These Vietnamese adoptees are searching for their birth families 'before it's too late'

Marie Maubouche was born in Saigon in October 1971 and was left on the steps of an orphanage when she was two days old. It was during the Vietnam War, and she knows little about her birth family or the first months of her life.

Maubouche is one of thousands of Vietnamese children who were adopted by foreign families while war raged across the country. She came to the UK as part of Project Vietnamese Orphans, which was spearheaded by reverend Pat Ashe in Leamington Spa.

“I was picked, I suppose, because I was in good health. My adoptive parents were part of this organisation and wanted to adopt a Vietnamese baby. They were shown pictures of babies who were available for adoption, and they chose me,” Maubouche says.

The adoption process took nearly two years, until September 1973, because the papers had to be signed personally by South Vietnam president Nguyen Van Thieu. There was a stipulation that the child could have no remaining family members in Vietnam.

“The Home Office had to have all the papers translated and the paperwork drawn up because it was the war and there was so much red tape. It was almost two years before I arrived in Heathrow with a lot of other babies and children, and our adoptive families were waiting for us,” Maubouche explains.

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Now in her 50s and living in France, Maubouche wants to learn more about her past. She has joined a new online networking tool connecting Vietnamese adoptees to their birth families and to each other.

It was set up by fellow adoptee Iola Nguyen, whose birth mother has terminal cancer. She says: “I realised that I was so lucky to know her and to be able to spend time with her before she dies. That triggered everything.”

Nguyen was adopted in 1992, when she was one, and her adoptive parents kept in contact with her biological parents. She first met her family in 2015 in Vietnam in an “emotional” encounter.

“My mother wanted to explain why she abandoned me. We were happy, but she was crying a lot, and that made me cry. I told her I knew she did it because she was poor and wanted to give me a better life,” Nguyen recalls. “I told her I have no anger. It was emotional when I left because, I imagine, she had to relive the pain of not seeing me again.”

Nguyen has a twin sister, who was not adopted, and sees the life she could have had through her. She was the bolder of the twins, which her mother said was why she was the one put up for adoption.

Nguyen set up the adoptee network because “she didn’t want anyone to feel that it would be too late” to connect with their birth families. More than 100 people are already using the tool.

For Maubouche, this is a chance to potentially start searching for surviving birth family. Her adoptive parents are elderly and she imagines her birth parents would be a similar age if still alive.

“I’ve got children. If I had to have given them up for adoption when they were babies, for whatever reason, I would think about that baby every single day of my life. They’re part of you as a mother. I don’t know if my biological dad even knows I exist, but maybe my biological mum is thinking: ‘I wonder what happened to her? Is there a possibility that one day I will be able to see her?’’”

Her adoptive parents have always been supportive of her staying connected to Vietnam in whatever way she can. Interracial adoption was not common when she was growing up in the 70s and 80s, and she faced “bullying” at school as the only East Asian child in the class. 

Her parents stayed in touch with families involved with Project Vietnamese Orphans, and Maubouche is still in contact with one of the other adopted girls to this day.

She moved to Paris, France after university and found a strong Vietnamese community there – and she actively sought them out to learn more about her culture. It was through this she learned that she may be mixed race and that “children who were mixed race were shunned by Vietnamese society during the war”.

Maubouche is yet to do a DNA test but finally feels as though she may be ready to learn more about where she came from. She believes there may be a chance her mother was a prostitute. A sex industry developed around American servicemen during the Vietnam War, and it is believed that there were between 300,000 and 500,000 prostitutes by the end.

Maubouche went back to Vietnam for the first time in 2000 and found the experience “very moving”. “I felt like I belonged, weirdly. It was almost like there was something I can’t describe.

“There’s so much footage of the Vietnam War. I was two years old so I can’t remember, but I’ve got the images in my head. I can’t watch Vietnam War documentaries. But I was in the plane coming into Saigon airport, and I could see images of the war, the helicopters and the red soil as you land over the palm trees. You can still see remains of military planes or helicopters in the fields. 

“I felt a tightness. It was almost like I was frozen, not in fear, but the emotions were too big for me. And when I was there, everyone was very friendly. It’s a beautiful country and there are hospitable people who, at the time, didn’t want to talk about the war. I almost felt like I’d come back home, even though I can’t speak Vietnamese.”

Maubouche has never been back to Vietnam since, but she would like to take her children – her 13-year-old twin boys. It had always been important to her to have her own children, to have family members with whom she shared DNA and who looked like her.

“When I came to France, I was British and I had a British name but I felt like I belonged a little more in the Vietnamese community,” Maubouche says. “It made me realise, it doesn’t matter what it says on your passport. You are who you are, and you’ve been brought up in a very unique situation.

“It’s just a piece of paper. I’m international. I know if I went to live in Vietnam, I’d never be Vietnamese either, even though it felt like home. As long as I’m happy, and I’ve got love and family and friends, what it says on a piece of paper is not important.”

Maubouche often thinks about children who have come to the UK today from conflict zones across the world, some of them orphans like she was. There are more than 7,000 unaccompanied children seeking asylum who are in council care in England.

“Looking back to how it was for me in the 70s and how society is now, they have a much tougher job. I think, unfortunately, there’s so much more open racism. People wanted to adopt – they had countries like Vietnam where it was almost like the place to go for adoption. Women were having babies to sell them for adopting, which created a whole other set of problems,” Maubouche says.

“But what would I like to see for children today? Ideally, for them to be taken in like I was taken in and taken care of. I know it sounds like an enormous task but they’re children. I’ve always heard people say: ‘Why can’t we adopt children in England?’ I understand that. It’s not clear cut. But if a child doesn’t have any parents, they’re looking for a family to love them. It’s just a family that can love that child wherever they come from.”

Find out more about how to connect with other Vietnamese adoptees through the project here.

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