Escape from Saigon (11 page)

When Matt arrived at the Steiner home in early April 1975, his new parents had decided that since there was only a little over a month left of school, Matt would stay home and Mary Steiner would tutor him. But Matt wanted to go to school right away. He was eager to learn and to get caught up on his studies. His desire was to be just like all the other kids. More than anything, Matt wished to be a real American boy.

His parents were unsure, but gave in. As soon as Matt arrived for his first day in third grade, he wondered if he'd made a mistake. He was eight years old and small and thin for his age. He did not speak English very well. He was behind in every subject. He knew several boys from church, but otherwise the children were strangers to him—yet they all knew his name because his picture had been in the paper.

At recess the first morning, the third grade girls formed a circle around him. They giggled and whispered to each other. Matt didn't understand what was going on and started to run. They chased after him. Then several boys surrounded him, running along with him, trying to keep the girls away.

“We ran and ran, all over the playground like that, the girls still chasing me. That was my introduction to American girls. In Vietnam, girls would never act like that. They were expected to be ladylike. So this was quite a shock to me.”

In anticipation of Matt's ninth birthday on May 15, the Steiners planned a birthday party, complete with gifts and Matt's first-ever birthday cake. When the big day came, the avalanche of birthday cards that arrived in the mail surprised him. Dozens of people had saved the newspaper article about him, which mentioned his birth date, and they sent him cards. Among his gifts were a kite, a puzzle of the United States, and a baseball and glove. Matt could not believe these treasures now belonged to him. “I had been so poor in Vietnam,” he says.

When school ended, the Steiners moved for a year to a little town on an Indian reservation in the Southwest where Dr. Steiner was volunteering as a medical missionary at the reservation health clinic. The family lived in a small home on the reservation, and Matt went to fourth grade there. In this new setting, he was no longer a celebrity. With his black hair and dark skin, he blended in with his Indian classmates. The teachers at the reservation school gave him lots of extra help with his studies. When the family returned to West Liberty and Matt started fifth grade, he had caught up with his classmates. He had also mastered English and was quickly forgetting how to speak Vietnamese.

Mostly, Matt's life moved along smoothly. He loved to learn and was an excellent student. He excelled in math. He grew and filled out. He lettered in football, golf, basketball, baseball, cross-country, and track. He enjoyed playing golf with his brothers and watching football on television. He played trumpet in the band. He helped out at home, and once he was old enough to work, he always had a part-time job. He went to church regularly and had a circle of friends, including girlfriends.

But, as happy as he was with his family, he still missed his birth mother and Ba. Sometimes he felt confused by everything that had happened. Why had his mother killed herself? Hadn't she loved him enough to want to stay alive? Wasn't he a good enough son? Couldn't Ba have found a way to keep him? He didn't want to upset the Steiners with these concerns, so he kept them to himself.

There were other rough spots. Every year, it seemed one or two boys took it upon themselves to tease him, calling him “Chink,” “gook,” or “Chinaman,” and saying it in a way that conveyed prejudice and hate. Once Matt got into a fight when a bully tried to provoke him by calling him names. “I stood my ground with him,” Matt says, “and he never bothered me again.”

Matt (third from right) as a proud member of his school's baseball team

Then came an incident that hurt deeply. In eighth grade during a football game, Matt made a successful block. When he reached the sidelines and the congratulations of his teammates, one of them, an old friend, called out, “Hey, Chink, good play!”

“It stopped me cold,” Matt says. “I know he thought it was funny and didn't realize how degraded I felt by it. I actually had tears in my eyes. I've never forgotten it. When other kids called me names, it made me angry. But a friend … well, that really hurt.

“I knew I looked different from my family, but I didn't want to
be
different. I wanted to blend in. I tried to forget the Vietnamese part of me. I didn't want anything to do with it. I never stopped missing my birth mother and grandmother, but I did not want to go back to Vietnam. I wanted to be an American.”

On September 12, 1978, three years after his escape from Saigon, Matt's dream came true. At a ceremony in Columbus, Ohio, with his family in attendance, the boy who was once Hoang Van Long, an orphan from Vietnam, officially became Matthew Ray Steiner, American citizen.

He had achieved his goal. At last he felt that he was a real American boy.

Matt's sixth-grade picture, taken as he is about to become an American citizen

11

R
ETURN TO
V
IETNAM

Matt remembers the photo that triggered his desire to explore his past.

He was in college, taking a history course that included a study of the Vietnam War—a subject he had always avoided, just as he had managed to avoid anything that touched on who he once was. He thought of himself only as Matthew Ray Steiner from West Liberty, Ohio.

But in his textbook was a picture of Amerasian children living on the streets of Saigon during the war. “I stared at it, filled with a sense of recognition,” Matt recalls. “I remembered such children. I once looked like them. Had circumstances been slightly different, I could have
been
one of the children in the photo.”

Suddenly he wanted to know everything about the war. He learned how devastating warfare had been on the country of his birth and that huge numbers of people had tried, and failed, to get out at the end when South Vietnam was collapsing.

Since the war, more than a million Vietnamese had left illegally by boat, determined to escape the harsh Communist government and the food shortages and poverty. Thousands had died on the open seas.

“For the first time, I understood how fortunate I had been not only to escape but to be adopted and to come to the United States,” Matt says. “I wanted to return to Vietnam and learn more about the culture and the people. I was ready to explore my Vietnamese heritage.”

The summer of 1995, when Matt was twenty-nine, he had that opportunity. Vietnam was ending its long isolation from western countries and opening its doors to visitors, even those from its former enemy, the United States. Matt learned he could tour Vietnam with John Williams, who had worked for Holt in Saigon and had since become president of Holt International. He decided to go.

*   *   *

As his plane flew over the Pacific Ocean toward Vietnam, Matt thought about the previous few years. In 1984 he had graduated as valedictorian of his high school, and in the fall of his senior year of college, he had decided to become a doctor and to practice medicine the way his father did, with compassion and charity for all. He had seen how his father took time with every patient, getting to know the person as well as the illness. He wanted to do the same.

He had written a letter to his father, sharing his decision to study medicine. He closed with “I appreciate all you've done for me in my life, Dad. I love you very much.”

Then, the week before Christmas 1987, Matt received devastating news. A car had hit his father while he was jogging along a country road. Matt rushed to join his mother and brothers at his father's bedside.

“I knew he was going to die and that I could do nothing about it. It was like having a knife stuck in my stomach—so painful I couldn't stand it. I loved my dad so much! I was a six-year-old boy again, losing my beloved parent, and I was completely helpless,” Matt says sadly.

“It took me a long time to work through my grief. Dad's death made me more determined than ever to be a doctor—to do it for him, as well as for me.”

Worried about his mother, Matt took off the year after college to live with her and work at their local hospital. Then he completed his four years of medical school and moved to Indianapolis for his medical residency in emergency medicine.

At a New Year's Eve party in 1994, he met Laura Gamble, who was also studying to be a doctor. She had a lively intellect and beautiful dark hair and eyes. Matt was smitten.

Now he and Laura were planning to be married. Soon Matt would launch his medical career. When Matt decided to visit Vietnam, Laura couldn't go because she couldn't leave her medical studies, but Mary Steiner could, and she was eager to share her son's journey to his homeland.

Matt intended to keep his expectations low. It was still painful to think about his birth mother and Ba. Even if his grandmother was still alive, he didn't know where she lived. Nor did he want to try to locate other relatives. Not only did he have no way to do that, but he also felt no need. “The Steiners are my family,” he says simply.

As his plane approached Saigon (though officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, many still call it Saigon), Matt was flooded with memories of the day twenty years before when he had left the country. “I remembered how excited I was to be on my way to America to my new family. But I also remembered the heat and the confusion, the fear of enemy attack, and my sadness at leaving Ba behind,” he says. “Now I was looking out my window at the intense patchwork of lush greens below, and I could hardly believe that it seemed so peaceful.”

Matt thought he would be an ordinary American tourist, but when he went through customs at Tan Son Nhut Airport, the official kept staring at him, examining his passport and identification papers over and over. Speaking a language Matt could no longer understand, the official forced him to step aside while others were checked through. Several other supervisors were summoned to look at Matt's documents. They eyed him suspiciously. His passport revealed that he was from there, though he was now an American citizen.

“I don't know what they were thinking, but they made me feel very uneasy,” Matt recalls. “Over an hour later, they handed back my passport and allowed me to leave. I kept reminding myself that Vietnam was a Communist country. Its relations with the United States were shaky. Maybe they were surprised that someone who had left would voluntarily come back.”

When Matt, his mother, and John Williams were finally able to leave the airport and walk outside, Matt was startled by his instant sense of recognition. It all came back: the intense heat, the smells of the vast, sprawling city, the vegetation and trees, the singsong sound of the language, the architecture of the buildings, and the sights and sounds of the ever-present street markets.

“Everything was familiar. I had the sense that I was home,” he says. “The heavy traffic, the noises, the smell of food cooking on the streets, the spicy
nuoc mam
fish sauce I love, the cyclos and motorbikes, and the river—I knew all of it. I think it had been lying dormant in me all those years.”

He also began to recall simple words or phrases in Vietnamese. They came to his lips as needed, always surprising him. “I remembered words like
left
and
right,
and I knew the names of foods and how to say a few things. I was as surprised as everyone else when I would pop out with something.”

When the three of them stopped in a small noodle shop for their first meal, Matt already knew what the food would taste like. While sightseeing on the streets, Matt knew that around the corner there would be a movie theater—the one where he saw
King Kong
all those years ago—and there it was. He remembered the park he had often visited. Soon he was watching for the alleys where he had played tag. He tried to locate the apartment where he and his grandmother had lived, but could not find it.