The Americanization of Kimberly : ‘Double Dads’ Adopt Saigon Orphan; She’s Assimilating Nicely

Suzanne was an early choice for a name until a Vietnamese pilot, in horror, said no. It shortened too easily. It suggested a second name and a sleazy slip of the pun. Given her nationality, he said, the kid could be stained for life . . . as Suzie Wong.

Kimberly became the replacement. That, an American captain said, was gingham and June Allyson with a fine, wholesome, mid-Ohio prettiness to it. Kimberly, added a Vietnamese major, also abbreviated pleasantly to Kim. If Yen were added, you had the Vietnamese for Golden Swallow. Perfect.

A Squadron Vote

Yet at the orphanage in Cholon she was called Cookie. Family names on her birth certificate should be part of any new identity. Would the Suzie Wong thing be settled by splitting and abridging Suzanne to Sue Anne? Each preference led to another combination that progressed through several beer calls to a squadron vote.

And that’s how Nguyen Thi Ngoc Kimberly Sue Anne Kim Yen Cookie Elliott was named and came to America.

She was only 9 months old when Dave Elliott and I adopted her. Now she is 20 and living in Dallas. We, her double dads, call her Kim.

Television, radio, magazines and movies have hammered and upended Kim’s thoughts this month. Cronkite broadcasting from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. My city . Time magazine and its cover story: Vietnam Ten Years Later. My country. More publications of that classic, symbolic, belly-tugging photo by Nick Ut of children running screaming from the napalm strike on Trang Bang. That was 1972 so they would be about my age now -- if they’re still alive.

Then there was a movie: “The Killing Fields.”

“All that killing and all those people suffering and it just put me back to ‘What if I were there?,’ ” Kim said. “Or, ‘Boy, am I lucky.’ It all goes back to the same thing, the if-I-was-there-type-thing.”

Kim was at home in Oak Cliff, south of Dallas, after school. She had a couple of hours to talk before a part-time shift at the Video Exchange. That’s one of three jobs cramming whatever time is left from her political science and criminal justice studies at Mountain View College.

We rooted around the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and explored any temporary imbalance of her duality. American by culture, Vietnamese by nationality. Kim said her sadness and reaction to current, widespread images and commentary of Vietnam is typically American. No more than that. No less than human. Then she thought more about it:

“It probably does move me differently than just any American because I could have been one of those dead babies or children out there. I was looking at Time magazine and all those kids just running around, the napalm, and, yeah, that could have been me.

The Bottom Line

“I wouldn’t say that it (Vietnam) is my country. The United States is my country. But that (Vietnam) is the country I was born in . . . (so) the thing that hits me the most is that, yeah, I could have been dead. I’m very lucky. That’s just the bottom line there.

“Or I could still be back there trying to get out.”

Vietnam. Mid-1965. The war was relatively palatable then. Enough people believed the noble cause, that the United States was containing communism. Winning was more of an acceptance than an argument.

I was a correspondent. Dave Elliott was an adviser flying Skyraiders with the 522nd out of Tan Son Nhut. It was a Than Phong (Divine Wind) squadron whose pilots wore black flight suits and lavender scarfs celebrating a flamboyance established by a former commander, general then prime minister now Huntington Beach resident Nguyen Cao Ky.

A Shared Mission

Dave and I became brothers through an affection for airplanes, Vietnamese beer, sports cars, Thai beer, leather dress boots, Australian beer, steak and potatoes and even French beer. We shared his final mission, the 110th, and bombed the bottom out of a Viet Cong swimming hole near Phuoc Binh. It seemed a suitably inconsequential moment upon which to launch formation (over Japanese beer) of the Unemployed Fighter Pilots Assn.

Our closeness left no doubt that Kim would be adopted by two fathers.

Actually, the adoption (an insistence of Dave’s wife Betty Alice--one combat tour, she said, in exchange for a brass coffee table and a baby daughter) was under way shortly after Dave arrived in Vietnam.

I entered the proceedings at about his sixth month of legal labor. Such timing effectively settled the division of parental responsibilities. Dave (senior claimant by virtue of the original request, his earlier rotation date home and the existence of a wife and two young sons in Phoenix) would receive custody of Kim and the bills. I (single, somewhat nomadic and certainly undomesticated) would get regular snapshots and unlimited visitation.

Not that any other arrangement would have worked.

Because Kim, you see, picked Dave.

It was at the Kien Hoa Orphanage where suburban Cholon makes a grubby merger with Saigon. Dave had spent weeks visiting the Catholic Relief Service, inspecting new deliveries to four orphanages and agonizing over more than 100 children marooned by war.

Then he peeked into one crib. Onyx eyes glinted back.

The eyes followed Dave. A pudgy arm reached out. Kim grabbed Dave’s finger. And it was all over.

Kim is totally all-American. Right down to her passion for Italian submarine sandwiches with Swiss cheese and French dressing. She plays Brazilian-style soccer, European handball and drives a Honda. Her loves are a Chinese shar-pei dog called Buddah Bear, Paul McCartney, Phil Collins and all imported accessories of the junior American Way.

And her very first recall is Riverside.

“My dad was in the Air Force and wore this blue uniform and I just went to elementary school a lot and my mother would drive us there and I’d walk home. It was a neighborhood of kids and my mother would give out Popsicles and stuff like that.

“I remember my school and that my mother taught at the school. I was around 5 then. I remember when I first rode a bicycle and the orange grove where we walked the dogs. . . .”

She has, she said, no memories of Vietnam. No flashes on the orphanage, her real mother, the nuns, nor her Saigon foster mother and the one-on-one attention that tempered Kim’s transition from orphanage to permanent care. Nothing before California. A blank.

Betty Alice Elliott, however, knows what her daughter does not remember. From the beginning she was watching for any indication of an emotional collision between Asian child and Occidental environment. As daughter of the late Milton Erickson, an internationally eminent psychiatrist and pioneer hypnotherapist, Mrs. Elliott was in a unique position to monitor her adopted daughter. What she saw, she says, were clear responses to Kim’s babyhood in Vietnam.

Rapport in a Restaurant

With Kim less than a year old and not quite 2 months removed from Saigon, the Elliotts dined at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. An Asian family was seated at the next table. Kim promptly joined them, crawling into laps, almost being at home. “When we left,” Mrs. Elliott said, “we had to pry Kim’s fingers loose from the mother’s arm.”

Later, in Phoenix, the Elliotts were frequently visited by a family friend. She was tall and brunette with a close physical resemblance to Kim’s Saigon foster mother. For months, at every visit, 2-year-old Kim would crouch on the floor near the friend’s feet and sob.

Kim’s early years were noticeably shy, introspective. There was a stubbornness. On the other hand, nobody had to teach her how to use chopsticks. “It made me a firm believer in inherited personality,” Mrs. Elliott said. “I never believed it before and can even remember arguing against it with Dr. Mead.” That was her father’s close friend and confidante, anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Such indicators, of course, are now almost two decades old. Seven years in the Elliotts’ military footsteps to postings in Ethiopia, Okinawa and Brazil have formed a smoothly cosmopolitan Kim. Thirteen years at civilian and military dependent schools from San Bernardino through Las Vegas to Dallas have created a young woman of grace, ease and humor.

And a constant sense of fun certainly helps when one has been considered Mexican (during college registration with an unexpired diplomatic passport as her only ID), Okinawan (to Hawaiians), Hawaiian (to Okinawans), and a member of the Japanese ski team (to other fans and trialists who attended last year’s Olympic training camp at Lake Placid).

‘I’m the Maid’

To casual, unknowing visitors with silent questions about an Asian girl within an Occidental family, Kim has developed a stock explanation: “I’m the maid.”

For those who insist on turning Kim’s nationality into their game of Twenty Questions, there is her T-shirt with its bald message: “I’m Swedish.” Yeah, but what about the eyes? “From squinting at the snow.”

She has encountered no racism beyond basic school mischief, teen-aged thoughtlessness and questions about her relationship to Connie Chung. Kim doesn’t speak Vietnamese nor was she thrilled by Vietnamese food (“I ordered chicken and they brought the whole carcass”) in a California restaurant.

Concerning her beginnings, she accepts that her father was a South Vietnamese soldier killed in the war and that her mother died after she was born. There is no proof of either death. It simply is what Kim chooses to believe and in that faith there is peace.

All of which leaves only one major irritation in her life.

It is individuals (including her father, the journalistic one) who seem more preoccupied with her being Vietnamese than she is aware of being Vietnamese.

“That’s the problem,” she blurted. “I forget that I’m Vietnamese. I forget that I’m adopted. Until people remind me.”

Then come the inevitable, well-meaning but repetitive (and somewhat resented) questions.

Supposing your parents are still alive?

“I just don’t think they are alive,’ Kim insists. “But even if I thought they are alive, there’s really nothing I can do about it. I’ve heard about some adopted people wanting to go in search of their parents . . . but I think there’s a reason why you were put up for adoption. I don’t think you’re put up for adoption to (one day) go back and look for the blood mother.

“I think it (adoption) is because they (parents) thought it was the best thing to do or because they couldn’t handle the responsibility. In my case, it was during a war and she thought it was the best thing.

“In fact, I’m grateful that my blood mother had sense enough, or was not as selfish as some mothers are, to put me in a place where I would survive best. I’m grateful to her more than anybody for putting me in an orphanage that took care of me.”

But if her mother were alive, maybe as a refugee somewhere, even resident in the United States, what of her concerns for the child she gave to an orphanage?

“Yeah, I’ve wondered about that . . . and if she does think about me. Of course, she might have lots of other children and she just might refer to me as one that was born during the war and that she had to give me to the orphanage.”

Does Kim, in self-protection, avoid probing too deeply into her unknown past?

‘What Else Could I Do?’

“That’s exactly right. I do not want to look for the house I was born in or the bed or the sheet I was wrapped in. And supposing I found my mother? I don’t know her. I appreciate what she did, I’m glad, I’m happy, but what else could I do? What would I say to her? I don’t even know how to speak her language.

“It (a meeting) is not necessary to my life, my balance, to see her. I have my parents. These (Elliotts) are my parents. She (blood mother) was more of a temporary mother to me, just like the lady in the orphanage.”

What of any desire to return to Vietnam? “I’d like to see the city where I was born . . . if it was open, like Japan or China, I would take a tour . . . and I’m sure that one day there will be a chance to see it.

“It would be a weird feeling. I wouldn’t feel sad. I’d feel lucky--that’s the only feeling I know that I can explain. Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky . . . and happy that I am able to visit where I was born.”

Although Kim certainly is an American by naturalized citizenship and an Elliott by adoption, she is quick to recognize personal traits that appear innately Vietnamese.

With three jobs and a full school load, her sense of industry is high. There’s tranquility and a lack of anger to her acts and reasoning. She feels control, a definite resistence to pain, and an ability for self-management and organization. From wherever or whomever, Kim says, it is her inheritance.

And as she gets older, she adds, so increases her desire to learn the Vietnamese language.

“I feel bad that I don’t know how to speak the language,” she explained. “I know that a lot of people in America seek out their culture and nationalities . . . but I don’t know what their (South Vietnamese) national anthem sounds like and I barely know what the flag looks like. So I feel embarrassed.”

Texas has an Indochinese refugee population of 51,000 and in Dallas there’s a significant Vietnamese community. Kim hasn’t visited it. There are Vietnamese students at Mountain View College. Kim has not introduced herself.

No Interaction

“They don’t interact with me and, to tell you the truth, I don’t think they know I’m Vietnamese. I think they think that I’m from Japan or am an American-born Oriental.

“No, I have not made an effort (to communicate) with them. If they’re in a group talking Vietnamese I am not going to go up to them and say: ‘Oh, hi. How are you doing? What courses do you have?’ And they don’t come up to American conversations.

“They’re Vietnamese and I’m an American. That’s the way I look at it and that’s the way they look at it.”

That also, acknowledged Kim, places her in an odd position.

When around Vietnamese, she is an outsider.

Time, personal growth and goals are spreading the Elliott family.

Betty Alice and Dave Elliott are living apart.

She is studying psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington to become a better credentialed messenger for her late father’s techniques. Dave rose to colonel, retired from the Air Force last year and works for Rockwell International in Los Angeles as a systems safety engineer with the B-1B bomber program.

One son, David Elliott, is 22 and studying electrical engineering at UTA. It will become his career. He says of Kim: “She’s my sister, that’s it, the best sister anyone could have. And I see a lot of things in her, her motivation, her control, that I’d like to instill in myself.”

Another son, Michael Elliott, is 21 and majoring at UTA in psychology and Russian languages. He is looking at a job in government and intelligence gathering. He says of Kim: “She has given me perspective on the race question . . . that there aren’t any differences (among persons) beyond visual ones. It’s not what people look like, it’s what people do. And Kim does OK.”

Dave and Betty Alice? Me? What do we think?

We look at Kim, bless past circumstances and agree: “What a happy, satisfying thing we’ve all been a part of. . . .”