Abandoned as an infant along a roadside during the closing of the Vietnam War, Katie Nixon made it out only because of a heroic airlift of 3,000 orphans and young kids 40 years ago this month. Her journey to piece together her identity, lost in that chaos, has spanned the globe and decades. Jane Sims reports.

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The nuns at the orphanage had called her Matilda.

The name was written in neat script on one of Baby Katie’s tiny wristbands when she was loaded onto the plane that would scoop her out of war-torn Vietnam.

The bracelet on her other little arm said what would be her new surname — ‘Mendonca’ — when she was united with new Canadian parents from London.

The bracelets are so small, they barely fit an adult thumb.

She was whisked away on April 6, 1975 in a frantic rush to save small lives.

The baby girl and the rest of the 3,000 orphans, all set for adoption, were shipped out in the hastily organized and controversial Operation Babylift to the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia.

No one could be sure, but Katie was believed to be about four months old. She weighed a little more than five pounds. She had bed sores, pneumonia and suffered from malnutrition.

She cried and screamed throughout the long flight across the Pacific. From the chaos of Saigon, she was placed in the arms of her anxious new parents waiting for her at the Montreal airport.

Katie Nixon had survived a trip many did not, to start a new life in the safety of Canada.

She was finally home.

But the journey was far from over.

It would take another 40 years and two trips back to Vietnam for her to find her inner peace.

Saigon was within days of falling to the North Vietnamese in the chaotic, final chapter of the Vietnam War 40 years ago this month, as Communist forces from North Vietnam closed in on the capital of South Vietnam.

What the world most remembers are the iconic images of military helicopters ferrying Americans and some of their South Vietnamese allies out of the besieged city as enemy tanks smashed through, the end of a Cold War conflict that still haunts millions of Americans.

A few years later, another searing image would burn into the world’s mind — the first waves of so-called “boat people,” desperate Vietnamese who took to the high seas in leaky boats, risking death and attacks by pirates, headed anywhere they could to escape. Hundreds of thousands joined the exodus, including many who eventually arrived in Canada to begin new lives.

But hardly anyone remembers, if they knew at all, the 3,000 orphans marooned in Saigon as the last pages of the Vietnam debacle were written.

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Perspective, Nixon says, changes everything.

In the comfortable living room of her parents’ Oakridge home, her enthusiasm about her trip back bubbles over. Her eyes dance and the words spill out quickly as she describes what she and her husband, Scott Nixon, the son of a senior Free Press editor, experienced during their two weeks to mark the 40th anniversary of her airlift out of Vietnam, just weeks before its capital fell to Communist forces.

They were at the Sisters of Providence orphanage, not far from the village of Can Tho where she connected with the people who are the closest thing to a birth family — a nun who cared for her as an infant, and some of the children she lived with during her first few weeks of life.

“It didn’t matter if you were Canadian, American, Australian. It didn’t matter. None of that mattered,” she said.

“At that moment in time, we were Vietnamese war orphans. We were all abandoned, we were all given up and here were are (40 years later) with our partners and spouses and families and coming together to celebrate this historic event.”

She had, at that moment, “the sense that you don’t have to explain yourself the minute you walk into a room . . . Everyone knows, you all have the same story. You just embrace, you weep and you don’t need to explain yourself.”

It was Katie Nixon’s second trip back to Vietnam, but this trip signalled a brand-new mindset.

“I had a stronger sense of who I am and who my real family is,” she said , recalling when she stepped off the plane in Vietnam. “I’m more confident in who I am.”

At 40, working for Community Living South Huron, Katie lives in Exeter where her husband is the editor of the weekly Times Advocate newspaper.

They’ve settled comfortably into small-town life — but it’s taken time to reach this moment.

Her parents, Rochelle and Jim Mendonca, listened intently as their daughter told what happened, calmly weighing in on the journey that has brought here to this point in her life.

Nixon leafs through the book of mementoes so lovingly preserved by her parents — the only photo of her in the orphanage, a chest X-ray, her baby bracelets, her first plane ticket, her paperwork, her medical reports, the picture of young parents holding their tiny baby.

She knows now she was lucky — and that there’s a reason she made it.

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It’s not clear where or when Nixon’s story begins.

The start date she knows is Jan. 24, 1975, when she was delivered to the orphanage. Coincidentally, it was a year to the day after her older brother, Daniel, was born.

Her birth date, listed on a hastily-made birth certificate to get her out of the country, says Feb. 16, 1975.

She’s been told she was left abandoned at a roadside in a garbage can. An American G.I heard her tiny cries and delivered her to the nuns.

“Thus, my life begins,” she said.

She stayed there for most of her brief time in Vietnam before she was moved to Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, for her escape.

Meanwhile, in Canada, her parents, Jim, a psychologist who came to Canada from India in 1966, and Rochelle, whose family was of Italian heritage, already had “two homemade boys” Paul and Daniel but felt a strong pull to help the children caught up in the war.

With the help of Londoner Donna Wolsey, who started Canadopt and encouraged overseas adoptions, the Mendoncas began the process of adopting an orphaned child. After a home study, they were approved and assigned baby Katie through Families for Children.

They believed it would be a long wait, but the war’s realities changed everything.

The Communists were heading quickly to Saigon. The Americans were soon to pull out.

The adoption of overseas orphans was already a lightning rod of controversy. But within days of Saigon’s fall, plans to evacuate the orphans — many of whom were fathered by American soldiers — had to urgently get off the ground.

The airlift began in early April 1975, but not without tragedy. One of the first planes carrying kids crashed into a rice field shortly after takeoff, killing 78 children.

The Mendoncas didn’t know if their baby was on that plane. They spent two angst-filled days by the phone before they were told to come to Montreal and meet their daughter.

Naomi Bronstein, a leader in international adoption circles, and known as the Mother Teresa of Canadian adoptions, was instrumental in getting the Canadian adoptees out. She handed the tiny Katie, wrapped in a blanket, to her parents.

They brought her back to London where, after one night at home, she was admitted to hospital for two weeks.

Otherwise, she was “absolutely perfect,” her mother said.

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But all wasn’t perfect for the young Katie.

Growing up, she knew she and her younger sister Claire, two years younger and adopted from India, looked different than the other kids in school.

Her parents never hid that she was adopted, or that she was orphaned during a brutal war.

“Right from the get-go, they brought out the map and showed me where Vietnam was and showed me where I was from and if I ever had an interest in going back it was always an option,” she said.

While her school was a sea of white faces, her family kept connected to other internationally-adopted children through Wolsey and Canadopt.

But by Grade 6, she was struggling to figure out why she didn’t fit in.

“When you begin your life as an abandoned child, you carry that with you and you think you’re not good enough,” she said.

High school was “brutal.” She was bullied, recalls racial slurs and being spat on.

During a Grade 9 biology lesson about genetic traits, the struggle to understand who she was took hold.

“I remember going home and staring in the mirror and breaking down and bawling and looking from head to toe, from my eyebrows to my eyes to my nose to my ears — every single piece of me, wondering what trait I got from what parent.”

She couldn’t understand why her birth mother would leave her at the side of some foreign road “like someone’s trash.”

“I hated when people asked me where I was from. I hated saying the word Vietnam. I hated how I looked,” she said.

Most of all, she hated her eyes — the feature she thought made her so different, and which her father called “exotic.” She doubted boys who said she was beautiful.

When she and Claire were asked at soccer practice about their parents’ background, they said their father was black and their mother Chinese.

“This is one of the reasons why I didn’t want you to come to my soccer games,” she told her parents for the first time this week. She said she was embarrassed about her big lie and never wanted to hurt them.

At university, she met other Asian people, but the hurt wouldn’t go away. She was “walking around in a haze, not knowing who I am.”

Scott came into her life, but at first she rebuffed him. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to love her. She felt she had lost a country, a family and an identity.

That was why, at age 25, her parents offered her a trip back to her birth country.

With her mother and uncle, she went back in 2000.

“There was a sense of coming home and I don’t know why. I don’t know what it was inside of me but the minute I stepped off the plane there was an overwhelming feeling that ‘I’m home, I’m back.’”

But it didn’t take long for her to realize she still was different. She felt people look her up and down. When she finally asked some Vietnamese women in a restaurant why that was happening, she was shocked.

They told her they could tell she was a war orphan living in the West. They said, “we envy you..... because you are free.”

“My jaw hit the floor,” she said. “From that moment on, I have never taken anything for granted.”

She visited the orphanage and soaked in the culture. “Everybody was left at the side of the road. Everyone was abandoned,” she said.

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It was war.

Her birth mother, like so many, made an urgent choice to try to save her baby, she says.

“For a parent to do that, that just broke my heart. I thought ‘Wow, they must have loved me so much.’

“I’m proud that I had a birth mother that had the foresight and strength to give me up if it was her dream for her child to have a better life. So how can I be angry at that?”

Healing and forgiveness replaced her anger and resentment.

“Unlike some other orphans, I had a need to connect.”

Supporting her was her family and, most of all, Scott. They married in 2002.

“Without his support and unconditional love, I wouldn’t have been able to take these journeys and steps towards finding out who I was.”

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It was important this time, she said, for Scott to be with her on her second trip back to Vietnam.

Together, they met Sister Mary Nell Gage, the American nun who looked after the network of orphan homes.

They returned with a group of adoptees from around the globe to her orphanage, now home to physically and mentally challenged children. That was something that Nixon, who works with the developmentally challenged at home, said, “hit me hard.”

She was introduced to two men — one with Down syndrome, the other with cerebral palsy — who’d been left behind when the others got out.

It was Sister Mary Nell who whispered in her ear. “See Katie, look how lucky you are. Forty years ago, this was you. You were here and look at your life. They’re still here.”

She knows.

“Now the script is my birth mother saved me and protected me by putting me in that garbage can. And then the next step was someone hearing me cry and finding me and bringing me in.

“It took all those people to bring me where I am now. It’s too bad we will never absolutely know where and when and who and all those things, because I would go back and trace my steps and thank each person for doing that.”

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Nixon has accepted that almost all chances of her finding her birth family have all but evaporated. Her orphanage records were burned before the Communists took over.

There’s still an option to have DNA testing done. And for the first time, Nixon says she’s ready.

Her parents are in full support.

“I said ‘Katie, you can’t do it too soon,’ ” her mother said. The test could lead her to bloodlines. If that opens up, she’ll follow it, but not with the intensity that once drove her.

“The journey is always there and it gets easier every year,” she said. “It’s not in the forefront of my life.”

“I’m at peace. I love myself,” she said. “And I didn’t think I’d ever get there.”

jane.sims@sunmedia.ca

twitter.com/JaneatLFPress

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TIMELINE



1975:Baby Katie born; left at orphanage. Communists converge on Saigon.

April 2,1975: First unauthorized airlift of 57 orphaned kids from Saigon

April 3, 1975: Operation Babylift authorized by President Gerald Ford

April 4, 1975:First flight crashes, killing 138 including 78 kids. Heroic efforts save many.

April 5/6, 1975:Baby Katie leaves Saigon on flight to North America.

April 26, 1975: Last Operation Babylift flight, three days before last Americans leave Saigon.

April 30, 1975: Saigon falls to the Communists.

2000:Katie Nixon, then Katie Mendonca, returns to Vietnam for first time with mother and uncle.

April 2015: Returns a second time, with husband Scott, on 40th anniversary of her escape.