sent him into psychiatric counseling, crippled his career and sabotaged his romances.

But none of that mattered anymore, because standing in front of him in the airport hallway Oct. 12 was the Amerasian daughter he had almost given up hope of ever finding--the girl he had traced to a beach in Vietnam after seeing her photograph in Life magazine.

Tears streamed down his cheeks. But the teen-ager stayed dry-eyed.

Hesitant, slightly distrustful, even a little afraid of this American stranger who had come forward as her father, ready to take her away from the poverty of Vietnam to a new life in California, she hung back from his hugs. Then she looked into his eyes and, through an interpreter, asked him a question:

“Do you love me?”

Balloons are still tied to the mailbox, “welcome” banners are still hanging from the trees and gift boxes are still scattered about the house--all reminders that their homecoming took place only Tuesday.

Gestures and Smiles

But already Barry Huntoon and Tran Thi Tuyet Mai are acting like they’ve known each other for a lifetime. Though she speaks no English and he speaks no Vietnamese, they communicate almost effortlessly through hand gestures, stares and smiles. He seems to know what she wants or needs before she’s even conscious of it. And she trusts him completely to guide her through the strange routine of American family life.

“It’s like she’s always been my daughter,” says the 36-year-old sales representative, who has taken a leave from his job with a water purification company to help his five-member family expand to six. “It all seems very natural--and I’m overjoyed.”

Meeting the Rest of the Family

So natural, in fact, that 15-year-old Mai appears to have developed an immediate rapport with Huntoon’s 30-year-old wife, Laura, and their three children: Jonathan, 2 1/2, Amanda, 1 1/2, and 3-month-old Brianna. Without being asked, the newcomer knows just when to rescue Laura from a cranky baby or stay out of the way of a tantrum-throwing toddler. Indeed, things are proceeding so smoothly that it’s easy to overlook that Wednesday was a day full of firsts for Mai.

Her first American breakfast: orange juice out of a can and pancakes with maple syrup. Her first video movie: the Walt Disney animated classic “Dumbo.” Her first hair ribbon: a green grosgrain bow that matched her new cotton sweat suit.

And her first lunch at McDonald’s.

Trailed by a small pack of reporters and photographers, the Huntoons aren’t able to ask Mai what she wants. “I just ordered for her what the kids always get”--a cheeseburger, milkshake and fries, Laura explains.

Seated in a back booth next to her father, Mai looks quizzically at the paper-packaged food in front of her. Huntoon, sensing her discomfort, unwraps her burger. She stares at it, gingerly lifts a corner of the bun and pokes a finger at the beef patty.

Completely bewildered, she sends her father a what-do-I-do-now? glance. He patiently shows her how to pick up the hamburger with a firm finger grip and then ease it into the mouth. She picks up the burger, puts it down, picks it up again and puts it tentatively between her lips. She bites off a tiny morsel and chews it slowly. With obvious effort, she manages to swallow.

“It’s called a ham-burg-er ,” Laura explains. “It’s American food. Do you like?”

Huntoon looks pleased. “I’d say she liked it. Wouldn’t you?” he jokes with his wife as he gives Mai a playful chuck under her chin.

With the younger children growing restless, the Huntoons are ready to leave. Then restaurant owner Sandy Schlicht comes over and hands Huntoon a stack of coupons for six free sundaes. “I read the article in the Paradise Post and I cried,” she says. “It was the saddest story I’d ever heard.”

With that, she bursts into tears and flees to the ladies’ room.

Huntoon suddenly realizes that he, too, is crying. “She just choked me up,” he says, fingering the six cards. “We can really use these coupons.”

He is still, by his own account, “a bundle of nerves,” even though his ordeal is finally over. “It’s been a long time, and a lot of work, and more effort than I ever thought it would be,” he says. “I suppose, in the beginning, I thought it would be easy. But then I was worn down by the bureaucracy.”

Huntoon’s personal nightmare, like those of so many other young American men in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, begins in the jungles of Vietnam. He volunteered for military duty right out of high school because “it was the patriotic thing to do.” He knew there was a war on, but he didn’t think much about it because he had spent his teen-age years in the isolated Marshall Islands with his family and “they didn’t have the protests going on there.”

At first stationed in West Germany, he heard veterans telling tales of horror. “I decided I needed to go over there and see it for myself,” he says, and at age 20 the Army medic found himself stationed in Vietnam’s central high lands with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. Nothing was as he had expected: The fighting was too bloody, the war too corrupt and the U.S. commitment too immoral, he decided. And yet he was stuck in the middle of it all, the victim of his own ill-informed bravado.

Looking back on it now, Huntoon can’t say exactly what first attracted him to the young Vietnamese woman who sold produce in one of the markets. Maybe it was her innocence. Or perhaps it was her pathetic situation. But a romance blossomed between them, and “I really fell in love with her.”

Dangerous Situation

From that time on, he felt responsible for Tran Thi Tuyet Nhung, took charge over her life and brought her to live with him. “I thought it was something I needed to do, considering the dangerous situation she was in,” he explains.

When he was transferred to the seaside town of Vung Tau, safely away from the heavy fighting, she came along. And he started the paper work necessary to get permission to marry her, but he says that meant paying bribes to South Vietnamese officials. After a year, he ran out of money and still didn’t have the necessary documents.

Though due to be rotated home, he extended his tour another year while he desperately tried to figure out some way Nhung and he could be married. “I needed to do something about her,” he says. “I couldn’t just leave her”--especially not after he found out that she was pregnant with his child. “We were a regular family with a husband-and-wife relationship. She was my first big love.”

By 1972, unable to get the paper work for their marriage, and about to be returned to the United States, he realized he had done everything he could from Vietnam and thought he would have better luck pursuing the case from home. When he shipped out without Nhung, she was one week away from delivering their baby.

Settling in California, Huntoon found himself unable to contact Nhung. He sent her letters, but she didn’t answer. She moved from the place they had lived together, but no one knew her new address. She just seemed to have vanished. And Huntoon didn’t know whether his child had been born dead or alive, a girl or a boy.

When South Vietnam fell to the communists in 1975, he despaired of ever finding her or their baby. With every new photograph of Vietnamese, every fresh boatload of Vietnamese, every scrap of news he could lay his hands on, Huntoon looked for word of his Vietnamese family.

He asked for help from Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), who represented his hometown of Norwood, Mass., and whose office enlisted a private international social services agency to locate the mother and child. After investigating, the group told Huntoon it had received definite word that Nhung had died and that their child may have perished as well.

Still Looking

Huntoon wasn’t satisfied. “I’m the kind of person who never believes anything that I hear,” he says. “So every chance I had to get news about Amerasian children in Vietnam, I pursued.”

He contacted the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, a Pennsylvania relief organization devoted to helping Amerasian children; the State Department; international refugee organizations; religious relief groups; congressional leaders and the news media. “I wanted to have access to every file that they had on Amerasian children.”

Over the next years, the search would become an obsession that would nearly ruin his life. He briefly attended college and worked at a succession of jobs, but shied away from pursuing romantic entanglements that could lead to marriage. “I just couldn’t quite get it together. I always had this stress that affected all of my relationships.”

Twice, he sought psychiatric counseling because his world seemed to be falling apart. He went “just to talk,” first to professionals at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, and then to local mental health center. But nothing he did seemed to ease the heartache that pained him, the guilt feelings that nagged him, because he might never find the child he had fathered and then abandoned.

Then, in 1983, he met Laura at a nightclub in Oroville. On their second date, “he told me everything. And then we both cried,” she recalls. “I could tell how sensitive he was and I knew I really liked this guy.’

Laura found it easy to empathize with her husband’s plight. After all, after her own parents had divorced when she was 5, she never saw or heard from her mother again until 18 years later. “And all that time, I would wonder where is she and what is she doing. So I know what that’s like.”

For the first time, Huntoon felt he was with a woman who “really understood and felt compassion” for his situation. “And I knew I’d never have to worry that she wouldn’t be behind me if I kept on looking. I knew she’d be able to deal with it.”

Two weeks later, they were married.

Huntoon kept searching, but not as intensely as before. By 1985, the couple had settled in the San Jose suburb of Saratoga, and Huntoon was working as a carpenter. “I was finally beginning to believe it was kind of a hopeless situation,” he says. “And so I was getting on with my life.”

Glancing Through Magazine

Then, one night in August, 1985, reading in bed alongside Laura, Huntoon leafed through the new issue of Life magazine. He had bought it because of an article on Amerasian children by photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, who, during a visit to Vietnam, had succeeded in tracking down a few of the youths.

Huntoon turned a page and came upon a picture of a little girl selling peanuts on a beach in Vietnam. Something about her face drew him. It bore an uncanny resemblance to his own. “And then I looked at my wife and said, ‘That’s my daughter.’ ”

Laura’s first reaction was disbelief. “Then I looked at the picture and, God, there were his hands. Hers had the same kind of shape.”

When they managed to calm down enough to look at the article more closely, the couple found some circumstantial evidence to support Huntoon’s gut instinct. The girl’s picture had been taken in Vung Tau, where Huntoon had last lived with his girlfriend. And her name was too close to Nhung’s to be a coincidence. But they also saw that the article had been researched the previous spring; where and how could they get in touch with the girl now?

The photographer was of little help. “He said she would be better off if I just forgot about her,” Huntoon says. He tried to take the advice, “but I couldn’t. This voice inside of me kept shouting, ‘This might be your daughter.’ On the other hand, I didn’t want to make any decision that would worsen her situation. I knew that from now on, the whole thing was very political.”

He contacted Jim Barker, a Veterans Outreach counselor at the local Veterans Center in San Jose. He also enlisted the help of Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), whose office contacted Bruce Burns, a San Jose attorney who three years ago founded the Amerasian Registry, a private organization helping some 200 American fathers and Amerasian children in Vietnam locate one another and try to arrange for the children to come to the United States.

Huntoon’s first break came when Barker got the opportunity to go to the Philippines to serve for a year in the refugee processing center at Bhutan helping Amerasian children with emotional problems. Barker was able to use the camp contacts to get a photograph of Mai back to Vietnam so that a refugee’s relative could search the beaches until he found her--still peddling peanuts in Vung Tau.

Mai was told that her American father was looking for her and that she needed to give the refugee her address so her father could write to her. Huntoon was besides himself when he found out that Mai had also enclosed a note to him: “Dear Father,” it said. “I am overjoyed that I have a father who is looking for me. I hope I will see you soon.”

But two years would pass before father and daughter would be able to meet--years filled with bureaucratic haggling, diplomatic squabbling and endless paper work between the U.S. and Vietnamese governments, made all the more complicated by the two nations’ lack of diplomatic relations.

Many Problems

An orderly departure program from Vietnam administered by the State Department was virtually dormant because of U.S. foot-dragging and Vietnamese irritation with the Americans. Yet the program was the primary vehicle for the emigration of Amerasian children to the United States. The Amerasian Registry managed to revive it only after intensely pressuring both governments but not before one of the children, desperate over delays in joining her parents, attempted suicide.

A woman whom Mai called her mother presented an additional, more emotional complication. Huntoon will not say whether she is the woman he lived with. However, he has arranged for her departure from Vietnam next week along with a 7-year-old child Mai calls her sister. They eventually will emigrate to the United States.

“She has some of the same facial features, she’s aged a lot, which might have been caused by her hard life,” the registry’s Burns says of the woman.

Even after Mai was allowed to leave Vietnam with her father, she was required by Thai officials to spend several nights by herself in what Huntoon describes as a prison camp. Huntoon said U.S. officials told him he “almost caused an international incident” when he demanded to visit her. Thai officials relented when he agreed to keep the meetings secret.

Still today, and probably for months to come, Huntoon is piecing together the puzzle of Mai’s life for the 15 years after her birth.

Eking Out a Living

It had been just an existence, really, a daily struggle to stay alive that no one, especially not a child of his, should ever have had to go through, the father maintains. “She had never had time in her life for play. It took everything she had just to survive.”

From what is known, Mai experienced every hardship her country could dole out. A various times, she lived on the streets with hundreds of other abandoned Amerasian children, spent time in the communists’ disciplinary re-education camps and worked in the fields as a laborer in one of the country’s “new economic zones.”

“Feel her hands,” Huntoon says. “They have unbelievably deep callouses.”

Most recently, she had eked out a living selling roasted peanuts to Soviet Bloc tourists who flocked to the white-sand beaches and turquoise waters of Vietnam’s closest approximation of a resort area.

But Mai never even went swimming, not when she earned only about 10 cents a day and had to work almost round the clock to buy enough food.

“She had never had anything new until I bought her some clothes in Thailand,” Huntoon says. “She had never even had a doll to play with.”

Still, he knows how lucky his daughter was that, for the most part, she was never mistreated or victimized because of her American father. Though governments have no policy of discrimination against the 15,000 to 20,000 Amerasian children still in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese officials privately see them as the embarrassing responsibility of the U.S. government.

But the worst legacy of her poverty, Huntoon says, is his daughter’s illiteracy. “She cannot read or write. She has never even stepped foot in a classroom.”

At one point, interviewing her before granting an exit visa, Vietnamese officials said in a medical report that she was suffering from emotional problems and a lack of discipline that could have barred her from entering the United States with her father. But subsequent examination showed that her primary handicap was her lack of education--and Huntoon had vowed to get her into an American school “as soon as is humanly possible.”

On Wednesday, his family in tow, Huntoon made good on the promise and escorted Mai on a tour of Paradise High School, where she will be enrolled as soon as a Vietnamese interpreter is hired. She will be the first non-English-speaking student at the school of 1,139.

Assistant Principal Jim Scott was introduced to Mai and welcomed her to her new homeland. “It won’t be easy,” Scott told Huntoon. “But it’s surprising how fast she’ll adapt.”

Through an interpreter, Mai said Tuesday that “of course, I’m happy to be here with my parents. I want to go to school. That’s the first I want to do in America.”