Out of the Fog

In 1975, to hear the Americans tell it, the mass adoption of Vietnamese children was a story of rescue and redemption. These children were war babies, bụi đời, children of dust. A decade of death coupled with a thriving sex trade near US military bases had put nearly 20,000 children in more than a hundred orphanages throughout South Vietnam. By April, as the Viet Cong swept down the coast, mixed race children were said to be in danger. The Northern army would find foreign offspring and carve their livers from their bodies to eat, or so the rumors went. Out of fear and desperation, mothers relinquished their babies — many underweight, sick, or maimed by war — to the Americans. And the Americans took them away.

The popular narrative of Vietnamese adoption began like this:

And ended like this:

Aid workers called it a “salvage operation.” Cherie Clark, a nurse, recalled, “We were literally picking up babies and trying to keep them alive long enough to place them for adoption.” Clark ultimately sent around 1,200 children out of Vietnam through her adoption organization Friends of Children of Vietnam (FCVN).

President Gerald Ford announced Operation Babylift in early April, as it became clear that the US would withdraw its presence from Vietnam entirely. Ford described the babylift as a humanitarian “mission of mercy.” It was, just as importantly, a deflection from military defeat and abandonment. A month later, 2,894 Vietnamese and Cambodian children were on their way to American homes; approximately 1,300 others were adopted to Australia, Canada, and across Europe.

Some of the first children were flown away on a C-5A Galaxy transport aircraft, a plane whose interior could rival a gymnasium. Orphanage workers loaded the cargo hold with 200-plus children, an endeavor “like trying to carry loose eggs in the bed of a pickup truck,” as journalist Dana Sachs described in her book, The Life We Were Given. Twelve minutes after takeoff, a door in the rear of the plane blew out, ripping a hole in the side of the plane. The plane crashed into a rice paddy, crushing the cargo hold where the children were kept — 138 died, including 78 babies.

Operation Babylift continued without a breath. The next day, 324 children, including survivors from the previous day’s crash, were loaded onto a commercial Pan Am flight. This time, babies in white pajamas were packaged neatly in cardboard boxes. Boxes with babies were wedged under seats like carry-on luggage. Some babies were buckled into the red-and-yellow plane seats, slumped over like little dolls. In the ensuing weeks, the seven US and international adoption organizations in Vietnam competed to ensure space on planes for the children in their care.

A South Vietnamese lieutenant gave this bitter statement to the New York Times: “It is nice to see you Americans bringing home souvenirs of our country as you leave — china elephants and orphans. Too bad some of them broke … but we have plenty more.”

Americans had adopted children from abroad in previous decades, most notably from South Korea, but Operation Babylift created a story around adoption that transformed the displacement of a foreign baby to an American home into an act of charity. Out of the horrors of war came an opportunity for benevolence and absolution. “Everyone suffers in a war, but no one suffers more than the children, and the airlift was the least that we could do,” Ford wrote in his autobiography. This narrative has never been without its critics — Grace Paley, writing for Ms. Magazine at the time of the babylift, called it “a cynical political game” — but even those who acknowledged the alarming messiness of the campaign’s logistics thought of the adoptions themselves as a win-win. A Massachusetts senator put it this way: “Very simplistically, it is better to live in elitism in the United States than to be dead in Vietnam.”

As the first babylift planes started landing in San Francisco, it soon became clear that many of the children were not, in fact, orphans. Nhu Miller, a Vietnamese woman who was living nearby, came to the Presidio to interpret for the older children and found that some didn’t know where they were. They wanted to see their parents, siblings, grandparents. “When can I go home?” they asked. In the chaos, many lacked identifying documents; their papers had been lost, mixed up, or fabricated. “I went to help and saw people were just picking them out like puppies,” Miller said later.

How one viewed the babylift — as a mission to save children or to abduct them — depended in part on how one defined the purpose of adoption. Was it to provide for a child or to provide a child to eager Western parents? FCVN and other adoption agencies, as well as prospective parents, persisted with their adoptions in defiance of evidence that some children had other alternatives. They offered their belief in the restorative power of a loving family as reasoning. “Let’s forget the politics and think of the kids,” said one adoptive parent of an Operation Babylift child. This attitude prevails today. 

The children’s birth mothers were rarely given consideration. Yet some refused to be forgotten. One mother, Anh Thi Hoang Doan, arrived as a refugee at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, four months after entrusting her seven children to FCVN in the belief that the agency would transport her children safely to the United States. She’d planned to join them. She explained these conditions to the agency, and — not intending to give her children up — she did not sign an adoption release. Once in California, Doan found several of her children quickly. A fifth child, Binh, had been adopted by a couple in Iowa. The couple refused to return the boy. Doan sued for custody, and the couple appealed. Finally, after 18 months, she won Binh back. Her last child, Than, was lost in the shuffle of FCVN. Doan died in 2021, having never found him.

left | https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/assets.sbnation.com/csk/uploads/verge-features/american-war/articles/babylift/spot/babylift_spot_1-min.png | “What is my face? Who are my people? Where do I come from?”

The mission of Operation Babylift concluded with the arrival of the Vietnamese babies to their American homes. For the humanitarians and the new parents, this made for a happy ending. But as the children grew up, their stories continued on to other endings.

“My adoption was not one of those happy, wonderful stories,” Lynelle Long told me. She was taken from Vietnam to Australia at five months old, in 1973. She was not formally adopted until she was in her late teens. “I suffered years of abuse,” she said. Long gave a testimonial last year to the Australian minister of immigration, in which she spoke about suffering sexual abuse by several family members. Two years ago, her adoptive father pleaded guilty to the abuse, and Long legally annulled her adoption. In her passport, “place of birth” had always been listed as Australia. She finally changed it to the truthful location: Vietnam.

Australia did not have a history of adoption before the Vietnam War, so Long was among the first children to arrive in the country. Back then, no one talked about adoption. “I just grew up feeling strange, weird, isolated, very alone,” she told me. When Long was in her early 20s, she went looking for a meeting like Alcoholics Anonymous for adoptees from abroad. There was none. She joined one group for domestic adoptees, but when she attended she found that they didn’t talk about the experience of looking different from their white families or about facing a daily undercurrent of racism. She asked the group organizers if they ever heard from other adopted people like her. A few came around now and again, they told her. She gave them her name and number and told them to share it when they did. A couple years later, Long, then working at IBM, transformed these chance connections into an online group for anyone around the world who’s been adopted to a foreign country.

InterCountry Adoptee Voices became a lifeline for adopted people looking for legal advice, help with mental health problems, and information about how to find their birth families — none of which was provided by governments in the years after the babylifts. The United States does not provide welfare checks on internationally adopted children, opening them up to potential harm. In 2022, research on a group of around 800 South Korean adoptees found that a third of them were abused by their adoptive families. The US government also does not collect information about the wellbeing of adopted children later in life. Yet teenagers who were transnationally adopted are far more likely to suffer serious mental health disorders than children who were not adopted. “As a taken child, I was never in any position to defend or protect myself. I had no voice,” Long said in her testimonial.

Not every adoption story is so sobering, but even children who are placed in happy families tend to grow up with complicated feelings about their histories. In 2000, a sociology student named Indigo Willing started one of the first groups for people adopted from Vietnam, called Adopted Vietnamese International (AVI). Willing was adopted from Vietnam to the suburbs of Sydney in 1972. Her family was loving, she told me, but that didn’t make her forget how she got there. She likened adopted people to lost souls wandering the earth, searching for answers.

“There’s not a day that I don’t look in the mirror and I wonder, ‘What is my face? Who are my people? Where do I come from?’” she told me. AVI is now a Facebook group of around 2,000 members, where people share baby photos and scans of government flight rosters. They list the names of their birth mothers and 50-year-old addresses, asking, “If you know anything, please let me know.” They fundraise for trips back to Vietnam to hand out DNA kits, in the hopes of expanding the databank of birth families. They organize heritage tours. Willing has traveled back to Vietnam, but she’s never found her birth parents.

Many of the adopted people I spoke to described themselves as fundamentally incomplete. The parts of their lives that are absent from memory loom as large as the parts that are present. “My narrative is the source of who I am and yet also a reminder of what I am not and do not have. I’m in between a complete story and a story that will never be fully known,” Bert Ballard, who was flown out from Saigon’s An Lac orphanage at three weeks old, wrote in an anthology of adoption stories.

It is for this reason that some adopted people find the closest sense of family among other adoptees. In the Facebook groups, adoptees will sometimes call each other brother and sister. “You guys are my homeland,” said one Korean adoptee to a room of other adoptees at a 2018 conference.

Jane Joy was adopted from Saigon in 1973 and grew up in a white family in western New York. A few years ago, she founded a Facebook group called Vietnamese Adoptees that she restricted to adopted people only. She told me that so often the good intentions and the injured feelings of adoptive parents end up circumscribing what their adopted children feel permitted to talk about. “I remember being seven or eight years old, and it felt like it physically hurt to not look like my family. I remember saying to my mom, ‘I just wish I had blonde hair, blue eyes.’ She didn’t understand,” Joy told me. “To her, my perspective didn’t make sense. Oh, but you’re different. I didn’t want to be different. That was the last thing I wanted.”

Long, Willing, and Joy are part of what’s often called the first generation of Vietnamese adoptees, people now in their 50s and 60s. For decades after the war, the most widely circulated first-person accounts of the babylifts were memoirs written by humanitarian workers like Cherie Clark, and the events held to commemorate the babylifts were put on by adoption agencies and airline companies. But as the first generation of adoptees came of age, they began to articulate their own perspectives. After groping the dark to find each other, adoptees formed a common language for their experience. They talk about “coming out of the fog” — learning to question the white savior narrative so often handed down by their adoptive parents. They’ve published memoirs, made documentaries and films. Many have managed to find and reunite with their birth families. They’ve created a counternarrative of adoption that acknowledges the reality of grief, loss, and anger in their stories.

The recent book Somewhere Sisters by journalist Erika Hayasaki follows the remarkable full story of an adoption, from birth to relocation, to reunion and its aftermath. In Nha Trang in 1998, a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman named Liên bears twin daughters prematurely. Both are ill, weighing less than four pounds. Liên has neither job nor home, and the father is gone. She brings the twins to a nearby orphanage, which accepts one girl, named Loan. Liên’s other daughter, Hà, she entrusts to the care of her sister. Over the next three years, Liên intermittently visits her daughters. One day, she comes by the orphanage and is told that Loan has been adopted by an American family. She is not told their names, but we learn they are the Solimenes, a wealthy family living in a large house in a Chicago suburb. The adoption was motivated by the mother Keely, who, in the wake of 9/11, wanted to do something good and meaningful for the world.

Hà, meanwhile, lives a poor but happy childhood in her village. At the age of 13, Loan finally reunites with her sister Hà and mother Liên after years of effort on Keely’s part. Her persistence at finding Hà and Liên — procuring interpreters, pursuing leads, and visiting Nha Trang in person several times — is a generous act, but it also makes clear how fully the adoptive family is in control of reunion. Keely makes it happen, though only according to her motivations and on her schedule. Early on, Liên writes Keely a letter to tell her she desires to reconnect with Loan. But Keely will not be ready for six more years. She does not reply.

right | https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/assets.sbnation.com/csk/uploads/verge-features/american-war/articles/babylift/spot/babylift_spot_2-min.png | After groping in the dark to find each other, adoptees formed a common language for their experience

The United States has absorbed more adopted children than every other country put together. In 2004, at the peak of international adoption, American families adopted almost 23,000 children. Since then, international adoptions to the US have decreased by more than 90 percent, largely due to Hague Convention regulations intended to eliminate trafficking. In other countries, the narrative around adoption has soured. Ethiopia was sending a couple thousand children to the US a year when the abuse and death of a 10-year-old girl pushed the country to ban all international adoptions. Today, the country’s official policy is that every Ethiopian child should grow up in Ethiopia. China — the country that has cumulatively sent the most children to the US — ceased overseas adoptions last year. When international adoptions do take place, Hague Convention guidelines suggest that the process should be regulated and that contact information for the birth family is preserved and made available if the child desires it.

There are currently more than a million people in Western countries who were adopted from abroad, including a predominantly Asian American population of adult adoptees in the United States. It’s a group of people unique in history. The first generation has found their voice; the youngest cohort is now coming of age. They are in the unique position, too, of seeing with clear eyes how the cherished American institution of family is offered up or withheld for political aim. 

One of the primary issues facing some American adoptees today is, appallingly, being denied citizenship. Until 2001, foreign adoptions in the US were routed through the same legal pathway as for domestic adoptions. The result was that naturalizing the foreign-born children did not happen as part of that process. Parents had to apply for their children’s citizenship separately, and many of them were either never informed or never did it.

Kris Larsen’s parents did apply for his American citizenship after they adopted him in Guam from an Operation Babylift flight. They assumed he received it, because they didn’t hear otherwise. But his paperwork was never processed. In 2012, Larsen was in his early 40s and serving a prison sentence in Seattle when an ICE check flagged him. The news that he wasn’t a US citizen made no sense to him. “I kind of laughed it off because I was like, ‘That’s impossible. I’ve been here all my life,’” he told me. His family told him it was a mistake and not to worry. On his release, when his family went to the prison to meet him, ICE picked him up instead. He was on their deportation list.

In 2000, Congress passed legislation to grant citizenship to all adopted children who were under 18. But the law did not apply to adopted adults, including the Operation Babylift cohort and thousands of other adoptees from Korea, China, and other countries.

Talking to Larsen, I made the mistake of referring to his situation as “undocumented.” He quickly corrected me. He has never been undocumented. In 2022, he petitioned for a pardon, which he received, and was reissued a green card. Now, in his 50s, he is in the process of applying for citizenship.

About 10 years ago, after the widely publicized deportations of a couple of Korean adoptees, one of whom committed suicide, a movement formed to lobby for legislation that would grant citizenship to adoptees who’d been left out of the 2000 law — a group that potentially numbers in the thousands. The proposed bill, the Adoptee Citizenship Act, has not passed. Conservative opponents categorize it as an undesirable “immigration bill” and demand that adopted people with criminal records and the many dozen adoptees who have already been deported be excluded from the bill.

Monte Haines is one such person. He was deported to South Korea in 2009. Five ICE agents escorted him off the plane, put $20 in his pocket, and left. It was November. Haines was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He had no luggage, no phone, no ID. He did not speak Korean. For three weeks, he slept under a bridge and ate from the trash. “It’s like ping-pong,” he said at a panel a few years ago. “First the Korean government sent me to the US, then from the US they sent me back to Korea.”

The children of Operation Babylift, and all other descendants of American war, are both adoptees and refugees. But they are not voluntary immigrants, and they are not foreigners. The denial of citizenship to adopted Americans like Larsen and Haines reveals that the beneficent embrace of the American family was always conditional, coming at the cost of more vulnerable families and even the children themselves. Adoption in the US has never erased a child’s foreignness. Those who grew up and were charged with crimes are most vulnerable, suddenly marked as not properly deserving to belong. This logic has continued in more insidious form under President Donald Trump, who has dispensed with any notion of saving the children and instead straightforwardly threatens them. His 2018 family separation policy severed approximately 5,500 migrant children from their families in order to broadcast a political warning; more than a thousand are still not reunited. His move earlier this year to undo birthright citizenship is a bald attempt to deny nonwhite children of the US their claim to the American family. 

Long has never found her birth family. Even so, she feels her story is complete. “You can find peace without finding your birth family. That’s not necessary. It’s the process of finding yourself that is necessary,” she said. Haines, meanwhile, managed to move into a studio apartment and get work at a pizza shop, but he has never found home. His new compatriots in Seoul look at him like he’s a foreigner. “I’m Korean, same as you,” he tells them. He has not returned to the United States.