1969

EIRENE DONOHUE

My mother grew up in poverty in the Vietnamese countryside after all the men in her family were killed by the Viet Minh. Forced into an arranged marriage to an abusive man, she gave birth to a son when she was only fourteen. This picture is from after that. There are no pictures from before she was a mother.

She ran away to Saigon with her first child. When he became ill and she couldn’t find work, she returned to her village and left him with her mother. Her ex-husband soon came and took the child away. My mother searched but was unable to find him. She began to build a life for herself in Saigon, supporting herself as a maid and teaching herself English.

Eventually she met my father, an American Navy officer. They married and had six kids, of which I am the youngest. When I was three years old my father tracked down my brother in a Cambodian refugee camp and brought him to live with us in Rhode Island. We didn’t know he was our brother; we thought he was just a Vietnamese refugee. It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I learned the truth.

I remember how scared she looked when she told me. She was so afraid that I would judge her for abandoning her child, that I would think she was a bad mom. As if that thought was even possible. As if I had not spent my whole life watching her do whatever it took to protect and nurture our family.

When I was in junior high, she went back to school and earned her GED, then her associate’s degree, then her bachelor’s. She started telling people her story, and after twenty years of working on it she recently published a memoir of her life in Vietnam, Crossing the Bamboo Bridge: Memoirs of a Bad Luck Girl.

I thought I knew how amazing she was, but I had no idea. Reading her story, I finally understood the depth of her pain and the magnitude of her strength. No one should ever have to go through what she went through. She survived a war and somehow found peace. She has always been and will always be my greatest inspiration. A little woman with a big heart. Before. Now. Forever.