Going home to Vietnam, a daughter of strangers
The woeful complexity of America's traumatic misadventure in Vietnam is perfectly captured in "Daughter From Danang," a fascinating documentary, opening in New York on Nov. 1, about a Vietnamese-American woman named Heidi Bub and her reunion with the mother who gave her up for adoption in April 1975, as the war drew to a chaotic close. Ms. Bub was among some 2,700 children flown to the United States in a controversial rescue mission called Operation Babylift.
Not all Babylift children were orphaned or abandoned, as officials claimed at the time. Directed by Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco, "Daughter From Danang" includes chilling archival footage of a young American adoption agency worker badgering reluctant Vietnamese women to surrender their mixed-race babies. Propelled by a rumor that the Viet Cong planned to kill such children, Ms. Bub's mother, Mai Thi Kim, whose American lover had abandoned her when she was four months pregnant, surrendered their 7-year-old daughter Hiep — Vietnamese for unity — to the babylift.
Twice cursed, Ms. Bub was adopted by a financially generous American woman who beat her, made her conceal her Vietnamese heritage and, finally, abandoned her outright while she was still in college. Ms. Bub married an American naval officer, and, at 29, flew to Danang to visit her birth mother after they tracked each other down. The affection of her Vietnamese relatives — including a half-brother she remembers fondly — thrills her at first. "They may not have much here," Ms. Bub says, trying not to look shocked at their squeaky-clean poverty, "but they do have that family love and unity."
Soon, however, she's griping about their "touchy touchy feel feel," and when her older siblings ask her to help support her mother and a severely impoverished half-sister, the scene that ensues beats anything on "The Sopranos" for riveting family drama, and exposes a discomfiting political paradox. For the Vietnamese, it seems, family values aren't a vote-getting slogan but a matter of inescapable responsibility. The thoroughly American Ms. Bub just thinks she's being scammed.
By Karen Durbin - The New York Times - October 20, 2002
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