Daughter from Danang will likely stun you no matter how well prepared you are for the story it unfolds. Heidi, a 22-year-old Amerasian, was seven-years-old when she was adopted by a single woman in America, who raised her in a tightly-knit, 101% American community in Tennessee. Heidi held on dearly to memories of her Vietnamese mother and her siblings, from whom she was separated during a Ford initiative called Operation Babylift, as they were the only validation she’d ever received in her life that she was a person deserving of unconditional love. This promotion describes Operation Babylift in the best possible light. According to attorney Tom Miller, who is featured in the doc along with his wife, the journalist Tran Tuong Nhut (who is an old friend of Gail Dolgin, one of the film’s producers), Orphan Lift may have been devised by the Ford administration as a means to solicit sympathy, and money, for the Vietnam war. And while Miller doesn’t cite the facts that led him to reach this conclusion later in life, the story does reveal, in old footage and interviews, that the U.S. Adoption Agency sent social workers to Vietnam to convince mothers of Amerasian children to surrender them for the chance at a much better life in America. Some were collected from orphanages that had been set-up to receive children from parents who were unable to care for them, or feared for their safety, due their mixed ethnicity. But most were not orphans in the literal sense. And the agency made no attempt to maintain a lifeline between mothers and children, and went so far as to employ deception, even when keeping a connection alive was of the utmost importance to the families.
Heidi’s separation from her family in 1975 was a very painfull and confusing experience for her and a time of great sadness for her mother and siblings. Her adoptive mother, a woman who had been denied this privilege in the U.S. due her single status, was an emotional cripple, unable to display warmth or affection, and she cut Heidi out of her life while her daughter was still in college after deciding she could no longer control her every move. At the time of filming they were still not speaking.
In this Behind the Scenes interview, filmmakers Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco discuss their project, and give opinions as to why Heidi’s journey was such an emotional disappointment for her. The reunion developed into a suffocating experience for Heidi, and her reason for going, to finally establish herself as a person worthy of love, was devoured by her family’s eventual solicitation of monetary help, a plea that Heidi considered indecent, and one that was prompted not only by the economic misery her Vietnamese family endured, but by their ritualistic, cultural expectations.
How much money did Heidi’s family want?
We’re often asked this, and we don’t really have a figure. We know that Heidi’s mother isn’t working and her husband receives a $20 per month stipend from the government for having fought with the Viet Cong. The average income in Vietnam is about $400 a year. A little bit goes a long way, so any amount of money sent by Heidi would help her family.
Some viewers have condemned Heidi for representing an aspect of American culture that they believe is selfish and individualized. They wonder why she just couldn’t give a small amount of money to her family. But… we don’t think her resistance to sending money has anything to do with the amount they might need. It’s our sense that Heidi’s reaction had much more to do with having lost the dream she’d held onto — of what she would feel like once she found her mother. As she says in the film, she returned to Vietnam hoping to be the child — the child who had been sent away at age 7. Yet she was asked, in many ways, to be the mother and her mother was the child. Heidi wanted to give to her family. She didn’t want to feel she “owed” them.
I began writing this before I found Dolgin’s and Franco’s eloquent and exhaustive critique of their own film, and had I found it first, likely would have provided a link to it and a short introduction. But I happened to come across a reader’s response to this piece in Mercury News, which was written by a colleague of Tran Tuong Nhut, and offered as a fond adieu to her and a lament of her decision to leave the United States and move to Hanoi, because she could no longer tolerate the foreign policy decisions of the United States. What follows are excerpts from Herhold’s article:
“My animosity to America has been growing,” she told me. “America is such an incredible bully. It’s doing the same things in Iraq that it did in Vietnam. America always comes down on the wrong side of things.
“It’s bullying coupled with the vast ignorance of its people, who are anesthetized by television,” she said. “It’s all about Halliburton, it’s all about oil, it’s all about Israel. . . . People miss the subtleties, the nuances. All they can see is freedom on the march.”
[…]
“I’ll be able to find a nice place to live, somebody who can cook my meals for me,” she explained. “Vietnamese are wonderful, they’re a noisy and scrappy people. I’m home and I’m happy. Goodbye, America.”
This letter, written in response to Scott Herhold’s article about Nhut’s leaving, led to my decision to put it all here, in one place, because it all says so much about reactionary America, the rush to judgement of others and their cultures, and an overriding urgency to view them not in the context of their histories and societal norms, but only so far as they fail to mirror our very disparate and internalised biases:
Scott Herhold’s column (Nov. 28) on T.T. Nhu’s pending return to Vietnam and “goodbye to America” provides a superb example of the Ugly American. Ms. Nhu will take her money and her arrogance, move to a Third World country, and live like royalty. As she states, she will find “wonderful and scrappy people” who will cook for her in her nice home.
She, like so many Americans, believes that the people of another nation will welcome her with open arms, just as so many thought the Canadians would after President Bush’s victory. It is this attitude of self-righteousness that gives us all a bad name.
John D. Blumenson
Santa Clara
How could Blumenson have read the same article I did? Scott Herhold was very clear that Nhut’s family originated in Hanoi and many have continued to make their home there long after some immigrated to San Diego. Blumenson appears incensed that Nhut would reject her privileged American status, as if she is a non-entity beyond its meaning, and owes the country her undying loyalty for allowing her the opportunities to accumulate this wealth. How is it arrogant to possess the means to offer employment to someone who lives in, as he termed it, a third world country? He’s no different than Heidi’s adoptive mother, who disowned her daughter, when she could no longer make her perform like a trained seal.
In America, the ideal of individualism has been bastardised by a market that sells it to consumers, a society that has come to expect that freedom and success is equivalent to a family of four possessing four cars, five phones (four cellular and one in the home), etc., and that the elderly who cannot take care of themselves deserve no better than an institution will provide. It’s not that we don’t love our parents, but who has the time to care for them, when our days are consumed earning the money to buy the products that show the world we are a nation of freedom-loving individuals?
Unfortunately, somewhere along this road to freedom, the inter-connectiveness of individuals in a shared society has been severed, as deliberately as the U.S. Adoption Agency dissolved family ties so long ago in Vietnam, and the question that begs to be asked, is which society should prevail in the end? The American model, a calculating one that casts-off the weak, and promotes the bartering of love based upon the absence of physical, spiritual, and emotional need? What’s in it for me, baby?
Is it really worthy of export?