Lost and Found of the Heart : Separated Since Vietnam, Woman Finds Her Mother

In the summer of 1964, a young Vietnamese woman, desperate to get her ill child out of Saigon, sent the 6-year-old girl away with an American couple.

Nguyen Thi Thanh Hien became Mary Mustard and she grew up in Thousand Oaks, the child of Sam and Margaret Mustard. The girl had contracted smallpox in Vietnam and the mother decided to have her sickly child go to the United States with the Mustards, who were visiting the Southeast Asian country.

After two years, the letters from her mother, Nguyen Thi Thanh, stopped coming. Nguyen was presumed dead.

But a few weeks ago, after a three-year search that began in Vietnam, the International Committee of the Red Cross found Nguyen in Paris. Her daughter, now Mary Reed, placed the call, and after the two women cried for 20 minutes across transatlantic lines, they spoke for the first time in almost three decades.

“I knew it was her,” said Reed, 36.

Reed lost the ability long ago to speak Vietnamese. But she never lost the small black-and-white photograph in which she stands shyly next to her mother.

Until last month, Reed’s attempts to find out what happened to her mother had failed. According to a friend of the Mustard family who traveled to Vietnam in 1966, Reed’s village was bombed and none of her family members were found.

“I never felt like I really belonged anywhere,” Reed said as she sat in her kitchen, looking at new color photographs of her mother. One picture showed her mother in front of the Eiffel Tower.

“I was lost,” Reed said, “not knowing where my family was.”

She began working in the Westminster area three years ago as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company. In Little Saigon, she met Vietnamese-Americans who encouraged her to try again to find her mother.

So in 1990, Reed asked the American Red Cross, which tracks lost family members in war-stricken areas, for help.

For three years, she had no luck.

“I would call, and check the status and they would say there was no progress,” Reed said. “I thought she was dead.”

But in late July, Tung Nguyen, a Red Cross worker, called and told Reed her mother was alive. She was living in Paris with two sons and three daughters.

Even the Red Cross cannot tell Reed how her mother was found. The free tracking service has a network in 146 countries, but who found her and how remains a mystery. Reed had been able to supply only her mother’s name and age and the name of a younger sister.

“The only things I remember in Vietnamese are all three of our names,” Reed said.

In Little Saigon, the same tracking service frequently finds people who were separated from family during the Vietnam War. In 1992, Tung Nguyen said, 60 Orange County residents either found relatives through the Red Cross, or were found by them.

Refugees who fled Southeast Asia by boat and settled here may be unable to find relatives in the same county, Nguyen said.

“Sometimes they lost everything because of the pirates” who preyed on boats.

Reed said she hopes to visit her newfound family in France in early September. One of the pictures her mother sent shows a rock band that features Reed’s three singing sisters. Her brothers play guitar.

Although happy to find her mother, now 53, Reed said she has a lot of questions: Who was her father? Why was she given up for adoption? Was her mother looking for her all these years? How did her mother get to France? And does Reed have Vietnamese relatives in the United States?

“My dear child, we haven’t met each other for 29 years. I miss you very much,” her mother wrote her after they talked on the telephone.

“You know, I asked my friends living in the U.S. to look for you. . . . I even sent them photos, but it was hopeless to me,” her mother wrote. “Remember to let your children come with you, because that’s my dream.”

Reed has a 9-year-old daughter and two sons, ages 6 and 5. She is separated from her husband.

When mother and daughter finished crying over the phone and were able to speak, Reed said: “She asked me how the Mustards were. I knew that this was definitely my mother,” she said.