‘He Is American, He Is My Son’ : A Father Who Cares Continues to Search

Paul Deal has two families, one American, one Amerasian, 10,000 miles apart.

But he lost touch with his family in Vietnam more than 15 years ago and has spent years trying to find out what happened to the son he has never seen.

Deal, now a 40-year-old factory worker in River Falls, was 22 and had served more than two years in the Army in Vietnam when he married Tran Thi Ngoc Hue in December, 1971.

Deal left Vietnam in May, 1972, while his pregnant wife stayed behind awaiting her visa.

“I was told she would follow me, that there was no problem,” he says. “I tried to get back over after I knew she was not getting out, but they wouldn’t let me go.”

Nine months after Deal left Vietnam, Paul Jr. was born, on Feb. 21, 1973. The father’s only ties to his son are photos of the boy when he was 3 months old.

Letters Stopped Coming

After that, American forces left South Vietnam, but fighting continued with North Vietnam, and two years later the south fell to the Communists.

The letters and photos from Deal’s Vietnamese wife stopped coming after September, 1973. He hasn’t heard from her or his son since.

“I could never understand what happened, how I lost her,” he said. “I got the runaround from all over this country for years. I wrote to everybody from Congress to the President.”

Thinking he had lost everything, Deal married an American woman. His Vietnamese marriage, he said, is not legally recognized in the United States.

Deal has three sons, ages 7, 10 and 13, by his American wife, but he often wonders what became of his Amerasian son.

“I’m just praying he’s alive, and her, too, and that someday we’re going to meet,” he says.

Deal has enlisted the aid of Bruce Burns, an attorney in San Jose, Calif., who specializes in tracing Amerasians and their fathers.

“If they don’t find them,” he says, “I’m going back to try to find them myself. I want him in the States. He belongs here because he is American and he is my son.”