Vietnam: When what we think we know, isn’t what we think we know

Child trafficking in Vietnam adoptions are old news by now, at least trafficking in modern day adoptions. I admit I have for years bought into the notion that int’l adoption began to help Amerasian children escape a country where they were unwanted and discriminated against. Although, by their own words, things were not easy for many adoptees growing up in racist communities abroad, I still held to the assumption that the decision to place them for adoption was one due to extreme social circumstances in post-war Vietnam. I accepted the widely held belief that child buying and recruitment began with the influx of commercialized adoption in the 1990’s.

Over the years I have even heard AP’s say that players like Cherie Clark and Mary Payne Nguyen started out with good intentions to help Amerasian children leave Vietnam where their lives would have been tragically difficult.

Recently, my family met another family with a story that has forced me to look at Vietnam adoptions from 20+ years ago much differently. Without using their names, at the time of the incident this family was living in Vietnam. The father is American, mother Vietnamese and daughter obviously Amerasian. They had heard about child traffickers snatching Amerasian children to sell for international adoption, but didn’t think too much about it…until a trafficker showed up in their neighborhood for their then young daughter. One day a man came to their neighborhood, grabbed their daughter and took off with her, but neighbors who saw what was happening blocked the road so he couldn’t leave with her. They were able to recover her and the trafficker got away. Obviously the family was traumatized by this experience and had to keep a closer eye on their child from that point forward. Over twenty years later, the entire family now lives in the US and to this day are stunned and affected by that event.

This family has nothing to do with the adoption industry or reform groups. They have no reason to make up their story and I have no reason to doubt their credibility.

Because of this, I have been forced to think about the history of adoptions from Vietnam in a different light. Just how many of the Amerasian kids were really orphaned? How many were really in need of an adoptive family? How many were actually snatched from intact families in villages and neighborhoods to sell for adoption?

We know at that time police weren’t going to do much about these cases. They’ve barely done anything in recent years much less decades ago!

So one wonders if Vietnam adoptions were ever “clean” and well-intentioned or if the unscrupulous even back then quickly saw a lucrative opportunity. Perhaps what started as an innocent and well-intentioned idea quickly morphed into something more sinister and greedy. A beginning of the system we have today.