Child of War Still Searching for Father

Thanh Nguyen wants my help. I can’t help him. Only his father can.

And he doesn’t even know his father’s name.

“When I came to United States I hope I searched my father, but four years from now I still don’t know how to look for him and who can help me to search my father,” Thanh wrote me. “I’m very sad and very disappoint.”

I have heard this before, many times. There is always too much feeling hiding behind the stilted English words. If you listen to these words as the children of the Vietnam War speak them, you begin to recognize a pattern. There is abandonment and misery and then there is hope. This is why they came to America, they say.

Here there is always hope.

As I walk up the stairwell to Thanh’s apartment in Garden Grove, a door opens. I recognize the young man who steps outside right away. He is American rounded with Vietnamese, handsome, fresh, with dark eyes that dance. He looks too hopeful. My first words are a warning: Please don’t expect too much. But it is useless, I can already see. Why not expect miracles? This is America, after all. And I am here, he says.

“I always thinking about him,” Thanh tells me. “When I was in Vietnam, I thought I would find him. I want to know how he look like. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that I love my father.”

Thanh cups his fingers and brings them to his heart as he says this, then he sweeps them away. Here they are again, those feelings that don’t quite translate from the Vietnamese.

Thanh’s mother, Mai Huynh, comes and sits beside me on the sofa. She has a few decades-old photographs of her and her girlfriends, dressed in the polyester fashions that were then the rage.

The pictures with Thanh’s father--on their trips to Saigon or at the American officers’ club in My-tho where they both worked--are long destroyed. Mai did not want such evidence to fall into the hands of the Viet Cong.

As it was, she hid her infant son from virtually everybody in Vietnam because of his round, American eyes. But she never told Thanh that he was any different from anybody else.

“I didn’t want him to know about me, what I did when I was young,” she says.

Thanh’s father, an Army sergeant--”very tall, blond, clean shaven, very handsome”--turned out to be married, with a son and daughter already back home. Or at least that’s what Mai says he told her, only shortly before he left for home.

He said he would send her money in Vietnam, for their child, and Mai never heard from him after that. “I loved him too much,” she says.

Later she forgot even his name, and his address, and other American things. He left at the end of 1968. Mai married a Vietnamese man and together they had three children, two boys and a girl. They have lived here, with Thanh, for the past four years.

“We come here, I very, very happy,” Mai says, “to be here, to forget.”

To survive in Communist Vietnam, Thanh and his stepfather would row a cargo of tree branches to My-tho, six hours away from the rural area where they lived. They would sell them, and row back another six hours, five times a week.

And Mai was forced to attend re-education classes, where she was harangued for her having associated with an American man.

“When I was about 11 or 12, the other kids they would yell at me, ‘Look, there is an American,’ ” Thanh says, harking back to those days.

“They would sing at me, make up things.” He is describing their taunts now, and later, the beatings at their hands.

“When I study about war in school, they say, ‘Your father was American soldier and you have to go back to your father’s land!’ ”

It was then, Thanh says, that he asked his mother for the first time who his father was. And Mai told him a lie.

“I told him his father was an American, but that I took him from an orphanage,” she says. This was the story she gave to the Communist government too, although it was rarely believed. Two years later, she told Thanh the truth.

By then, he was about to drop out of school after a total of only five years, on and off. He couldn’t take the harassment any more.

Now Thanh is a student at Golden West College, after graduating from Santiago High School earlier this year with a B average. He hopes to be a physical therapist; he knows his English needs some work. At the Domino’s Pizza where he’s worked as a delivery person for the past year, he says he doesn’t talk much.

He had hoped to join the military--a few months ago he took an induction exam in Long Beach for the Marines--but his English failed him. His mother says that is just as well; she doesn’t want him in the military at all. “Hard life,” she says.

“But I want it very much because I just want to be like my father,” Thanh says.

No, Thanh goes on, there is no fantasy, no reunion scenario that he plays over in his mind. If he were to find his father, and be rejected, that would hurt, of course, but he would survive, bettered by the experience, he believes.

“I just want to know him,” Thanh says. “I think he is just like me. I don’t want the whole of my life to go by without my real father. I don’t want anything from him. But I want to know him.”

And if he never does find his father?

“I will cry more,” he says.