DNA test leads to a long-overdue meeting
Family
ops,” Lee says.
In 1969, Lee left his young wife behind to ship out to Vietnam. He was assigned to the border of South Vietnam and Cambodia, near the Vietnamese city of Can Tho, where the mission was to keep the North Vietnamese Army from infiltrating the south. Lee led operations on the ground and from the air, spending months at a time in the jungle. He remembers one night with his men in a cave, when a young sergeant said his wife was due to have their first child any day. The next day, the sergeant was shot by a sniper and died in Lee’s arms.
“I came back to camp to a ‘Dear John’ letter from my wife,” Lee said. “It was somewhat shocking, but it was a miserable marriage. I felt liberated.”
Out on the town that night in July 1970, Lee met a waitress in a restaurant, the woman who would become Remzi’s mother. He doesn’t remember the details. He never knew he fathered a child that night.
Back home, Lee and his wife reconciled and had four children together. Lee’s political outlook changed. He resented the Army for mishandling Vietnam, a war he now feels was built on lies and greed. But he loved being in the military and made it a career, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1991.
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Kim Remzi says she knows very little about her mother’s life in Vietnam. She never talked about it, and declined to comment for this story.
When Remzi’s family moved to the United States, her mother left a child in Vietnam. Remzi has a sister who is three years older, also the child of an American soldier. She was raised by her grandmother, Remzi said.
Once in the United States, Remzi’s parents had two more children. Remzi says she and her siblings look alike, and her father never treated her differently from her brother and sister. But her parents had an unhappy marriage and divorced when Remzi was 12. Her mother worked as a waitress on the Army base where they lived. A few years later, Remzi’s sister died after an asthma attack. Remzi moved out of her mother’s house when she was 17 and had her first child when she was 19. Her father stopped talking to her and they have been estranged ever since.
Last winter, Remzi and her co-workers at the aircraft supply company where she works found a sale on kits from 23&Me. The company analyzes DNA to identify potential health risks and ancestry. Stories of family reunions have percolated throughout the U.S. since Ancestry.com and then 23&Me became widely available. Adoptees, blocked by the law in many states from seeing their original birth records, traced their biological connections through DNA.
Remzi’s results arrived in November. In addition to the shock about her ethnicity, Remzi saw she had a half-brother, and also a close match with a woman who turned out to be her biological niece. She requested through the 23&Me website to contact the brother. She also had questions for her mother, 69, who lives with her in Springfield, Va.
She waited until after the holidays, and for a moment when she and her mom would be alone.
Watching her mother’s face in the rearview mirror, Remzi told her about the test results.
“I’m not mad,” she said. “But I want to know, did my biological father know about me? And did my father know I wasn’t his?”
At first, Remzi’s mother denied it, and called the test a waste of money. Eventually, she acknowledged it was true, but would not add any details.
It was all too long ago, she said, too far in the past to talk about. No, the biological father didn’t know, Remzi’s mother said – she had no way to contact him. Yes, Remzi’s father knew. ****
It was Rob Lee’s son, Brian, who showed up in Remzi’s results as her half brother. He was the only one of the family, aside from one of Lee’s grandchildren, who sent DNA to 23&Me. Later, Rob and Mary Irene Lee logged their DNA with the company as well. Remzi’s family tree grew again.
When Brian broke the news to his father, he was stunned. But the Lee family says the shock quickly turned to joy.
Robbie Lee, Brian’s older brother, joked Remzi is lucky she found herself in a cool family.
“We’re a very loving, close family,” Robbie Lee says. There was grief, too.
“I lost my wonderful daughter, Maggie, 10 years ago to cancer, and I felt like I found another daughter,” Rob Lee said.
In February, Lee and Remzi met for the first time while Lee was at the Washington, D.C., airport on a layover. They sat down to eat and Remzi said she was so nervous she only ate one French fry.
“We started talking like we knew each other forever,” Remzi said. They posed for a photo, which Remzi printed and framed to give Lee at the reunion, along with a picture of herself and her three daughters. Lee wishes he remembered more, or he could’ve known Remzi sooner, but so much good has come from the lost night all those years ago, he said.