Amerasian Girl Slowly Adapts to New Culture

Tuyet Mai Huntoon, the Amerasian girl who was united with her father after he spotted her picture in a magazine, is slowly adjusting to the mysteries of American life, including the kitchen sink.

Tuyet Mai, which is pronounced “Tweet My,” found the sink and its hot water one of the things she had to get used to when she came to California from Vietnam and moved in with her father, Barry Huntoon, his wife, Laura, and their three children, in this small town about 80 miles north of Sacramento.

Tuyet Mai, 15, still needs an interpreter to talk to her new family about most things, but she started high school last week and is a quick learner, her stepmother said.

She is also well aware of American food.

“We thought she might only eat rice, fish sauce and spices,” Huntoon said. “But it seems she’s had all the corruptible American food we can stick in her body--as well as Vietnamese diet.”

Huntoon, an Army medic during the Vietnam War, tried to take Tuyet Mai’s mother to the United States when his tour of duty ended in 1972, but his efforts failed. The mother, Tran Thi Tuyet Nhung, was pregnant with Tuyet Mai at the time.

“The Vietnamese government was corrupt,” Huntoon said. “There was always a tremendous amount of paper work and bribes. It cost $800 each time I filed a request. . . . The paper work just never went through.”

Later, after he returned to the United States, he was told that Tuyet Mai’s mother was dead.

Then in 1985 Huntoon spotted Tuyet Mai’s picture in Life. “I turned the page and this girl actually jumped out of the picture,” he said. “I had gone through 13 years of wondering whether my child had been born, alive, dead . . . and here was this girl. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her face was like her mother’s; her arms and hands were like mine.”

Huntoon eventually located his daughter and five weeks ago Huntoon flew to Vietnam at the invitation of the government and brought his daughter home with him. He still hopes to bring her mother, who is alive, to California.

The search for Tuyet Mai exhausted the Huntoons’ savings--phone bills from Huntoon’s trip to Vietnam were $6,500, for example--but book and movie offers for their story have been pouring in.

“At times, she must feel as if she’s on an alien planet,” Huntoon says of his daughter. “We were extremely lucky to get her out. It was a series of coincidences that evolved into a miracle.”