I watched a wonderful movie last night; it won a Sundance Award for Best Documentary in 2002 so you may have heard of it: Daughter from Dananag. It is about a young woman who had been a part of Operation Babylift, the 1975 removal of thousands of Vietnamese “orphans” from Vietnam to the United States. Of course, not all of the children were orphans, which was one of the tragedies of the event. The girl–born Mai Thi Hiep, but who became Heidi Bub–was taken to the orphanage because her mother, like so many Vietnamese mothers at the time, believed that her daughter, born to an American GI, would be burned to death by the North Vietnamese because she is mixed race.
Heidi is flown out of Vietnam and grows up the daughter of a single woman in Tennessee. After a falling out with her adoptive mother (This documentary does not portray Heidi’s American mother very positively at all!) Heidi decides to track down her birth mother. She is one of the fortunate few who was removed from Vietnam by an agency that worked diligently to keep accurate records of the children leaving Vietnam despite the chaos that was going on in that country as the U.S. was pulling out. (I recently read The Life We Were Given, Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam by Dana Sachs which is a remarkable accounting of that turbulent time in Vietnam’s history and most of the kids have absolutely no records of their identity or their families.)
Heidi was older, however, 6 1/2 years old, when she is removed, so she has some hazy memories of her childhood, and with the help of the agency, she is able to find her family. The focus of the movie is on Heidi, a.k.a., Hiep and her reunion with her mother. It’s incredibly touching and it speaks so much to the adoptive experience and what makes us the people we are, our genetics or our environment. Heidi is Americanized through and through and has difficulty relating to her mother and siblings in Vietnam. At one point she says she feels suffocated by the closeness of the bunch. Her mother in the U.S. was cold and distant, so she is unaccustomed to the physical and emotional closeness of her siblings.
Much has been written about the end of the movie when her Vietnamese family asks her to support her mother financially, and Heidi breaks down into tears saying that she feels so used by these people whom she doesn’t have a relationship with. I wish someone had done a better job preparing her for what she might experience. Her Vietnamese family is not greedy, children who have the means are expected to care for their parents.
If you haven’t had a chance to see it, it is an incredible film and I highly recommend it for anyone who has adopted or who is thinking of adopting internationally.
