sgecstasy
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Số bài
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676
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Điểm thưởng
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0
- Từ: 17.09.2005
- Nơi: Cuối Cùng Của Một Bắt Đầu
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RE: :: Thì Thầm :: Ta Với Ta ::
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27.12.2006 06:52:55
Báo San Jose Mercury News sáng hôm nay có đăng một tin về một Người Mẹ Việt Nam đường xa vạn dặm tìm con. Câu chuyện hết sức cãm động về một người Mẹ, bà Hai Nguyen, hiện đang sống ở Việt Nam đang sắp chết vì bệnh ung thư vượt đường xa vạn dặm đến Mỹ tìm một người con trai tên là Tuan Bao, đã xa cách 20 năm hiện đang sống tại San Jose, California.
Đến Mỹ, bà Hai Nguyen đã tìm được người con sau bao nhiêu tháng trời tìm kiếm, với sự giúp đở của nhiều người. Bà đã tìm thấy con nằm ngủ ở một vỉa hè sau lưng một tiệm bán bánh mì sandwich. Tuan Bao bị bệnh tâm thần, không có chổ ở, ăn xin, sống và ngủ ở vỉa hè. Tuan Bao, người con bà tìm được không phải là những gì bà mẹ tội nghiệp nầy mong đợi. Em post bài nầy vào đây cho chị đọc nha.
Mother's love reaches far in search for son
VIETNAM TO CALIFORNIA: HUNT ENDS IN SAN JOSE
By Truong Phuoc Khánh
Mercury News
Hai Nguyen came to America to reclaim the son she had sent away 20 years before. She had hoped for so much for him: freedom, education, prosperity, the difference between a life of promise and a life deprived.
When she finally found him, in November, he was homeless and barely coherent, lying crumpled on the cold cement behind a Lee's Sandwiches shop in San Jose.
The mother's search for her son, whose letters home abruptly stopped four years ago, is known by now to thousands after the dramatic tale hit the Internet and spread by the Vietnamese media from Canada to Australia.
When she finally found him, she was dying of cancer.
That autumn day, folding him into her arms even as he, not recognizing her, shoved her away, the mother's tears burned of shame and disappointment. She had failed him.
``You've heard of the phenomenal love of the Vietnamese mother?'' an acquaintance said, resting her hand on Nguyen's shoulder. ``This is the genuine article.''
When she found him, Tuan Bao, 36, had a criminal record.
She learned about his legal troubles only last week. While recounting it, Nguyen bowed her head and begged society's forgiveness for her son, asking a reporter to record it.
Bao, visibly pained, objected.
``No, Ma, I take responsibility for my crime,'' he said. ``I am to blame, not you. It is my shame, not yours.''
Bao was only 16 when his mother last embraced him and then turned him over to a boat captain to be smuggled out of Ho Chi Minh City in 1986. He was her eldest of three -- their father had died fighting in the war when Bao was a toddler. Like millions of other families living under communism, Nguyen was barely eking out a living. America, that fabled land where trees dripped with gold, was where everyone wanted to be.
Bao made it across the sea and lived with a sponsoring American family in Minnesota for several years. He dropped out of high school in the 12th grade. When he was 20, Bao headed to Denver where he briefly stayed with an uncle, his mother's brother, who taught him the craft of watch repair.
He sent letters and money home. The photos he included showed he was healthy and doing well. An ocean away, his mother sent back advice and encouragement: Don't fall into the wrong crowd. Finish school. Find a good job.
But Bao did fall in with the wrong crowd. By the time he reached Southern California in 1994, any money he earned went toward gambling, drugs and parties.
``I did not give one thought to my future,'' Bao said. ``Life here is all about freedom. And if you don't have a strong foundation, you lose your way. So I pay this price for my past mistakes.''
When she found him, he had already paid a grave price. Sentenced to 10 years in prison for a robbery in 1995, he served 6 1/2 years, including time for several parole violations. At Wasco State Prison in Kern County, Bao trained as an X-ray technician. He sent home a photo of himself, nicely dressed in borrowed civilian clothes. When he was released from prison, Bao struggled to find stable employment.
His last call home was during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, spring of 2003. Nguyen told her son she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had two months to live. He scraped together $500 to send for her medication. He then descended into depression.
``I was wandering the last four years,'' he said, ``a vagabond.''
He dug food from trash cans during the day and slept in parking lots at night. Diagnosed in 2004 with mental illness, he lost track of his medicine and succumbed to his illness, withdrawing from the world, living on the streets.
Nguyen's search began in September, when she landed in Southern California with $600 in borrowed cash. Although she had survived cancer longer than she had expected, she worried that she might die soon and couldn't bear to leave the world without knowing the fate of her eldest. She sold the last bars of gold she had saved for her burial plot and paid $1,400 for plane tickets. She had one friend in Santa Ana, the last place Bao was known to have lived.
When she found him, she pledged she would make up for 20 lost years.
She started by placing missing-person ads in the Vietnamese-language newspapers that circulate in Southern California. Her friend helped print fliers, using the photo Bao had sent from prison. Nguyen taped the fliers to hundreds of lamp posts and street signs throughout Little Saigon in Westminster, Los Angeles' Chinatown and many homeless shelters in between.
In a culture where some of the most celebrated songs are dedicated to the bond between mother and child, everywhere Nguyen went, strangers who heard about her quest pressed cash into her hands. She paid taxis to drive her around.
After two months of desperation and false leads, she prayed: Let him be dead, but at least let him be found.
When she finally found him, it was thanks to a San Jose woman, Huong Le, who recognized Bao, the ``missing son'' on Vietnamese news programs, as the homeless man she had been feeding. Bao was sleeping behind an eatery where Le worked at Lion Plaza, a commercial hub of Vietnamese shops in San Jose.
The restaurant workers, finding him harmless, brought him food and buckets of water to wash up.
``He was really gentle,'' Le said, and clearly mentally ill. ``We offered him money, he would refuse.''
Le reached Nguyen by cell phone in Southern California. The restaurant worker told Nguyen about the homeless man who had the same name as her son, and who grew up in the same villages as her son.
Does he have very dark eyebrows, the mother asked?
Yes, Le answered, very dark.
Nguyen drove up, and with Le's help, tracked down Bao who had relocated to a different shelter behind a sandwich shop nearby. They called the police, who took him to the hospital. Today, with medication, Bao's tremors have stopped. The hallucinations are rarer. Thien Cao, a local Cao Dai priest, opened his San Jose home to mother and son.
``It's nothing less than a miracle,'' said Cao of the reunion.
In his lucid moments, Bao is articulate and thoughtful about his past.
``I've given our community a bad name,'' he said. ``I beg for forgiveness.''
Bao, who does not have U.S. citizenship, is uncertain what his status is with immigration officials, given his earlier refugee status and his criminal conviction. Meanwhile, his mother must return to Vietnam in January, because her visitor's visa expires and she must check in with her doctors. But she will come back, she said.
Now that she's found him.
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Contact Truong Phuoc Khánh at tkhanh@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2729.
[image]http://diendan.vnthuquan.net/upfiles/9908/EF1C44E20FA2461FAEEC340F54193C12.JPG[/image] Hình của Bà Hai Nguyen và người con trai Tuan Bao đăng trên báo San jose Mercury News.
<bài viết được chỉnh sửa lúc 27.12.2006 06:56:51 bởi sgecstasy >
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