Lost & Found
The beginning of my life is a mystery. I was brought to an orphanage called An Lac during the Fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War. I’d like to understand why I was left an orphanage like many orphans do. We may want to complete that part of our stories, perhaps we think it will complete us. Although fictional stories can offer fictional characters answers and science can give us some insights, real life is not so simple even when faith is taken into account. I do believe events today can give us a window into the events of the past but there are so many questions I have.
I don’t know the circumstances of my arrival at the orphanage. Was I a foundling, meaning I was left and then found? Was I like an ‘owner surrender’ at animal control were there was a dialogue between my birth mother and the orphanage staff? Did she have money and because of that, I was afforded this or did she lack the resources to do anything else and this was their own option? My arrival is not the only question I have – the mystery for me goes back further – in a way I can see today.
Of late I’ve seen a few young women during their pregnancy. I’ve watched the care, the questions, the joy, the excitement, the exhaustion, and the wobbliness of their condition. I wonder what the woman who carried me experienced. What were their questions, what were their concerns, what did they experience?
History dictates they were experiencing the fall of their country during a time of war. For them there most likely was not a baby shower, an amazon registry, or a family surrounding them in excitement for the life that lay ahead. There was only death and destruction ahead for her and those around her. In this time of death and destruction it’s unlikely she survived, and my faith tells me those answers may only lie in the afterlife.
People in faith have plenty to say. They would say ‘your identity is in Christ’, or ‘Christ completes you’, or ‘you need deliverance from that trauma’. All of those things may be true but at the same time most people have the narrative I am missing and that sense of where they came from – that sense of completion. Those phrases, to me at least, do not set well.
It’s almost dismissive to me when I hear those phrases. Other people don’t have the questions we do and not knowing creates a gap others can’t possibly know – how can people imagine the absence of information they already have about their own origins? It’s a wide gap in our personal histories.
It’s very personal. We just want that answer. We want our personal stories to be completed. We want that same happiness that others have and others can’t possibly understand the unhappiness that resides in the gulf of the unknown. It’s not something that dominates us or defines us but it does reside with us. It is a part of us.
It is a part of me. It’s not a part to be cast out, delivered, or replaced – to do so dishonors the choices my birth mother made from the time I was conceived to the day I arrived at the orphanage. It’s not something I believe I will ever know. This is the real world, not the fantasy world.
In the fantasy world, Rod Serling might be talking about me stepping through a door that has all the answers, Captain Michael Burnham might jump the starship Discovery’s spore drive into my past, or a visitor in a big blue box might arrive to take me back to that very day where I was brought to the orphanage. But a las, this is the real world.
The real world I walk in is not very unlike the world my birth mother walked in 50 years ago. Space is everything. If I lived in Ukraine or Gaza I might see mothers making the very same choices for the very same reasons. The only thing that separates me from this reality isn’t time, it’s space.
Space is being sent to the United States that made the difference between the world she lived in and the world many young mothers live in now in Ukraine and Gaza – making choices amidst the collapse of their homelands and the death brought on by war. To some degree today’s world can shed a light on what’s missing.
In science we can posit the existence of something we don’t see or know by the behavior of other observable phenomenon. We can form theories of the life cycle of the sun by observing stars forming and going nova millions of miles away. To some degree I can learn about the experiences of young mothers in collapsing war zones and speculate what my birth mother’s narrative was, but I’ll never know for sure. This isn’t the only kind of science I’ve considered.
Though the science of consumer DNA tests, I’ve been able to determine some genetic information but no familial connections. I do know I am 100% Vietnamese – not the product of a mixed race conception. Beyond that however genetic relatives have come up short on multiple tests. Science doesn’t dissapoint but it doesn’t complete either.
Completion – knowing what happened during the missing time of my life is what I seek but may not find. Lost & Found. Somewhere between fiction and science, the past and the present, may lie the closest place to an answer I will ever find this side of eternity.
