Barry Huntoon says he climbed the stairs, then stood and waited anxiously for her in a large, empty, second-floor waiting room of Tansonnhut Airport.
After a few moments, Tuyet Mai stepped out from a side office and looked shyly at him. She was wearing red pants and a loose red shirt and carried a small purse which contained no money or makeup-only the necessary papers and some photographs.
She had no baggage. No trunks. No souvenirs. No change of clothes.
She walked toward him as simple and pure as only a child can be. What little she had ever owned, she was willing to leave behind. Tuyet Mai was ready for America. More importantly, she was ready for a father.
Huntoon, a Vietnam veteran and former Army medic, stepped forward and put his arms around his daughter. His voice choked, and he started to cry. He told her he loved her and that he was taking her home.
Tuesday evening, Tuyet Mai and her father, fresh off a flight from southeast Asia, pulled up to that California home. Along the driveway were bunches of red, white and blue balloons flying from the trees and two long home-made banners that stretched across the pines.
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”Welcome to America,” one read.
”Welcome to Paradise,” read the other.
On Oct. 5, when Huntoon flew into Vietnam`s Tansonnhut Airport on an Air France flight to pick up 15-year-old Tuyet Mai, he became the first American veteran of the Vietnamese War since the fall of Saigon to personnally retrieve a child fathered there.
”This all began,” his wife Laura said, ”two years ago when we were sitting side by side looking at Life magazine. There was a photo article on Amerasian children in Vietnam. Barry got to one picture and said, `Laura, I think this is my daughter.`
”It seemed so improbable to me. But then, she had to be somebody`s child. I looked at her hands, and she seemed to have large hands like Barry.
”Then he got out a picture of the girl`s mother-the Vietnamese woman that Barry had fallen in love with when he was over there. The girl looked like her, and she looked like Barry. Then we looked at the age, and it was right. We looked at the town she was from, and that was right.
”Barry said, `She`s mine. I feel it in my heart.`
Huntoon, 36, served two years in Vietnam and met Tuyet Mai`s mother while stationed in Vung Tau near Saigon. She was nine months pregnant when he was ordered back to the States in 1972.
Unable to bring her with him, he wrote her once he got home. There was no answer. An international social agency did some investigating and told him that she was dead. He could find out nothing about their baby.
But when he saw the Life photograph, Huntoon says, ”I was determined to find my daughter at all costs. I had always wondered about this child, and it had left a large hole in my life. If there was any possibility of getting her out, I had to follow through.
”There were so many obstacles we met, then overcame and ran into the next ones, and so many setbacks in trying to get her out that eventually I realized, even if she proved not to be my daughter, it wouldn`t matter to me. She was somebody`s daughter and she needed a father.”
Through connections in the Vietnamese refugee camps and their contacts back in Vietnam, Huntoon got word to Tuyet Mai that her American father was looking for her. She managed to get a letter out to him and sent him a photograph she`d had taken for the occasion. Huntoon learned his daughter was living a life of poverty, selling peanuts on the beach to Russian tourists.
Teaming up with San Jose attorney Bruce Burns, whose agency-Amerasian Registry-works to unite Vietnam veterans with their Amerasian children, the two began fighting the bureaucracy of both the United States and Vietnamese governments in order to get Tuyet Mai out.
Due to Huntoon`s persistence and a change in the political climate in Vietnam, Huntoon and Burns were allowed to enter Vietnam on visas and bring out Huntoon`s daughter and several other children-the first group of Amerasian children allowed to leave Vietnam in over 13 months.
”It was an eerie feeling flying in,” says Huntoon. ”Looking out the window at this country I`d left 15 years before. Looking down at the bomb craters still left from the war.
”Then we landed at Tansonnhut which was the big air base we built, and it was now quiet, and I saw the grasses and trees and vines growing up through the tarmac and taking the place over. I realized who the final victor of the war was. The only winner of that war was the jungle.
”And the only good that came out of that are these Amerasian kids who have no fathers and are caught up in a web of politics and living in despair.”
In all her 15 years, he said, Tuyet Mai has never had a new dress. She`s never worn a pair of nylons. She never even owned a pair of shoes. She cannot read or write because she could never afford to go to school.
But already, she can count to seven in English. And the first thing she tells people she wants to do in America is ”go to school.”
The first night in her new home, Laura Huntoon had to show her how to pull back the sheets and get into a bed. She`d never been in one before. The first day she had to show her how you talk on a telephone. She had never before received a phone call.
During their three-hour stop at Tansonnhut, a band of raggedy children lined the balcony of the terminal building and waved madly at Huntoon and attorney Burns. Their features were half-American.
”It was as if they were hoping one of us would walk over and take them with us,” said Burns. ”As if they were hoping it was their American fathers who`d come to pick them up. That they just someday might be as lucky as Tuyet Mai.”
”That scene,” says Huntoon, ”made me very sad.”
On the plane home, when the stewardess served Tuyet Mai her tray of food, she offered it to her father.
”She is,” says Huntoon, a wonderful child.”
”I knew how Barry wondered about what had ever happened to his child since I was dating him,” says Laura.
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”So this came as no great surprise to me, although it seemed so improbable that a photograph in a magazine could really result in his lost child coming to be with us. I might not have been as understanding if I had not had children. But now with three small ones, I see how much Barry loves his kids and I realize how important it is for a child to be with his parent. ”I was thinking a lot about her the last couple days before Barry came home with her,” says Laura. ”About what we were going to teach her first and how I can help her learn. Then I noticed our trash cans-we have three. I realized that we throw away more than she has owned in her lifetime.” I think I have some things to learn from her.”
On her second full day in America, Tuyet Mai sat on a sofa, surrounded by her three American baby brothers and sisters-all under the age of 2 1/2.
She was wearing a pair of her new mother`s ear rings and new white tennis shoes and giggled along with the toddlers at the cartoons.
They curled up next to her as if she had never been a stranger.
”She`s had such a hard time all these years, she`ll have the best I can give her, I promise,” said Barry.
He gestured out to the living room where all four of his children were together at last.
”It`s over for her. See. She`s one of the kids now. And that`s the way it will always be.”