…to hear Loc’s story firsthand.  I travelled deep into the country in Quang Ngai Province to her humble but beautifully kept farm.  Chickens, dogs, and cattle milled about the newly planted rice paddies, her back yard, and occasionally the kitchen.  Although she has been forced to move many times, Loc has lived in this area with her husband and 9 children since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Because Loc had worked for the Americans at the Chu Lai Combat Base, she joined thousands of panicked South Vietnamese civilians who fled their homes to escape the on-rushing Communist troops.  Many South Vietnamese soldiers, in an attempt to blend in with the refugees had discarded their military uniforms and were dressed as civilians.  After a day on the road the refugees found their way blocked by a huge barbed wire containment area where Viet Cong troops were checking documents and making decisions about who would pass and who would be detained for questioning and possible imprisonment.  In the ensuing swarming chaos a man grabbed Loc’s 2 year old son Thanh from her arms and disappeared into the crowd of thousands of refugees.

Single men without family were automatically detained for questioning in the belief that they were fleeing Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers.  The man who had snatched young Thanh used the baby to talk his way through the checkpoint, discarding Thanh at the side of the road when he was no longer needed.  A woman, seeing this, collected Thanh and later traded him to another woman for a bag of rice.  This woman, past child-bearing age, raised Thanh as her own child into manhood, marriage, and kids of his own.  During the years apart from her son, Loc dreams often of where he must be living and pictures his life in detail in those dreams.

In 1996, 20 years after her loss, Loc hears of a woman who is visiting her village and telling a story that seems to match her own.  On meeting, both women realize that Thanh is indeed Loc’s lost child.  On visiting Thanh’s home, Loc is shocked to realize that his life is precisely as she has pictured all these years.  He lives in a beautiful home and has all the advantages of a middle class Vietnamese child doted on by adoring parents.

Thanh’s adoptive mother pleads with Loc to leave him with her, her only child.  Loc makes her difficult decision in an instant.  She wants nothing more than to be reunited with her long lost child, but recognizes both that he has a better life style in his adoptive home and that to deprive Thanh’s mother of a son in her declining years would be a cruelly unnecessary stroke.  She gives Thanh her blessing and Loc rides away in tearful grief.