Children of war:
Flown out of war-torn Vietnam, wrapped in blankets and tucked into shoeboxes, hundreds of children arrived in Australia in the 1970s. Now in their forties and fifties, four Vietnamese-Australian women speak with Samantha Trenoweth about their painful jour
the babies airlifted from Vietnam to Australia, four decades on
In April 1975, more than 3000 children were airlifted out of Vietnam. Some called it a rescue mission, others a kidnapping. “Vietnam was in chaos,” says My Huong Le, who was five when she and her brother were bundled into a car and sped to the airport.
“I remember looking out the back window as we drove away. My mother was standing in the street, screaming and hysterically crying. I didn’t understand the significance of that moment until I’d been in Australia for several months and realised I wasn’t going back.”
The decade-long war was almost over, American and Australian troops had withdrawn, and Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces were approaching the southern capital of Saigon, where panic had set in. My Huong and her brother were swept up in “Operation Babylift”, an effort to bring Vietnamese orphans and mixed-race children to the West and to salvage some humanitarian spirit from the final days of this bloody and unpopular war.
“Mixed-race children were being killed by the communist government in Cambodia and there was a fear that the same thing would happen in Vietnam,” My Huong explains. “Mothers were told to put their babies in orphanages to keep them safe. They were told to throw away photos, get rid of anything that linked
them to their mixed-race children and to Australian or American troops.”
Today, My Huong works in a children’s centre in Vung Tau, about 100 kilometres from Ho Chi Minh City, and is contracted by International Social Service (ISS) Australia to conduct birth-family searches for other Vietnamese-Australian adoptees. She often meets Vietnamese women who lost children in the war.
“A lot of the babies in orphanages weren’t orphans,” she says. “After the war ended, the mothers went back to get their children, but they were gone.”
The children had gone largely to the US, Canada, France and Australia. Television had beamed the war into lounge rooms and inspired an overwhelming desire to do something for these innocents who had been caught in the crossfire.
By coincidence, numbers of domestically born babies available for adoption were dwindling in the wake of cultural shifts and the birth control pill. Adoption advocates lobbied to solve two problems at once by plucking Vietnamese children out of poverty and danger, and welcoming them into American and Australian homes.
A loving family
But it wasn’t that simple. The first “babylift” flight that took off for the US crashed in a rice paddy, killing 141 orphans, many of them infants. All 281 children on Australian planes arrived safely but, in the chaos of their departure, paperwork was lost and overlooked, and approvals were rushed through. Many children arrived without records of their dates or places of birth, making it almost impossible for them ever to trace their parents, or for their parents to trace them.
Jen Fitzpatrick arrived in Australia on April 7, 1975. She had a cleft palate, she was malnourished and tiny for her age, which was estimated at two-and-a-half. There was no record of her birthdate and there were conflicting stories about how she’d come to the orphanage. If she wanted to trace her biological parents, it would be difficult. Fortunately, she hasn’t felt driven to do that.
Jen was adopted by a couple who had been through multiple miscarriages and desperately wanted a child. There was little information about intercountry adoption but, she says, her parents were hippies – “I grew up in the country in a mudbrick house” – and they muddled through with the very best intentions.
“Sometimes I felt isolated,” she admits. “I was the only Asian child at school, there was racism and I knew nothing of my language or culture, but my parents were awesome. I knew I was adopted and I knew I was loved.”
As an adult, Jen has worked in adoption services and has seen firsthand that many of the children who were airlifted from Vietnam fared worse than she did. She considers herself lucky.
“In principle,” she says, “children are best placed within their community or family, but that’s not always possible. In my case, I would probably have died on the street. I had a disability; I was a product of the war. My chances were very slim.”
An easy target
Emma Pham also had a disability. Born with microphthalmia, a condition which leads to blindness, Emma was abandoned at a Dominican orphanage 30 kilometres from Saigon, where a visiting Australian nun made it her mission to have her flown to Sydney for treatment. She arrived, pre-babylift, in January 1973.
“I remember someone holding me and running across the tarmac in the rain,” she says.
Doctors realised it was too late to save Emma’s sight and the family that had been proposed as possible adoptees, or at least long-term foster carers, reneged on the deal. It was deemed too dangerous to return her to the escalating war. At four years old, Emma was stranded.
Emma was enrolled as a boarder at St Lucy’s School for the Visually Impaired on Sydney’s North Shore and, during holidays and on weekends, she was shunted between 13 foster families over 10 years. Often they complained Emma didn’t try to fit in.
“I got the blame always and, no matter how I was treated, I was expected to be grateful,” she says.
At school, Emma was an easy target for a predatory nun. “I was 11 when the sexual abuse began,” she says. “I couldn’t avoid her because I couldn’t see when she was coming and she knew I didn’t have anyone to turn to.” Many years later, the nun confessed and the Church provided Emma with limited compensation. She gave evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. At 15, Emma met her final foster family, a single mother with two children, who welcomed her and officially adopted her at the age of 22. The emotional support was welcome after so many years struggling through life alone. Emma has suffered recurring bouts of depression and, after a particularly severe episode in her mid-forties, she was treated with electro-convulsive therapy.
“It has helped,” she says. “I still have down times but they’re more manageable.”
Emma’s dream is to study teaching English as a second language and “go back to Vietnam knowing that I have something to offer”.
Dr Patricia Fronek, a Senior
Lecturer in Social Work and Human Services at Griffith University, says that stories like Emma’s reinforce “the need for lifelong support for adoptees,” especially those who were plucked from war zones back when intercountry adoption was in its infancy.
Unwanted and abandoned
Martine Bach has also struggled emotionally with her adoption. “Whenever there are bombings or wars in the news, it feels like a retraumatising of my experience,” she says. “I find it a very hard topic to talk about. I’ve spent a lifetime coming to terms with it.”
Martine’s mother operated a food cart. Her father was an American soldier who ran out on her during her pregnancy. Her mother tried Chinese herbs to abort Martine and, when that failed, tried twice to give her away. Martine was eight when her mother sent her shopping with two strangers and she was delivered, later that day, to a Saigon orphanage.
“I was an unwanted child,” Martine says. She is a quietly spoken, thoughtful, inward-looking woman of 50 who now lives in South Australia.
“When I consider the age my parents were and what was going on around them, I can understand why they did the things they did,” she says. “But then, somewhere inside me, I still have the hurt eight-year-old child who was abandoned, screaming out to be heard.”
Martine has gone back to Vietnam and found her mother but, she says, that only confirmed her sense of abandonment.
Finding her family
My Huong Le, on the other hand, has forged a strong sense of family and identity back in Vietnam – all because, 10 years after she and her brother were whisked away in that shiny white car, she found a piece of paper that led her home.
When My Huong and her brother first arrived in Canberra from Vietnam, their adoptive mother seemed shocked to see them. In the years that followed, she was inexplicably cruel, while their adoptive father, who worked internationally as an engineer, was physically and emotionally remote.
When My Huong was 15, her adoptive mother died suddenly of a heart attack. Not long after, while she was rifling through a filing cabinet, she came upon a bundle of letters from her birth mother. They explained everything. Her birth mother had been a singer in Saigon, where her adoptive father had been working as an engineer. The two had had a long-term affair, during which My Huong’s younger brother had been born – so her brother was actually her half brother.
As the fall of Saigon loomed, his father had been posted back to Canberra and, at the eleventh hour, he had secured passage for both children on one of the last flights out of Vietnam.
Once she knew the truth, My
Huong was determined to find her mother. There followed a “10-year roller-coaster ride” as letters went back and forth between Australia and Vietnam. Sometimes My Huong received responses that she felt sure were from her mother, other letters she knew were not. Finally, at 33, My Huong returned to Vietnam.
Because she was five when she left, My Huong had vivid memories of the house and the street on which she’d lived. “I came back with no intentions or expectations except to return to that house,” she says, and within two days, she had found it.
“I remembered the alleyway so clearly and, when I walked into it, my childhood friend was standing there and she recognised me instantly. People came out of their houses and I was surrounded by a sea of activity and chatter. I had brought a translator and she turned to me and said, ‘Sit down, your mother is coming.’ Within 10 minutes, my mother was there. The last time I’d seen her, she had been standing in the street crying. Now here she was, crying again. She told me that, as I’d left, I had said to her: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll come back and find you.’ My mother held on to those words all her life.”
The aftermath
The jury is still out on whether the rush to airlift children from Vietnam was the best of a bunch of imperfect choices. Certainly, a more rigorous approach to immigration and adoption could have saved much heartache, as could the provision of greater assistance and advice to adoptive families and adoptees. Every Vietnamese child did not land in a perfect home. For some, like Emma, there was no home at all.
However, many mixed-race children and orphans who were left behind fared no better. As the Viet Cong moved south, orphanages were closed and the children of foreign soldiers were abandoned, bullied, beaten and denied education in postwar Vietnam. Many became homeless. They were referred to as “children of the enemy” or bui doi, “the dust of life.”
Today, My Huong lives in Vietnam with her two adopted sons, Daniel,
14, and Sam, six, surrounded by Vietnamese family and friends. She considers herself neither wholly Australian nor Vietnamese. “I feel privileged to have been brought up in Australia,” she says, “but I think of Vietnam as home.”
“My mother held on to those words all her life.”