Barton Williams, a Vietnamese adoptee, has recently undertaken a spiritual trip in order to discover their origins. He recently wrote a children’s book, But What Are You?, based on his own experiences as an adoptee. This narrative evolved into a play named “FRAGILE: Handle With Care,” which Williams showcased at the Edinburgh and Adelaide Fringe Festivals. His recent trip to Vietnam was ground-breaking. More importantly, it provided him with the opportunity to face his past, to prepare for and have real interactions about adoption.
Williams, evacuated from Vietnam to Australia just weeks before the fall of Saigon in 1975 during Operation Babylift—the largest humanitarian adoption program globally—expressed the significance of returning to his homeland. He stated, “Returning to Vietnam this time the second time for me with other adoptees was really cathartic in the sense that it really allowed me to actually talk about it, whereas in the past I hadn’t really talked a lot about my past and my adoption.”
Accompanying Williams on this emotional journey was Sue-Yen Luiten, another adoptee who organized a bike ride connecting adoptees to Vietnam’s culture and people. Luiten, who was adopted from Vietnam at four weeks old and raised in Western Australia, has taken him 10 years to be able to plan this ride. Thirteen adoptees mostly from Down Under have undergone their own incredible odyssey. They rode 284 kilometers in four days, from Ho Chi Minh City to Sóc Trăng, through the communes along the Mekong Delta where each was born, during the Vietnam War.
The therapeutic impact of the bike ride on the participants was often profound. Luiten described it as “a really cathartic way to exercise and exorcise those sorts of feelings.” Their travels provided both of them with opportunities to reconnect with their broader heritage, while respecting and celebrating their common legacy as adoptees.
These adoptees have come to understand that, ever since 2015, their time to search for their biological families is nearing its end. Luiten noted, “Since 2015 – the 40th year of the end of the Vietnam War – it became evident that we as adoptees or children separated from our birth families due to the war, we’re running out of time to look for our families as they’re getting older.” That urgency speaks to the heart of anyone who has started down a similar path.
Kim Catford, another participant in the bikethevote bike ride, spoke about his years-long search for his birth mother. As he put it, “I’m like all the other orphans, or Vietnamese adoptees on this ride — I’m still looking for my birth mom. We’re hoping that they are searching for us, just like we’re searching for them.” Catford’s journey unearthed an amazing discovery—his father had been Danish. He had left his homeland behind, emigrated to the U.S. and served heroically as a soldier in the Vietnam war.
The strong emotional bond between the adoptees and their land of birth became clear throughout their stay. One of the most touching scenes played out in Vietnam, where a former war refugee reunited with her mother. Cheerfully, she shouted, “Mabuhay and welcome home to your motherland! Barton Williams reflected on this experience, stating, “One of the mothers stood up in front of all the others…and she said in Vietnamese ‘Welcome back to your home country’. I thought that was the most beautiful thing. It brought a tear to everyone’s eye.”
From riding through busy market streets to stunning landscapes, the enthusiasm was contagious. They couldn’t stop imagining the day they would meet with their birth families. Luiten remarked, “It’s interesting to talk to the other adoptees about those moments that you sort of think, ‘wow, this could be her.’” These kinds of reflections emphasized the emotional contradiction of their transformative journeys.
DNA testing has been a huge factor in other searches as well. Family reconnections using genetic testing, like Kim Catford’s reunion with European extended family seen here, are chronicled by Kinsey. While these individual stories play out, adoptees are doing everything they can to find their mothers. They look for fathers, siblings, and extended family members who were possibly separated during times of turbulence.
