Coming Home

I met Nhuan Duong Ngoc when I went to Little Saigon, where I was trying to learn as much as I could before going on assignment to Vietnam.

His English was pretty bad, so we said little, but others told me of the turmoil that had shaped this quiet, boyish 22-year-old.

His childhood was hard, but I had heard such stories before. His family--a French father and a Vietnamese mother with nine children--lived on an isolated peninsula in Vietnam. They made their living from a coconut grove until it was so heavily mined by Vietnamese troops that Americans called it “Suicide Alley.”

Nhuan, injured at birth by a clumsy doctor, could not walk until he was 5--the year the new Communist government seized the family lands. After four years of poverty, his father died, leaving the children to suffer the acts of bigotry dealt to Eurasians in Vietnam.

The older children left to survive. At age 9, Nhuan was old enough.

In Ho Chi Minh City, he sold coffee at a zoo. He worked as a fisherman in Vung Tau. Cashing in on his unusually melodic voice, he sang as part of the “Flying People” circus troupe. But he was still the outcast, and his anger and frustration eventually drove him to tattoo a verbal protest on his body.

In 1990, Nhuan saw a way out. By claiming to be half American, he gained admittance to the United States that same year and wound up in Orange County, where so many Vietnamese have settled.

That’s where he encountered Mary Nguyen, a white American woman married to a Vietnamese man and the mother of their three children. She once was director of the Amerasian Center in Orange County and recognized the sadness, confusion and loneliness in Nhuan.

She took him in, and Nhuan’s spirits began to rise. He adopted an American name, Nathan, began studying English and submerged himself in the Nguyen family. Soon it was agreed that the Nguyens should adopt him.

First writing, then visiting Nathan’s mother, Nguyen received permission for the adoption. So early this year, Nathan, his prospective new mother and I were on an airplane heading to Vietnam for an official adoption.

The conflicting emotions within Nathan were obvious. He was going home, but a home that had treated him miserably. He was arranging a life in a new but alien home. Who was he, anyway? Vietnamese or American? The question would be settled in a surprising way.

Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, Nathan discoveredthat the “Flying People” circus was in town, and the troupe celebrated his return with a special performance by acrobats. But the pleasant beginning soon turned sour.

Government officials in Nathan’s mother country were treating him like a foreigner. To travel outside the city, he needed a permit, and getting one out of the bureaucracy took time. As he waited for the exorbitant fees to do their work, he visited his father’s grave and asked his father’s permission to go through with the adoption. He placed a pack of cigarettes on the grave and left.

The papers issued, we boarded a government van and headed out along rutted roads into the lush, green countryside and past the monuments and abandoned bases of the war. On the second day, we arrived in Xuan Canh, across the bay from Nathan’s home of Hoa Loi. We were told that Nathan’s mother and brother had boated to Hoa Loi each of the last three days hoping to meet Nathan. But they had not come today.

Nathan was fidgeting with excitement--the Vietnamese word translates as “heart in stomach”--and when we went to a cafe he said he could not eat. Finally he embarked on the 30-minute voyage to Hoa Loi.

Word of Nathan’s impending arrival preceded him, for at the landing all the village’s 350 families waited. Our boatman told us most had never seen an American before.

For safety’s sake, the boatman steered to another landing, but a crowd there was wading out to meet the boat. In the center was Nathan’s tiny, 58-year-old mother. In knee-deep water, they hugged, and Nathan, breaking a personal vow, broke down and cried. Soon he was swarmed by hundreds of children, and he beamed. They and their families followed him to his mother’s home, and surrounded it, spilling into the doorway. He finally gave the children candy in hopes they would leave, but they mobbed him instead.

Word came that Nathan had to return to the other shore and pay a fee, apparently just for being there. Later that night, two more officials came to the house demanding more money. The next morning, two different officials appeared saying the previous officials shouldn’t have been paid and that the fees must be paid to them instead.

Meanwhile, Nathan was being pressured by others. To impress his old friends, he brought a wardrobe of a dozen trousers and matching shirts. His friends were impressed and demanded that he turn them over as gifts. The pleas for money and possessions never let up until Nathan boarded the boat to leave.

His smile now had a bitter tinge, and he uttered one of his few English sentences during the trip: “Goodby, Vietnam. See you disappear.”

Nathan’s homecoming was scheduled to last a month, but now, only two weeks after arriving, he wanted to go “home.”

The adoption finally was formalized in Ho Chi Minh City. Last I heard, Nathan had intensified his English lessons. He works for the state’s Medfly eradication project and is no longer slow to help with family chores.

He says he is no longer confused about where home is.

Nhuan Duong Ngoc changed his name when he immigrated to Orange County but he couldn’t change his Eurasian oots. A trip back to Vietnam showed him he is now a foreigner there too.