The Bitter Legacy of the Babylift

"When am I going home?" asked twelve-year-old Ya Hinh, just eight weeks after arriving in the suburban New York home of Janet and Louis Marchese. Hinh, called Keith by the Marcheses, was one of some 2,000 Vietnamese children airlifted to the U.S. in Operation Babylift as Saigon fell to the Communists in the spring of 1975. He had learned to say "mother," "father" and a few other English words quite quickly. But Mrs. Marchese, wife of a New York City policeman, was torn between her desire to adopt the boy officially and her awareness that his real mother might want him back. "Keith loves it here, but he misses his parents," she explains. "He has lots of nightmares. I think about how it would be if he were my child, and I break into a cold sweat."

Unlike many of the Americans who have taken in Vietnamese children, Mrs. Marchese is earnestly trying to find Keith's parents. She has spent some $500 on telephone calls to the Red Cross, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and many refugee camps, with no success. "It's very cruel to keep a child if his parents are looking for him," she feels. Similarly futile attempts to find the parents of My Hang, 7, have been made by Lisa Brodyaga, 35, a lawyer in San Jose, Calif., who has adopted the girl. She contends that adoption agencies show little interest in helping. My Hang arrived in the U.S. with no identification papers at all.

Batches of Babies. The anguish of Viet Nam lingers--for the American families seeking to adopt the children they have come to love, and for an unknown number of Vietnamese parents now seeking to regain custody of children they sent to the U.S. as "orphans" to spare them from a possible bloodbath or starvation. Operation Babylift was created out of humanitarian motives on all sides. Yet it has left a legacy of uncertainty, considerable bitterness--and a legal situation as tangled as the emotions that swirled around the war itself.

In the rush to get the children out of Viet Nam, there was often no great concern about technicalities like proper identification or release forms from parents. Recalls Bobby Nofflet, who worked with the U.S. AID agency in Saigon in those hectic days: "Three, six, nine babies would be left in front of the agency, mothers begging us to take them. There were large sheaves of papers and batches of babies. Who knew which belonged to which?" Children also were dying of malnutrition in the orphanages at the time. "When you see that, you don't care what goes on; you just want to get those little kids out," explains Anna Forder, a St. Louis lawyer who, as a social worker in Viet Nam, was familiar with the orphanages.

The result is chaos, as the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and local U.S. courts try to determine whether specific Vietnamese children are legally eligible for adoption by the Americans who have taken them in. So far, the service has declared 1,671 children eligible, based either on signed releases from a parent or on affidavits from Vietnamese swearing that the parents are dead or the children have been abandoned. Another 353 children have been ruled ineligible.

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, meanwhile, has filed a class-action suit on behalf of all the children who may not in fact be orphans, including those who have been ruled eligible for adoption. The center, challenging the validity of the service's decisions, is asking for a case-by-case review of each child's background. A district court in San Francisco, however, has ruled that no class litigation for all the children is lawful; if individual reviews are requested, they must be granted by the appropriate local courts. This ruling is being appealed. The ambiguity hurts all parties.

Very Bad. Ha Thi Vo, a Vietnamese mother who gave up three sons during the babylift, is now living in California, where she is fighting to regain them. She found her youngest child, Tung, 3, at an adoption agency. But since he did not immediately recognize her, agency officials said she could not take him. "They call me a liar," she says. "They make me feel very bad."

In Forest City, Iowa, Johnny and Bonnie Nelson feel they have the right to resist the claim of Doan Thi Hoang Ann, who lives in Great Falls, Mont.; she insists she is the mother of the fouryear-old Vietnamese child they call Ben. Says Mrs. Nelson: "At first I was trying to look at it as if I were in her shoes. But we couldn't just give him away to someone claiming to be his mother without any proof." When both sides went into court over Ben, Mrs. Nelson decided, "If he reacted to her in a loving way, if he knew her and ran to her, we would know she was someone whom he could accept and love. But Ben was in court with us the entire day, and when she walked in and called his name, he looked up, then went right back to his coloring." Nonetheless, a district court in Iowa has ruled that the Nelsons must give the boy up; they are appealing.

Le Thi Sang, 32, a Vietnamese woman now working as a hotel cleaning worker in Ohio, is seeking her son, Le Tuan Anh, 7, who lives with a California family. Says Sang: "I telephoned, but the other lady says she doesn't want me to talk with him. She says I must speak English, and I do and she answers for him. I cry. I cry."

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