Sue-Yen Luiten

Australia Broadcast Center

26-05-2025

LEIGH SALES, AUSTRALIAN STORY PRESENTER: It's 50 years since Operation Babylift, the dramatic US-led evacuation of children in the final days of the Vietnam War.
Sue-Yen Luiten was just four weeks old when she was airlifted to Australia. And like many others, she's spent years trying to find family left behind.
Now, Sue and a group of fellow adoptees are embarking on a last- ditch mission to find their birth parents.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: The question of who I am has definitely dominated my life.
There's so much ambiguity and unknown.
Who do I look like? Where did I start from? What have I left behind
SUE-YEN LUITEN: One recurring fear and it's definitely a fear. What if my biological mother and father are looking for me, and I'm just sitting here not doing anything at all? I'm not the only one that comes back to Vietnam, there are thousands of people that are constantly searching for those missing pieces
UPSOT: Gunfire
REPORTER: Saigon April 1975 the frantic final days of a capital about to fall to the enemy
SUE-YEN LUITEN: The war in Vietnam finished exactly 50 years ago. Towards the end of the war, there was a sense of urgency to get people out of Vietnam and especially the children that had been abandoned or orphaned or separated from their families.
REPORTER: The Ford Administration announces the Operation Babylift, a humanitarian effort to rescue Vietnamese orphans.
BARTON WILLIAMS, ADOPTEE: Operation Babylift was the largest humanitarian adoption program ever. Approximately 3,000 children were airlifted out of Vietnam.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: Prior to that there were a few hundred children that had already arrived in Australia. And I was one of those. And there was archive of me with my adopted father at the airport
KIM CATFORD, ADOPTEE:
Just like Sue we've been searching for our birth family
BARTON WILLIAMS, ADOPTEE:
Our parents are ageing. We're ageing. Yeah, there is a certain amount of urgency to find out our history
SUE-YEN LUITEN: This next trip to Vietnam is really the last big push for us to make connections with our mothers and fathers before time runs out.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: So right now, I'm in the final stages of p reparing to return to Vietnam with a group of adoptees
Hi Bart how you going
BARTON WILLIAMS (Bart), ADOPTEE: hey
SUE-YEN LUITEN: To let family know that as adoptees we're still searching. We'll be going right back to basics. No fancy cars just riding our bikes through the Mekong area
KERRI YOUNG, GENEALOGIST: We will be asking mothers to DNA test if they come up to us to try and find their missing children.
BARTON WILLIAMS: I'm nervously excited, the anxiety of possibly discovering something.
KIM CATFORD: Sue has an incredible passion to gather us as adoptees together to support us.
BARTON WILLIAMS: It's like we're an exclusive sort of family in a weird way
SUE-YEN LUITEN: I feel really proud of you guys. So I've spent the last few decades working with adoptees to link them with their birth families.
ERA: And I can't say thank you enough to you.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: yeah, nah, absolute pleasure.
By helping other adoptees search for their origins it helps me fill that void.
So that void and that space around my identity has been around me from as long as I can remember from a very young age.
MARLENE LUITEN, ADOPTIVE MOTHER: This is an interesting one. Just a couple of days after you arrived. Asian war orphans fly to WA.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: I arrived in Perth on the 25th of May, 1974. My adoptive parents were Marlene and Richard.
MARLENE LUITEN: We were very aware of what was happening in Vietnam., it was a television war constantly in the news and we knew about the terrible situation with the children. There were over a million orphans. And so we wanted to do something to help.
MARLENE LUITEN: And this is the adoring brothers. Getting ready for bed.
ANDRE LUITEN, ADOPTIVE BROTHER: I came home from school one day and Sue, my new sister, had arrived. And I remember that I used to rush home from school every day to play with her. She really rounded the family, made it complete.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: So growing up within my family, with my brothers, I never felt there was any difference between us. But I was always really conscious of how the world saw us.
MARLENE LUITEN: I would introduce Sue to newcomers and say, this is my daughter Sue. And they'd look at me and say, this is your daughter Sue but never in a really negative way. It was just are you sure?
SUE-YEN LUITEN: I don't think my mother ever really understood the depth of confusion that those interactions created, but I also had a very strong connection around preserving my family.
I knew, deep within myself what it was like to experience losing your family. The worst thing that I could ever think about was now losing this family
MARLENE LUITEN: Unfortunately my husband Richard died when Sue was nine years old. And so that was a very traumatic time for her. There was the feeling of abandonment again.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: And I just felt like am I worthy of having a mother and a father? Why can't I have that? Why is it there and then gone? That's yeah hard to describe.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: So getting through the following years was really tough. So I responded by just putting my head down, completed my interior architecture degree And when my daughter was born , that really changed the way I reflected on myself and my origins. It was my time to step in and open some of those doors, start looking
So this was probably the only document that I exited Vietnam with. It's a Vietnamese passport that was issued. It states my name, which says Luu Thi Van.
ASHIKA BURNSIDE, DAUGHTER: When I was born, that was really a pivotal moment for my mum.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: I went to the state office here and said, 'look, do you have any other documents'.
ASHIKA BURNSIDE: I understand her drive to find her biological family. Even though obviously she has a really loving adoptive mother and adoptive family.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: One of the interesting pieces of information that came out in that request was a translation of the Registry of Birth, it gives me my mother's name, so it says Luu Thi Han
It was about a year or so after my daughter was born that I really started thinking of going back to Vietnam
SUE-YEN LUITEN, IN CAR:
So I'd spent quite a bit of time collecting information in preparation for going back to Vietnam and it became really obvious to me, at least, that there was one door that I'd been really hesitant to walk through and that was around really reaching out and having a discussion with a Vietnam veteran.
So as a teenager, my adoptive mother cautioned me around disclosing to Vietnam veterans that I was from Vietnam in case it triggered any trauma
It was always a really unsettling feeling to think that just by being me that I might trigger some traumatic memory in a Vietnam veteran.
And given that a lot of Vietnamese adoptees had fathers that were Vietnam veterans, how would I feel if I discovered that my father was a Vietnam veteran. And how he would feel about me. So I said where's the safe person to have that conversation with
SUE –YEN LUITEN MEETS VETERAN
SUE –YEN LUITEN: How are you?
GRAHAM EDWARDS, VETERAN AND FORMER MP: G'day.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: How are you, good to see you.
GRAHAM EDWARDS: Sue came into my office and I could see that she was quite tentative.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: So I brought along the article, which first twigged for me that I might get in contact with you. One of these guys is you. Which one is you?
GRAHAM EDWARDS: Good looking bloke up there in the left-hand corner.
There'd had been an article that covered my return to Vietnam and the experiences that I went through, I was on a patrol when I trod on a landmine, I lost my legs and in 1990 I decided I wanted to go back to Vietnam. It was a very rewarding trip. but Sue was quite challenged about going back.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: One of my best friends, her father was a Vietnam veteran.
GRAHAM EDWARDS: Yes I remember.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: And of course I'd been really very much aware of his trauma.
GRAHAM EDWARDS: I just wanted to encourage her to go back with some confidence.
I just think it was really important for you to go back and find the things that you were going to find.
SUE-YEN LUITEN:
And I realised I didn't have anything to be scared about. So shortly after meeting with Graham, um, I was heading off to Vietnam for my first trip back.
When I first went back in 2001 my senses were just in overload.
Looking out into the street and smelling and feeling and hearing all the sounds. It was quite overwhelming.
Trying not to look, but wanting to look at everyone as if I'm looking in a mirror.
I'm trying to look at them, to see whether I recognise them. I'm terrified that someone might recognise me.
I asked the taxi guy what this address is and showed him the paperwork that I'd brought, and we realised that it was the maternity hospital.
I walked into the hospita l and they led me to meet an elderly nurse. And she introduced herself as Sister Marie Vincent.
She gave some places to go and visit two district offices where births and records used to be kept.
The most beautiful thing before she went she gave me a hug and she said she had seen and cared for thousands of babies and hundreds of babies that had died, but she had always wondered what had happened to the children that had left Vietnam. And I was the first adoptee ever to come back and find her.
I felt that my journey had, for the first time, been a piece in someone else's puzzle.
So I follow Sister Marie's advice. And I was able to get a copy of my original birth certificate. And in that there was an address of my mother's residential address. And I came here to the location in that document. And what I found is a now a sprawling metropolis. Once was a rural street just at the end of the airport.
SUE –YEN LUITEN: So that was hugely disappointing. I'm thinking that's probably the needle in the haystack moment,
But I kept on searching, and I went to Sancta Maria orphanage, where I was before I came to Australia.
I felt an instant connection to the space.
SUE-YEN LUITEN AT ORPHANAGE: Just being here I can sense the ghosts, the ghosts of what it was before. Yeah. It's quite, it's quite overwhelming, I guess think about that.
There were people that lived there who had grown up there they were still there because they had nowhere else to go. And it was sad. It was confronting. Just that moment of thinking how easy could it have been that I was you and you were me
By the end of the trip, I just felt like this was one of my homes. This place where I could support the breadth of the multiplicity around about my identity. I didn't have to be Australian. I didn't have to be an Asian in Australia. I had a legitimate connection to Vietnam.
MY HOUNG LE, ADOPTEE: You know, I was thinking the other night Sue it's 20 years since we've known each other after all that time, and we're still working with adoptees.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: Not long after my first trip I learnt of another adoptee My Huong who was actually going back to Vietnam long term.
MY HUONG LE: I mean it was a really big decision for me to return to Vietnam it was something I had wanted to do for many years.
Sue and I, we had both begun searching for our families. So it was just wonderful to be able to connect with another adoptee, understanding what I was going through.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: I remember when I met you how fortunate. I thought you were. My Huong was an older child when she came to Australia and that made a huge difference in her search.
MY HUONG LE: Because I was five when I left I still had so many memories. And I remembered the area where I used to live. When I returned I went to that area and my childhood friend and her mother lived there, and they recognised me and they called my mother. And within 10 minutes we were reunited. I knew my life was here now.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: There was a lot of media around her reunion. So My Huong's story gave myself and other adoptees a sense of hope that we, too, might be able to find our mothers. But at that time, searching in Vietnam was really ad hoc. There was no systems or support for us to do that
BARTON WILLIAMS, ADTOPEE: When I went back to Vietnam many years ago, for the first time, I got very little information from Sancta Maria, and I hit a brick wall, basically.
KIM CATFORD, ADTOPEE: You go across there and who do you ask? Who do you go to? No one knows.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: It was really important to let the people in Vietnam and the communities know that we were coming back and searching.
TALK VIETNAM PRESENTER : After the American War thousands of children and babies were taken out of the country and relocated to different regions of the world, hundreds of them in Australia. So thank you very much for being here today.
SUE- YEN LUITEN: Forty years from the end of the war we had the opportunity to go on Vietnam TV and talk about looking for our mothers and connections.
TALK VIETNAM PRESENTER: Let's start with Sue maybe.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: I left Vietnam at the age of 4 weeks old, so I was very, very young.
So our hope was that either someone would see it and that would be a mother searching, or that they would know somebody and put them in touch with us.
MY HUONG LE: We need a system within Vietnam, to have a database of birth mothers in Vietnam.
SUE –YEN LUITEN: After Talk Vietnam aired we had a mother contact the show, the producers, and she believed that one of the people on our panel might be her child. So she came up to Saigon and we did a DNA test. It was probably one of the most emotionally gruelling things I'd ever really done. I'm trying to swab the inside of her mouth and I can just feel her whole body shaking. It wasn't a match, unfortunately.
Around that time, we became aware of certain people that were trying to take advantage of both adoptees and of birth mothers coming forward and most shockingly, faking the results of DNA tests
My Huong and I were aware that there things could be done better and safer. So we came up with Vietnam Family Search that was to be a non-for-profit organisation run by adoptees.
MY HUONG LE: So at the time we started Vietnam Family Search I had no idea about the complications of my own story. In 2018, out of the blue, a woman who had seen my reunion story sent me a very unexpected message.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: She said something like, oh, just letting you know, I've just watched your YouTube documentary and that woman is not your mother.
MY HUONG LE: In that instant, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. I had lived with this family in Vietnam for 14 years, and not one moment did I ever suspect she was not my mother .
What I learnt was that when my mother gave birth to me, she had a severe haemorrhage. My grandmother, asked these two women to take me to care for me. And one of these women ran away with me. To cut a long story short, after receiving that first initial text message the following day, I was reunited with my real mother. But I wasn't going to make the mistake this time by not DNA testing. So that day I took my mother and we did a DNA test, and it came at 99.999% that she was my mother.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: The emotional toll on My Huong was huge. You know, the the deception. So My Huong's story really highlights the need for being careful.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: I think the reason why I was really nervous about doing a DNA test to begin with was probably because I was equally interested in finding out who I was related to, but also equally terrified.
KERRI YOUNG, GENEALOGIST: I've been working with Sue for about eight years now. I help people, um, navigate DNA and ad teach them how to understand their DNA matches. I'd been encouraging Sue to take a test for years and years. She kept procrastinating, making excuses. So we had a dinner party last year in around October, and I took a test with me.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: As soon as I arrived, she asked most unusual question. I mean, it's like, 'Hi, how are you? But it was like, now, have you eaten?' And I went, 'No', she goes, 'Good. Spit in here'.
KERRI YOUNG: So she did it and I put it in my handbag and I sent it off.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: But I thought I just wanted you to explain really what I'm looking at.
KERRI YOUNG: Sue's results came back, as 100% Vietnamese. And she was very excited and shocked.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: I'd always assumed that my father was a Vietnam veteran. So that laid the question to rest.
KERRI YOUNG: I'm monitoring your DNA all the time, to see if you get a big close match come up
A few months later she got a really good ping on her DNA, which is possibly a second cousin. That would mean that they're descended from the same great grandparents.
We're trying to contact the match at the moment to try and find out where she's living, what country she's in.
SUE YEN-LUITEN: So that was amazing. 50 years of never having any sign of a human being. That is actually related to me
So it's like a tree with roots. I finally found that I was not so lopsided and that's even before I've even contacted this person.
KERRI YOUNG: So we've sent off messages to this woman, and we're just waiting on a response
Eventually one day you will get that golden match and I will call you at 2 o'clock in the morning, obsessively until you answer the phone.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: There are thousands of adoptees that now have put their DNA into the search engines. But unfortunately, we're only looking at a matter of a hundreds, hundreds of DNA tests having been completed by Vietnamese mothers.
KERRI YOUNG: Most people in Vietnam they haven't got the, the means to actually purchase a test. So one of the main goals with this trip back to Vietnam and riding through the community, is to encourage that safe place for Vietnamese mothers to come forward and take part in the DNA testing.
HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM
SUE- YEN LUITEN: It was great to be back on Vietnam soil.
KERRI YOUNG: There's one kit per package
SUE- YEN LUITEN: We brought a couple of hundred DNA kits in preparation for a couple of stops along the way.
CAROLINE NGUYEN TICARRO, CATALYST FOUNDATION: So our goal is to get into as many of the provinces that have the most orphanages back in the 70s.
Day 1 of bike ride:
MR BIKER: Get your water bottle and come this way. Also want to make sure that you respect local traffic.
SUE-YEN LUITEN
Our group consisted of 13 adoptees and their support people for a planned five-day bike ride through the Mekong.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: So we have some people that have come all the way from Holland and England and America and Australia
KIM CATFORD: We've got a 287-kilometre bike ride. We're very excited about that.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: When we set off, we had no idea how many women might actually come forward. It was very hard for me to think about what I might hope for.
BARTON WILLIAMS: I have that hope that glimmer of hope of finding a relative maybe not my mother but maybe just a relative.
KIM CATFORD: I'm looking for my birth mother. If not my birth mother, then Bart or Sue's or anyone on this bike ride.
MY HUONG LE: Why are we on the wrong side of the road?
My Huong lives now permanently down in the Mekong area. And so she was able to come and join us.
MY HUONG LE Hey, this is exciting Sue.
It was emotional. Just so wonderful to be with fellow adoptees, riding for a purpose.
KIM CATFORD: It's only been like, two days, and the group's bonded really well. There's a lot of amazing story telling at the moment, you know, sharing our stories
BARTON WILLIAMS: So along the way, uh, Sue's been organising us to meet with locals.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: Before the first formal stop we had done some background communications within the community around our purpose for visiting. We knew there was going to be the sensitivities around DNA testing.
KIM CATFORD: For those women who were separated from their babies, if they came forward on that day, it could be, um, quite shameful. It could be quite embarrassing for them.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: We had organised care packs for the community and we were welcomed by the local community leader. Someone in a government position said, 'We miss you. We consider you our children and we welcome you back to Vietnam.' And that was incredibly powerful
BARTON WILLAMS: I think what was freaky was standing and looking out and seeing mature aged Vietnamese locals, and I eyeballed one lady and I was like, woah, that that's mum. Like it was freakish that's just the brain just freaking me right out.
KIM CATFORD: Oh look I've had exactly the same feelings. And talking to the others in the in the group. They're thinking exactly the same. We're all thinking, could this be our mother?
SUE-YEN LUITEN: No one came forward that day. However, within 24 hours after we had left we had a request.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: So it's been really encouraging that we've had 20-to-25 mothers already come forward and ask for DNA kits. And we're just assuming that that will continue. The snowball effect will continue. The word of mouth, mothers talking to mothers
BARTON WILLIAMS: When we found out that DNA kits were requested, it's like woah well, the brain starts playing mind games. And I think, well, maybe that lady that eyeballed me was my mother.
KIM CATFORD: I think there's a high chance of finding some type of relative for one of the people in our group I really am very hopeful.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: The trip solidified us as a very special bonded group. So the last day of the ride, it was both a little bit sad, but I also felt this overwhelming sense of just pride, like a parent, the mother duck.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: It was difficult for me to pin down any particular feeling. I think there was so much going on and I still had to stay on my bike you know. That was a really important thing. Don't fall off my bike.
SUE-YEN LUITEN, on bike: We're almost there, 3 ks out we're almost there almost finished
KIM CATFORD, on bike: How are you feeling, bro?
BARTON WILLIAMS, on bike: Yeah, it's, uh. It's a whole happy, sad man.
KIM CATFORD, on bike: Yeah that's how I feel it's going to be weird coming to the end of such a ride. Wow look at this We're coming through like it's all like a flower market or something. Beautiful. Absolutely stunning
SUE-YEN LUITEN: There's nothing quite like going through all of those emotions and physical experiences together.
MY HUONG LE: We made it! We made it! Yay My Huong. Good one.
BARTON WILLIAMS : It's a unique experience that won't be repeated but it won't be forgotten so mixed emotions.
SUE-YEN LUITEN: As an adoptee driven to look for my mother, that journey can be incredibly lonely. But you know after the ride, no matter how lonely that journey is there's a community there that can respect each other and each other and hold each other. There will always be something very, very special about our group.
PHOTOGRAPHER: One, two, three!
CAPTION: 25 Vietnamese mothers are interested in taking a DNA test. Sue's search for her mother and father continues.