Woman forced to give up her baby during the war is reunited with her daughter 44 years later
For mothers, there’s nothing more frightening than letting go of their children.
There are several circumstances why some mothers give up their children – but usually, the reason is to keep them safe from any harm.
During the Vietnam war, Nguyen Thi Dep was fighting a different kind of battle. Only in her 20s, she had to provide for her four younger sisters ad sick father to prevent them from slipping into poverty. She had to find work to keep them alive.
“I just wanted to do something to have some money to help my family,” Dep said.
Luckily, she speaks English so she found a job at the U.S. Army base in Saigon, South Vietnam where she worked as a phone operator and office cleaner. There she met an American Army sergeant named Joe O’Neal whom she got into a relationship and later got pregnant.
However, when the Paris Peace Accords was signed in 1973, the U.S. government ordered all American soldiers to come home. Joe then left Dep who was two months pregnant at the time.
Dep and her daughter, Phuong Mai, have been happy together for three years until she heard rumors that communist troops were targeting biracial children because they considered them to be the children of traitors.
“I was very afraid [of] many people telling me that if I don’t send my baby away, they will come in here and maybe she will be killed,” Dep said.
She then had to make the excruciatingly painful decision to leave her daughter at the orphanage.
“When I go to the door … she say, ‘Mama don’t leave me!’ “ Dep recalled. “And I want to come in and bring her back home but then I think if I do that, she will be killed later.”
Dep knew that her daughter would be part of Operation Babylift, in which the U.S. airlifted thousands of children out of Vietnam for adoption. Beyond that, she had no idea where Mai would exactly end up.
Years after the tension in Vietnam began to lift, Dep started her relentless search to find her daughter.
She sent letters to adoption agencies and even to Joe to ask for their help.
But her letters were left unopened.
Luckily, a Vietnamese ex-pat living in Florida named Vu Le decided to help Dep in her 40-year search for her daughter.
“As a Vietnamese person, I understand how much pain she going through for those 40 years,” Vu said.
Little did they know, Mai, now named Leigh Smalls, was also looking for her mother all these years.
She was adopted by loving parents and had a pretty normal life.
She knew nothing about her biological parents and didn’t think she could find them. This all changed after seeing the “Miss Saigon” musical.
“That was probably the first time I emotionally broke down about any part of my history with the war at all,” Leigh remembered. “That was probably a big moment for me.”
Eventually, Leigh was connected to her half-sister after taking a DNA test on Ancestry.com. Leigh was surprised to receive an email from her, saying that their mother has been looking for her for 40 years.
After 24 hours, Dep finally got to speak with her daughter Mai.
“I think she wanted to prove to me that when I was there she loved me and she wanted to make sure that I knew those three years she had me she gave me everything she could,” Small told in an interview.
Of course, Leigh planned a trip to go see her mom in Vietnam.
“It filled in a lot for me,” Small said. “I was never one of those people who had a hole in their life from my adoption, but when that hole was fulfilled and found out my history — I don’t think I realized how much I needed that.”
“I told everyone in my family and said, ‘Oh, I found my daughter!’ And they said, ‘When you see your daughter, you don’t have to cry, OK?’ And I said, ‘No, I’ll never cry again,’” Dep said. “I’m very happy I found my daughter.”
Watch their happy reunion on the video below.
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Source: YouTube – @WMTW-TV