The Letter that Fell through the Crack: American Story with Bob Dotson
Posted: Monday, July 23, 2007 8:25 AM by Zoe.Marcus
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American Story with Bob Dotson
(From Bob Dotson, NBC News National Correspondent)
Viewers ask me, “What’s your favorite American Story?” I always say, “The next one.” It’s too tough to choose from the past. I’ve done about a thousand of these stories. But while working on this morning’s piece, WATCH VIDEO I found a note, yellowed with age, stuck in the back of my drawer. It said “Thu Nga Tran gave birth to a baby girl last night.” Not so unusual really, but when she was a child, her mother sent her searching for freedom in a tiny wooden boat just sixteen-feet long and seven feet wide. It held 324 people.
"I thought for sure I was going to die,” Thu Nga recalls. “The first day the boat's engine broke. We found out that we didn't have a pilot. We didn't have any food. Water was in every direction, but you couldn't drink it. We were just waiting to die, but we didn't know if death would come soon or the next wave would send us to the bottom.”
They drifted for a week.
“We saw many ships pass by, but none would stop for us. By the seventh evening, we spotted an American ship. It picked us up."
Thu Nga wound up with a family in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Dwyers always wanted a baby girl but figured it wasn't going to happen after five boys. So, they agreed to raise someone else's. But she wasn't a baby. And she brought a brother. And those two found four more of their family who came drifting in -- two by two -- from the calm surface of that endless sea. Jim and Marty Dwyer raised them all.
"You can't erase their fears," says Marty. "You can't make them miss their birth parents less. All you can do is offer a hug and a quiet time and understanding."
I first met the Dwyers in 1984. They had taken their family of thirteen -- horse back riding in the Rocky Mountain foothills. It was as close as the Dwyers had gotten to the dream of owning a ranch.
"If five more Vietnamese came tomorrow, well, I'd just postpone it again," Jim told me. "I don't think that was much of a decision, to tell you the truth."
Jim was working 13 hour days, six days a week, at a small muffler shop he owned -- surrounded by his kids.
"Every time we see them accomplish something, we think of what their Vietnamese parents are missing," said Marty.
"After the communists took over Vietnam, my dad lost his job," Thu Nga explains. "The whole family tried to escape together many times. We couldn't make it. My mom and dad decided we had to split up."
Jim thought about that for a long moment, and then said, "They passed on their own personal happiness to better their children. I guess that's the ultimate in parenthood."
Thu Nga's parents sold everything they had to put their children on those boats. There was no money left for their escape. So, their kids worked odd jobs for ten years to pay for their parents' passage to freedom.
In 1991, I finally met Thu Nga's mom and dad. The same moment their children saw them for the first time in a dozen years. They were children no more. So much had happened since that dark night when the family split up.
Thu Nga tearfully recalls the last dinner she had with her family before leaving Vietnam.
"We had dinner together for the last time," Thu Nga recalled. "My mom had kept me home from school that day because those were our last hours together. She said that if we ever make it to America, just do our best." Tears rolled down her cheeks. She swallowed, "They just said they have a lot of hope for us. And they have high hope for us. We should try to reach it."
All six of the Tran children graduated college. (All five of the Dwyer's kids went to college, too.) Thu Nga graduated Johns Hopkins Medical School second in her class. Today, at 40, she is brilliant doctor, a highly regarded research physician who works with kids.
I asked Marty Dwyer that day, "Could you and Jim imagine having to sit at a table and decide, some night, how to send your kids out to a better life?"
"I don't think I could love enough to give them up like that," says Marty. "You know, you must love your kids an incredible amount."
The Dwyers do, too. Jim never got that ranch. Instead, he worked 13-hour days in a muffler shop to feed his family of 14.
"That's all right," says Jim. "Our 14 grand kids, they're worth a dude ranch anytime."
That yellowing old letter ended with this from Thu Nga. "I feel really blessed to have two sets of parents and to be loved by them all."
Two families. Destined to be together. Theirs is a love without season.
Want to contact the Inventors in this morning’s American Story with Bob Dotson. Here’s their contact information: http://www.ns-design.com/
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