If you're reading this, Mommy, friend me on Facebook!

Hey kids,

Momma gets maudlin when you guys aren't around.

There was a short feature story on the local news last night about a Vietnamese woman who handed over her two-year-old son to a U.S. embassy official and his wife back in 1975 when everyone was scrambling to evacuate. Her son was fathered by an American G.I. who then abandoned the two of them. The woman feared for her son's life and her own, knowing the treatment they would both receive at the hands of the Communists, who would be forever in contempt of them both as American collaborators. So when the embassy official, who was a friend, was skedaddling out of the country following the fall of Saigon, she begged him to take her child with them. The couple agreed, and that was the last she ever saw of her son.

Cut to 35 years later, the Vietnamese woman now lives near Reno, and says she has been searching for her son in the intervening years. (I don't know how long she has lived stateside, but her heavy accent suggests that she is F.O.B., although I don't think that's the case.)

Here is a video of the news piece.

Her son's story is more or less my story. Minus all the shoving and helicopters and Communists and such. Seven years earlier, in the Philippines, my birth mother gave up her hapa newborn to a pleasant, white military man and his wife, never to be seen again.

I wonder if she looked for me. Or *is* looking for me. Or if she's even still alive. If so, she'd only be somewhere in her late 50's.

I consulted a psychic once. After reading me, he came up with this story: My birth mother was impregnated by an artistically-inclined Native American sailor, who was gone before he even knew that he knocked her up. Eventually she made her way to the States, married a white man in the Midwest, and had other children with him. Although she often wonders about me, she hasn't told her husband that I exist, and she does not want me to ever find her.

Makes as much sense to me as any other wild fantasy I've ever concocted about her.





Maybe she is one of the young ladies in the above photos, found randomly on the web, both purported to be taken near Subic Bay Naval Base, near my birthplace, Olongapo, in the late '60s.

Every time there is civil unrest back in the P.I., or whenever Mt. Pinatubo erupts, I envision my mother, fighting off insurgents, or fleeing a slow but relentless tide of lava flowing down the middle of a grimy city street.

I also wonder about siblings. I wonder that there are actually other 30-something or 40-somethings out there with slightly off senses of humor, tendencies toward lazy and addictions to Starbux and celebrity reality shows.

These very occasional thoughts don't consume me. My life has never been a made-for-Lifetime TV movie, where the main character grew up always feeling that there was "a piece missing from her life," or that she would "never truly know herself until she knew where she came from." They are just curious questions that will probably never be answered, like Did Lee Harvey Oswald Act Alone or Where Does The Universe End And What's On The Other Side Of It. Pressing questions, yes, but nothing to sit around obsessing about all your life.

The two of you will grow up knowing exactly where you came from, and will always be surrounded by people who all slightly look like you, and will not want for exchangeable innards, should that time (touch wood) ever come.

Love you both, come home to me soon, before this pervasive boredom leads me to pondering man's inhumanity to man or the fate of baby harp seals.