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We had a plan: Phu San hospital, where I was born, then either the province police or council of Gia Lam (pronounced Shalam - yes, it I feel like it sounds like a Batman or Spiderman movie or something). A Vietnamese friend of mine had told me that all inhabitants need to register at the local police or council where they live, hence we would maybe be able to get information from them if and about a person matching the name and approximate birth year of my biological mother.
She also had an extra helmet, with an eye-shield, though I didn't pull it down when I put the helmet on. We rode for quite some time. I was a bit confused because I had, by coincidence, passed a hospital on my first day looking around town, that was called Phu San. I had taken a picture of the place and sent it to mum and dad to ask if that was the place where I had been born, because I thought I recognized it from when I was 10 years old, and mum and I went back to visit the hospital while accompanying another Swedish family who was adopting a child on the exact same floor as my parents had picked me up the first time.
My mum had recognized the hospital in the pictures I had sent her and had replied that that was where I was born. That place was very close and in walking distance to my accommodation so that's why I was so confused by how long it took for us to reach Phu San by scooter.
We went to, I think, some completely different area of Hanoi, there were no tourists around, the streets reminded me more of when I had been walking to the cooking class in the outskirts of Mumbai, India. More…rural.
I didn't really believe my interpreter when we said we had arrived, because we were just in some fairly small but yet lively street with tiny corner shops and street food but nothing at all that looked like any official buildings. Then she took out her phone and realized we had taken an early turn. So we turned around, drove another street, and this time arrived to a huge building with a gate in front of it. On the building, there was a screen with subtitled videos playing with subtitles of doctors, nurses, clients, research(?) or I don't know what they were showing. It stated in both Vietnamese and English 'Phu San hospital Obstetrics and Gynaecology Hospital'.
She asked me to wait at the gate, while she parked the scooter. She rode her scooter to the right, where there was like an entrance to the scooter park. I think she must have got a ticket from the guy in the parking booth, and then she just disappeared. She only came back like five minutes later or so, and then we headed inside.
The first thing I saw 'inside', was actually an inner outdoor or backyard area with a canteen and coffee place. There were some booths to the left, which you would suspect was the reception, but a woman sitting at a desk to our right, without being in a booth. We talked to her and my interpreter explained my situation. She told us to talk to someone else and pointed us towards behind the booths on the other side of the entrance.
We went there, and after some back and forth between the woman and my interpreter, she explained that the hospital didn't keep records for longer than 15 years.
I always remember my mum having told me when I was younger that 'it was Vietnam in 1992…the records may have been just on paper and there could have been a water leakage or whatever. It's not sure there are any records.'
I had kinda forgotten about that but now that she said they didn't even keep the records for that long, I was reminded of the fact that I couldn't really expect anything from any records.
She also said that she didn't have the authority to go look in the records (which ones, if they don't exist anyway? …I didn't quite get it) unless we could get some authority to request the information for us, such as the police.
Thus our next stop was the Gia Lam police. Gia Lam is a different province of Hanoi, and Google Maps told us it would take us 40 minutes to get there by scooter. My interpreter even joked on the way that it felt like we were going on a picnic, because it was so out of town.
I felt like we were leaving town when we crossed the river. Below the bridge, there were some slum-like houses along the water. We went on highways, countryside streets, more bridges…
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We went inside, and talked to one of three women sitting behind a service desk. After some talking, my interpreter asked me to get my birth certificate out. The woman asked for my (Vietnamese) name, the alleged name of my biological mother, year of birth. She said she couldn't help us in her official capacity because they didn't have the information we were looking for, but she wanted to help and was going to ask around in her private network. So she took down my contact details as well as those of my interpreter and said she would let us know if she found out about anything.
Additionally, she told us that we had to go to the communes of Gia Lam instead, to get the information we were looking for.
There are 22 communes in Gia Lam…and it's a pretty huge area. So we went from only having had three places to visit in the morning, to suddenly having 22. That felt…quite numbing.
It was around noon and she estimated it could take us up to three days to go to all of the communes. So I felt like I needed breakfast, and also that we had to sit down to map down where the communes were so we could visit them in a logical order. We found some bun cha and sat down to try to figure out where the communes were.
We also tried to get in touch with the "personal blogger" or whatever he is, that someone on Facebook had commented that I should try out. The first time, the line was busy though, and the second time it didn't pick up. So we tried writing to him instead but didn't receive any immediate reply.
My friend had, as I have mentioned, been in touch with the Gia Lam Red Cross, so we decided to pay them a visit before going on our 22-commune-quest. However, when we got to the place according to Google Maps, there was no Red Cross, only a police station. It was the communal police station of Co Bi, Gia Lam. So we went inside and asked if they could check up the name of my biological mother. They checked it up on their screens, right in front of us.
There were so many people with that name, but according to my interpreter they had said there was only one and she was born in 1964 (so don't ask me what all those other names were!). They also said that they couldn't check the records in 1992, this was only the current information they had based on people's ID cards. Furthermore, we couldn't know if the information I had was reliable. They also didn't know where the local Red Cross was…
So that was one commune down out of twenty two… We had decided to head south to the second one, which happened to be only like 10 minutes from where we were.
The police at the second station asked for a copy of my birth certificate, and contact details. So my interpreter wrote down my Vietnamese name, the alleged name of my mother, other relevant information and gave it to him. I took a picture of it first, thinking it may be of use. Then we went around the corner, pretty much to a highway, where there was a photocopying place.
We decided to make 30 copies of the birth and adoption certificate, so that we would have one for each commune and some extras for…other places. Then we went back and gave him the copy.
At the third communal police, the police officer said to leave our contact details and information about my situation and he would give it to his boss for processing. Additionally, he said that it didn't really make sense for my mother to be from current Gia Lam because it was so far away from Phu San hospital that she couldn't have gone all the way to Phu San to have a baby. Instead, he theorized that she was from probably from Long Bien province, which was part of Gia Lam back in 1992, but that had since become its own province. He knew this because he himself was from Long Bien.
My interpreter told me that she had got the chills as he had told her this. Maybe we were in the completely wrong province.
Long Bien 'only' had 14 communes so then we, thankfully, had fewer places to go. That also meant we should try contacting the Red Cross in Long Bien instead, or in addition to Gia Lam, to see if they could help us in any way.
We hadn't received any reply on our 'official' request to the Red Cross (the digital tracing request that we had filled in, in the café the day before) but the woman at the Red Cross, whom my interpreter had been in contact with, was extremely helpful, and had managed to find a list of all women with the name of the biological mother, who lived in Gia Lam.
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We talked to some older woman with a facial mask on who was standing in a booth by the gate. After some time, she took us inside, up to the third or fourth floor, into some office with no window where three or four young women were sitting at desks in front of their laptops.
We ended up staying at the hospital for maybe half an hour. The old woman stayed with us for almost the entire time. I don't remember who said what but in short, this is what happened:
The women were confused that I told them this was the hospital I was born, because this hospital used to be called something else, not Phu San. They asked if I had pictures of the place from when I was born. Also, because my birth certificate said Phu San Hanoi, which was the hospital we had visited in the morning, but this was Central Phu San, so it didn't match.
They said that they too, didn't keep records for that long and that any nurse or doctor back in 1992 would either be dead or have retired. They nevertheless asked if I had any names or pictures of the doctors or nurses at the time.
I messaged my parents and at the same time found a picture with a Vietnamese woman and a nurse or doctor and I was in their lap. The ladies, and I found out from my dad, said that I was too old in the picture, and that the photo was from when my family returned to Vietnam for some business when I was 1. Additionally, mum told me that the doctor in the photo had not been the one who had overseen my birth, or if so, she didn't know about it. She was only the doctor who had arranged and greeted them during the visit back.
I think we left some papers there, just in case they could find out anything. The older woman at the gate asked me to send her the pictures of the doctor and the other Vietnamese woman, so she would try to identify her. So I added her on Facebook so I could send it to her. Around that time, I don't really know with which piece of information, they seemed to come to the conclusion that we were in the right place after all, that this was the right Phu San.
We were still standing outside the gate and deciding where we should go next, when she called us back and said she had already found out who the doctor was. She was standing on the opposite side to her booth, by the guards' booth, where two middle aged men were in dark green uniforms. After some talking, my interpreter explained that the men's mothers had worked at the hospital back in the day, and that was how they had been able to identify the woman in the photo so quickly.
There are so many leads and tips to follow up on, that I can't even remember why we made all the decisions that we made. I think I decided it wasn't worth getting in touch with her because I would have been one out of hundreds of babies that she brought to this world, so she wouldn't remember me, and even if she did, she wouldn't necessarily remember my mother.
So we decided to head to the last destination we could think of: The Department of Adoption, Ministry of Justice. It was around 4PM, but the parking guards told us that the Department was only open on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Good thing I hadn't planned any day trip on Thursday I thought to myself…
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We sat down on a boat at a café of the same branch as the one we had sat the day before right by my accommodation.
We had received an excel from the woman working for the local Red bi, with all the women with the name we were looking for, in Gia Lam province. We looked at it, but only one matched in terms of birth year, two others could possibly match, if the year was off by 2 years… Interestingly, according to the document, our best match lived in Co Bi, the one commune where the police officers had checked for the name on the screens right in front of us. How had she not showed up in their search?
Also, don't even ask me where this Red Cross woman got this list from… I bet it would have violated so many GDPR rules back home!
I suggested we ask if she could provide the same type of list but for Long Bien instead. So we contacted her again, and she said she would provide it to us the next day.
We caught up on some other leads while having another drink. I don't remember what I ordered but it was some other weird, scarily green tea, with cream on top and lotus seeds, except the cream was oddly salty.
'Yes, it's salty cream,' my interpreter explained, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
It wasn't bad. Just…had to get a bit used to it I guess.
We also tried calling the 'personal blogger' again and this time we got through. They asked for my number, since they wanted to be in direct contact with me and would do so when they could find someone who could speak English.
We tried to sum up all the leads we were waiting for:
- The 'official' tracing request at the Red Cross.
- Waiting for the Long Bien list from the Red Cross woman.
- If anyone heard anything, they would get in touch with us:
- The woman at the Gia Lam province council office
- The police in…I don't even remember
- Am I forgetting someone?
- Wait for the team of the 'personal blogger' to call me.
We also decided to meet at 9 on Thursday to try the Ministry of Justice again. She would message me if she heard anything new from anyone. Then she dropped me off back at my place.
Back at my place, my phone rang. My mind was still so stuck on the search that I thought it was the 'personal blogger' who was calling me, so I got severely confused when I picked up and someone said hello first in English and then in French!
My mother fairly often addresses people in the wrong language, other people get confused or mix up different languages, and even my interpreter had accidentally spoken Vietnamese to me once today, but that usually never, ever happens to me. But this time on the phone, maybe I was also just tired, I was like 'was that really French? Am I asleep and dreaming? Or what is going on?'
The person on the other line introduced himself and I realized it was my good old friend from the 2011 trip to Paris (see "How to win a trip to Paris" under Texts). I had completely forgotten already that I had given him my Vietnamese number when we had contacted me on Saturday, the day I got here.
I had contacted him back in August of last year(!) and again in like…December, and even had mutual friends write to him to check up on him, tried writing to his wife whom I had met in Bordeux in 2015 (before they got married) when I was an au pair in Nantes and they invited me to join them for the Vietnamese New Year when they were studying in France…no response…until the day I arrived to Hanoi!
I had given up all hope that I would reach him or see him while in Vietnam, so I was so happy when I had seen his message, excusing himself for not having got back to me. We had decided we would have dinner that day so now he was calling to ask if it was OK that he'd come pick me up in around 50 minutes.
My dresses hadn't been of any use yet, since it's still only around 20 degrees and cloudy, but I decided I couldn't see such old friends without dressing up at least a little. So I changed into a dress, though I didn't have any tights to go with it, so I ended up having to match them with my 'elephant pants'…
About an hour later, he called saying he was outside in the white car. We greeted each other the French way with one kiss on each cheek in the car. I'll admit that I had totally forgotten about that (I haven't been to France for years!). He hadn't changed one bit either, or at least I feel like he hadn't, even though he's both married and a father now! Even though I had had dinner plans with locals like every night since I got here, this was the first familiar face I saw, so it felt really great to see him again.
It was interesting getting out of the tiny street in a car. He tried driving through the alley and turning into the next one but it was too narrow, or a car or parked scooters in the way so he ended up reversing all the way out, and even that cannot have been easy.
We caught up in French while he drove to pick up his wife who was working at a bank nearby. We switched to English when she arrived since she doesn't speak French and then went to their place.
We drove into a garage, and my friend told me his wife and I should go inside, while I found a parking spot. So I went with her into an elevator and we got up on the fifth floor. There were so many apartments on the floor that there were signs pointing in which directions the different numbered apartments were.
She reached through the metal gate to knock on the front door, explaining they had a nanny. She had only recently gone back to work after her maternal leave, so they nanny was staying with them until their baby was old enough to go to pre-school.
The nanny came to the door with their 6-month old in her arms. She didn't speak any English, so I just nodded and smiled.
The apartment was big with bright and modern interiors, and a big window with a surprisingly good view considering we were 'only' on the fifth floor out of like…I didn't even notice how many floors there were in the elevator, 15? They had a piano, some big orchids in full bloom, a big and open kitchen, what seemed to be a study, and two or three other rooms.
When my friend came up, he explained that it wasn't a very "Vietnamese" apartment but that he was planning on inviting me to his parents' house which was much more Vietnamese.
'What do you mean, "not very Vietnamese"?' his asked wife asked. "It's quite normal for our generation," she went on to tell me, explaining it was perhaps more a generational difference that my friend was referring to, than a cultural or traditional difference in homes.
A few moments later, my friend's brother arrived. My friend had told me about him, and that he was working at the Ministry of Justice, but hadn't told me that he was coming for dinner. He was super jolly when he entered and greeted me in both English and French and asked which language we should speak in. I guess we stuck to English because of my friend's wife.
We had a fusion of some European cheeses and charcuterie with plenty of greens and herbs, some different kinds of meats, tofu and other things to go with some Vietnamese rice paper. Everything was super delicious (except maybe the pig tail, which I think I'll pass on next time). We ended up sitting there for over an hour, chatting about Vietnamese life, culture, my search, old memories from France and mutual friends, while nibbling on all the great food in front of us.
'No, it's out. It was published just before I got here, on like Friday or something,' I told them.
So then we all got our phones out to find the article. They must have said something or maybe explained to the nanny in Vietnamese what we were talking about. She replied something, and then my friend's wife turned to me and said: 'Oh, she read the article! She thought you looked familiar, but since I didn't think the article had been published, I told her that it couldn't be you. But now that you said it's been published... She read the article just yesterday and recognized you!'
So funny. But also great to hear because it means the article is gaining readers. Average people. Anyone.
I had been exhausted when I parted with my interpreter but I had completely lost time and seemingly gained some energy from the lovely dinner because suddenly it was almost half past 11 and I had to get up ridiculously early the next morning. But so I said I would keep in touch with the brother on Thursday and maybe he could connect me to some of his friends and colleagues at the Department of Adoption. I was going to order a scooter on Grab but my friend really insisted on ordering transport for me, explaining that that way he could also see in the app and make sure I got all the way back safely.
He had took take his brother and me downstairs, as the elevator required a key card to operate. I hadn't noticed, but it had apparently been raining because the ground was wet (and some tourists told me the next day that it had been pouring quite badly). Again, to my surprise, he had a car waiting for me. He said something to the driver in Vietnamese and then we "kissed" bye (I had already forgotten about the French way again!) and I got home both safe and dry close to midnight.
I had to get up early but I could sleep on the bus, and the reunion (and the food) was so worth it.
Next up: Day trip to Ninh Binh!