|
One evening in June, the Beachlers were having dinner in their
suburban St. Louis home when the phone rang. Their daughter
Christy answered it.
"Hello?"
"I'm
looking for Christy Beachler," a woman's voice said.
Uh-oh,
what did I do?, Christy thought and then managed, "This
is she."
"My
name is Susan McDonald. I was a nun that took care of you
in Vietnam. I now live in St. Louis. Would you like to have
dinner sometime?"
Four rapid-fire
sentences opened up a new angle on 27-year-old Christy Beachler's
existence. Two weeks later she arrived (late because it had
slipped her mind) at the dinner she’d agreed to and
found not just McDonald, but a whole group of other Vietnamese
adoptees awaiting her. Unlike many of them, Christy had not
been searching for her past. "It's not that I hadn’t
thought about it," she says. "But I wasn't looking...
You know that book Are You My Mother? That was disturbing
to me as a child. The baby bird had to find the bird. Why
couldn't the bird and the elephant be a family? I didn't look
like my mom."
When McDonald
invited Christy to return to Vietnam on a guided tour with
other adoptees, she was not immediately interested. "I
wasn't sure I was ready," Christy says. But after a few
weeks of adjusting to the idea, she agreed, and six months
later Christy found herself - along with two other adoptees
- touching down on a runway at the other side of the globe.
[Keep
reading and view pictures]
|
