Vietnamese reunites with daughter after 4 decades

Ho Chi Minh City, Nov 25

They wondered about each other over the decades, the Vietnamese mother constantly and more acutely than the 3-year-old daughter she gave up in April 1975, just before Saigon fell to Communist North Vietnam.

As US troops exited Vietnam after 20 years of conflict, thousands of South Vietnamese who had fought alongside them or otherwise opposed the North were terrified of what lay ahead. As some fled, more than 3,000 children were flown to new families overseas in what became known as ‘Operation Babylift’. Among those infants was Leigh Mai Boughton Small – the daughter of a Vietnamese maid and a GI – who was airlifted out of the humid chaos of Vietnam for a new life and adopted middle-class family in New England.

Leigh Mai and her birth mother may have spent the rest of their lives wondering about each other – except for the mother’s persistence, the daughter’s decision to try a DNA website, and help from a Vietnamese Good Samaritan.

After years of trying to find each other, Leigh Mai, now 47, met her birth mother Nguyen thi Dep on November 17 in Ho Chi Minh City. It began with awkward hugs. Dep, 70, was afraid her daughter would be disappointed in her – the beautiful young mother had turned into “an old and gray woman, ugly and skinny,” she said afterward.

Leigh Mai, accompanied by her husband Jeff and three children, was eager to reassure her mother she harbored no resentment about being sent away. Leigh Mai gave Dep a locket and a scrapbook of her childhood. Dep gave her grandchildren traditional red envelopes containing cash. They hugged, cried and laughed. What hit Leigh Mai the most was realizing it wasn’t just a mother she had lost, but a Vietnamese family “and that there was love there… and aunts and uncles and that never kind of crossed my mind.”

She also could not comprehend how hard it must have been for Dep all those years ago when Dep had struggled with the decision to hastily send her daughter overseas to an unknown fate. — Reuters