Vietnamese-American O.C. official finally meets his ex-soldier father after more than 50 years
The bullies made his life hell because of the father he never knew.
Those were tough years for Hugh Nguyen, living with his grandparents in Saigon, living with Vietnamese and American blood.
His father had been a U.S. serviceman, stationed in Vietnam. That man, whose name he didn’t know, had died in battle shortly after getting Nguyen’s mother pregnant, the result of a one-night liaison on leave from the base in Nha Trang. That’s all Nguyen was told.
The kids in Saigon called him an Amerasian, a derogatory term.
“I had light skin and light eyes,” Nguyen said.
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And the kids in Saigon treated him like garbage.
“I got picked on all the time,” he said.
Hugh Nguyen lived for more than seven years with that stigma in Saigon. Then, when he came to the United States, he lived the next 40-plus years wondering what his life would have been like if he would have had a father to show up to his basketball games, or give him advice or make a speech at his wedding.
Here’s what he or his family didn’t know. Part of the story about his dead father wasn’t true.
The dead part.
It was a family mystery that would take 50 years to solve.
‘Lost in the dust’
A DNA test and relentless sleuthing on ancestry.com ended with joyful embraces this week when Roy Patterson, a trophy wholesaler in Tennessee, met the child he first learned of just last month.
Father and son saw each other in person for the first time Thursday night at a gathering with Nguyen’s family in Orange County. Patterson flew out from his home in Cookeville for a short visit. His youngest son, one of four children he raised with his wife Brenda, joined him.
On Friday, Patterson, 70, came to the Old County Courthouse in Santa Ana where Nguyen’s office as Orange County’s clerk-recorder is located. On the lawn outside the historic building, family members surrounded Patterson and Nguyen as news crews captured the moment.
Nguyen showed the letter with the DNA results that indicated there was a 99.9995 percent chance Patterson was his father.
The man who is charged with overseeing the vital records of some 3 million people has special plans for that personal document. He announced he is going to frame it.
Patterson smiled at their fate: “Absolutely amazing.”
The 50-year-old Nguyen, who once described himself as “a baby lost in the dust of life,” smiled back.
“This is official,” he said to Patterson. “Now you’re stuck with me.”
Later, Patterson beamed as he sat in a pew at the back of the room where wedding ceremonies are performed, nodding his head as his black-robed son stood beneath a canopy and pronounced a couple husband and wife.
In his hands, Patterson clutched a copy of the book “Run for the Wall – A Journey to the Vietnam Memorial.” The book had been presented to him a little while earlier by a genealogy researcher who assisted Nguyen in his search.
Back in 2015, Nguyen decided to act on the longing he’d had all his life. Whether his father was dead – or, if by some miracle, alive – he wanted to know more about that mysterious part of his life. All he’d ever had was the story his mother told him and an old black-and-white photograph she had given him that she said pictured his father as a young man before he fought in Vietnam.
Nguyen is among 26,000 children fathered by American soldiers in Vietnam who ended up in the U.S.
Patterson was 19 with a young wife and infant son back home when Nguyen was conceived in Vietnam. He’d had no knowledge that this second child was on the way. He was already back in the United States after a one-year tour of combat when Nguyen’s mother visited his base at Nha Trang to tell him she was pregnant. Fellow soldiers informed her that Patterson had been killed by a mine.
With a mix of sadness and guilt in his voice, Patterson said Friday that he wishes he had known sooner about his Amerasian son.
“Hugh has been through a lot.”
Different from everyone
Nguyen’s mother was young, and irresponsible. She gave Hugh and his little sister, Linda, whose father was also an American soldier, to their grandparents to be raised. As an Amerasian child, Nguyen was teased and bullied from the time he was a toddler.
In April 1975, Saigon was falling to the communists from the North. The grandparents, knowing that their decision was fraught with risk, sent Hugh and Linda to an orphanage where they might have a chance at a better life. He was 7; she was 2.
Their grandparents wanted to take a chance on Operation Baby Lift, a program to move Vietnamese children to the United States.
“My grandmother felt so much guilt,” Nguyen said.
They changed their minds and brought the children back home.
The family – the two siblings, their grandparents and three aunts – squeezed onto one of the last of the packed helicopters airlifting people frantic to escape on April 30, 1975, the Fall of Saigon. They were among 3,073 refugees who sailed away on the deck of the USS Midway. His mother stayed in Vietnam.
They lived in El Centro, east of San Diego near the border wtih Mexico, at first, where this time American kids hurled fists and curses at Nguyen. Again, because he was different. They moved to Orange County in 1979, where Nguyen’s life transformed in his teenage years. He developed as an athlete, becoming captain of the Saddleback High varsity basketball team.
Unknown to him until now, his father played high school basketball, too.
Patterson thought of himself as hot stuff, averaging about 12 points a game in high school. Then he learned that his son, who stands about shoulder to shoulder with him at 5-foot-9, was twice as good as a point guard.
“He blew that out,” Patterson said, laughing.
Nguyen describes his father as a big-hearted man with a good sense of humor.
“This means a lot to me to have my dad here after 50 years. … He knew in his heart that he was my dad and he flew down here to meet with me.”
The truth of it
A cousin of Patterson’s became the connection on ancestry.com after she got access to the site as a birthday gift earlier this year. But when Sherry Stokes first called Patterson, he was skeptical.
“Is it possible you could have had a son in Vietnam,” Patterson recalled Stokes asking him.
“I said, ‘No, don’t believe so.’”
But when he heard that Nguyen had been born in December 1967 in Nha Trang, he thought long and hard about his time in Vietnam.
It fit.
“Obviously, there was something,” Patterson said. “I had to stand up and tell my wife.”
Patterson not only gained a son, but two more grandkids – Nguyen’s son Steven, 28, and daughter Gabrielle, 22 –- to add to the 20 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren he has back in Tennessee. Nguyen’s wife Lorena is his high school sweetheart.
Nguyen is luckier than his sister, whose own search led to finding out her serviceman father died several years ago. Nguyen hopes to visit his family in Tennessee next year. His father goes back home this weekend. There is talk of Patterson perhaps returning in January to see his son – re-elected in June to the clerk-recorder’s office – sworn in.
But before Patterson’s departure, Nguyen was taking his dad to a special spot in Orange County.
Not Disneyland, where Patterson’s youngest son spent Friday.
To the memorial in Little Saigon where 15-foot-tall bronze statues of a South Vietnamese and an American soldier stand side by side.
Together.