Reclaiming Ownership of My History
By
Sumeia Williams
My dad had been serving his tour of duty in Vietnam when he’d decided to adopt. He and my mother had already had two boys and wanted a girl. In 1970, toward the last six months of his tour, he’d come across me in an orphanage and taken me home.
At least, that’s what I’d been told as a child.
In the early days of my childhood, I believed myself to be a true orphan with no living genetic parents. The thought that I’d had another mother and father before my adoption didn’t even occur to me until second or third grade. With the exception of my dad, no one spoke of my adoption at length. Perhaps it was my family’s way of telling me that it didn’t matter. They loved me regardless of my unfortunate circumstances.
Further still, my past was too closely linked to a war that had cost thousands of American and Vietnamese lives. For my dad, this was yet another reason not to talk too much about our shared past in Vietnam. War created the circumstances of my adoption, chaos an excuse for hiding the truth and time covered the trail. It boiled down to, “Life happens. Here’s a shovel. Now dig.” It still baffles me that some adoptees must exert so much effort just for the hope of gaining access to a history that rightfully belongs to them. The obvious question is, “Why?”
Perhaps the fact that I wore the face of “the other side” doubled the importance of locking away certain memories forever. Maybe he feared conflicting feelings that might arise in my own growing consciousness as I learned about the conflict between my birth country and my adopted one.
“Many of us from that era still have memories we choose not to speak of or think about,” he once wrote in a letter to me, “It is just a self-protective mechanism of our human nature to preserve our dignity and perhaps our very own sanity.”
Unfortunately, in his attempts to bury parts of his past, he also secreted away vital keys to mine — and with it my personal history and identity. Not content to leave the story open ended, he invented a scenario that might offer us both some closure.
My parents had divorced shortly after my adoption. My mother had been my primary caregiver for most of my childhood. During the early part of my adolescence, I went to live with my dad. Shortly after my arrival, he decided it was time to tell me “the truth” of my adoption.
I was 14 when he called me into the room: “Honey, come here. I have something to tell you.”
He then began to tell the story of how he’d fallen in love with my Vietnamese mother while he was serving in Vietnam. How I’d been the result of that love and how he’d brought me back under the guise of adoption. My dad was married to my adoptive mother at the time, so the need for the ruse was obvious, wasn’t it? As for my mother, he told me, she’d been killed by a group of Viet Cong after which he’d taken me to Hoi Duc Anh orphanage in order to begin the adoption process.
My feelings at that sudden disclosure almost 14 years ago escape me — but I do know it wasn’t like what you see in the movies. There were no tearful, joyous declarations of, “Daddy!” No feelings of resolution. No closure.
I can’t remember how I felt — only my reaction endures in my memory. I smiled, tried to comfort him with a hug and left the room. We didn’t really speak of it again aside from his occasional remarks of how I walked or looked like my mother. How could I convey my feelings of betrayal at having been lied to? I didn’t have the tools to process how learning I was Amerasian threw my identity into chaos. Deeper still, how could I explain that with his sudden confession, he’d just killed all hopes of ever finding my mother? As an orphan, there had remained a small glint of hope. Now that was gone.
In silence, I spent the next several years trying to come to terms with what he’d told me. My mechanism of choice was denial. I went on with my life trying to not to think of it too much. It worked better on some days than others but his words and their affects on me were always there. They manifested themselves in every aspect of my life, directed my choices in ways I’m still trying to understand.
I finished high school, got married and had children of my own just like everyone else, but I could never rid myself of the sense that my insides had been ripped from beneath my skin. And then there were the unanswered questions. What was my mother’s name? Why did he have no photos of her? What about other family members still in Vietnam?
By the time I reached my mid-thirties, I couldn’t stand it. I had to know. After over a decade of silence, I began to ask those questions out loud. And once again, my dad’s response threw me into chaos.
The words of Bryan Thao Worra, a Laotian adoptee and poet, reverberate through my mind as I make yet another necessary edit to my story: “For transcultural adoptees, our lives are written in pencil. Everything you think you know about yourself can change in an instant.”
And for me it did. It seems that I am not my dad’s genetic daughter after all. He didn’t say it directly, but it was obvious: “You were already in the orphanage when I got there.” Even this small detail took months of prodding and questioning. Once it was out, he offered up a tangible clue to my past. It was a 37-year-old address in Saigon that he said belonged to my foster mother, Ta Kim Cuc.
So here is my dad’s most recent version of my beginnings. I have no way of knowing if it is true: Cuc somehow learned of my dad’s wishes and took him straight to my crib in the orphanage. After that, I was taken to her house where I stayed for the next six months. She accompanied us to the airport before we left Vietnam and gave my father her address. “Give this to Le Thi,” she instructed, “so that I can find out what became of her.”
Does or did this woman really exist? If so, how long did she wait hoping for the letter that never came? Is it possible that she’s waiting, still holding perhaps the only clue to the identity of my mother? Why did my dad never write to her? Why did he wait until I’d nearly driven myself crazy with the longing to know my history before he’d given me her address?
“I was waiting until you understood more about life. I had my reasons,” was the only explanation he offered.
All I heard was, “I am not accountable.”
I couldn’t disagree more. Adoption isn’t just about destiny, circumstance and self-congratulation for “saving” a child. It’s also about the consequences of conscious decisions made for adoptees supposedly “in our best interest.” Regardless of whether it’s for better or worse, adoption is the power to change a life and as the saying goes, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” My history had been hidden and altered, affecting my life in ways I’m only beginning to understand. Furthermore, my father’s actions may have possibly prevented me from ever finding out the truth.
What I think my dad failed to realize is that regardless of his own feelings, the truth of my adoption was rightfully mine to know. He was simply holding it in trust and was responsible for giving me unfiltered access to it.
Unlike in decades past, the act of hiding an adoptee’s heritage is not beyond question or criticism. We should be past the days when adoptees are forced to shoulder the burden of maintaining the illusion that none of it matters. In my own situation, though, the instinct to comfort and reassure is too ingrained. Despite my feeling of outrage and betrayal, I cannot break my conditioning.
“It’s alright, Dad,” I said. I was glad we were talking over the phone, that he couldn’t see the look on my face. “I understand.”
I didn’t understand. But what good would it have done to say so? I’m 37 years old with four kids of my own. How much more was I suppose to understand “about life” before he deemed me ready to hear the truth? The fact is he withheld and even altered vital pieces of my puzzle years after my initial inquiries. Knowing that forces me to question the nature of his other “reasons.”
Without further explanation, I am again left to speculate but to what end? My dad and I both know it wouldn’t do anything good for me to push the matter. Even if I tried to hold him accountable for withholding information that was rightfully mine, we both know he would throw up the old reliable defense.
“Everything I did was in your best interest.” How do you argue with that?
It’s not that I doubt my dad’s sincerity. I have little doubt that he believed his decisions were based in large part on what he thought was best for me. Unfortunately, we disagree. Sympathy or even empathy does not equal acceptance or approval. In fact, over the years, I have become highly critical of his actions. By way of omission, deception and half-truth, he altered my personal history and my identity. His actions not only affected me, but all those around me, including my children and even the life of an obscure, almost forgotten woman by the name of Ta Kim Cuc — that is, if she exists. If I bring thoughts of my Vietnamese mother into the picture, the pain and anger become unbearable.
My dad would probably argue that he simply told my story as a continuation of his. True, my story is part of his own, but in telling it through his own perceptions and not including mine, he took away my ownership and for that I need to hold him accountable.
I have tried to write a letter Cuc …
“To whom it may concern…”
But how do you write a letter to a person who may no longer be alive and send it to an address that may no longer exist? To whom it may concern? My father’s choices concerned us all. My whole family has had to live with the consequences, yet I am the one left with the job of rectifying his wrongs. It is the thought foremost in my mind as I scramble to find the one woman who could unravel decades of secrecy. I can’t even begin to think of how I might react if it’s discovered she’s already passed from this life, taking it all with her.
Of course, I will always love my dad as any dutiful daughter does, but I will always feel betrayed. Any feelings of ingratitude, disloyalty and guilt about my anger takes a back seat to a sense of urgency as I run full steam backwards into the past.
Miriam on November 13th 2007 in Articles, reprint articles