REFUGEES: The Bitter Legacy of the Babylift

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"When am I going home?" asked twelve-year-old Ya Hinh, just eight weeks after arriving in the suburban New York home of Janet and Louis Marchese. Hinh, called Keith by the Marcheses, was one of some 2,000 Vietnamese children airlifted to the U.S. in Operation Babylift as Saigon fell to the Communists in the spring of 1975. He had learned to say "mother," "father" and a few other English words quite quickly. But Mrs. Marchese, wife of a New York City policeman, was torn between her desire to adopt the boy officially and her awareness that his real mother might want him back. "Keith loves it here, but he misses his parents," she explains. "He has lots of nightmares. I think about how it would be if he were my child, and I break into a cold sweat."

Unlike many of the Americans who have taken in Vietnamese children, Mrs. Marchese is earnestly trying to find Keith's parents. She has spent some $500 on telephone calls to the Red Cross, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and many refugee camps, with no success. "It's very cruel to keep a child if his parents are looking for him," she feels. Similarly futile attempts to find the parents of My Hang, 7, have been made by Lisa Brodyaga, 35, a lawyer in San Jose, Calif., who has adopted the girl. She contends that adoption agencies show little interest in helping. My Hang arrived in the U.S. with no identification papers at all.

Batches of Babies. The anguish of Viet Nam lingers—for the American families seeking to adopt the children they have come to love, and for an unknown number of Vietnamese parents now seeking to regain custody of children they sent to the U.S. as "orphans" to spare them from a possible bloodbath or starvation. Operation Babylift was created out of humanitarian motives on all sides. Yet it has left a legacy of uncertainty, considerable bitterness—and a legal situation as tangled as the emotions that swirled around the war itself.

In the rush to get the children out of Viet Nam, there was often no great concern about technicalities like proper identification or release forms from parents. Recalls Bobby Nofflet, who worked with the U.S. AID agency in Saigon in those hectic days: "Three, six, nine babies would be left in front of the agency, mothers begging us to take them. There were large sheaves of papers and batches of babies. Who knew which belonged to which?" Children also were dying of malnutrition in the orphanages at the time. "When you see that, you don't care what goes on; you just want to get those little kids out," explains Anna Forder, a St. Louis lawyer who, as a social worker in Viet Nam, was familiar with the orphanages.

The result is chaos, as the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and local U.S. courts try to determine whether specific Vietnamese children are legally eligible for adoption by the Americans who have taken them in. So far, the service has declared 1,671 children eligible, based either on signed releases from a parent or on affidavits from Vietnamese swearing that the parents are dead or the children have been abandoned. Another 353 children have been ruled ineligible.