While she couldn’t offer any information about his parents, she did offer to be his godmother.

The nun who had signed Tuy’s paperwork - Sister Desiree - was now living in the nearby city of Can Tho. Finding her proved to be relatively easy.

A few hours later, they returned with news.

Travelling through Vietnam was not easy, and for a disabled person it was just that much harder. So it was decided that the hotel owners would venture ahead with Tuy’s papers by boat to Sa Dec, to visit the orphanage.

Bad roads and washed-out bridges meant the journey was much more difficult than they’d imagined.

Tuy and his friends stayed at a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, and the owners - a retired army officer and his wife - offered to help rent a car and drive Tuy, Tich and David into the remote Mekong.

“I hoped to simply thank the nuns there and, in a way, seeing the people of that region would be like seeing my mother and father.”

I just wanted to see the town of Sa Dec and the first orphanage I had been put in,” he says.

Tuy remembers saying hello to the children, and sitting on the cracked concrete benches looking at the faded orange paint on the walls.

The arrival of this unusual group of disabled Vietnamese-Americans created an immediate buzz. The local market almost stopped trading, as people began to crowd around the front gates of the orphanage.

This time, after more than five hours of driving on pothole-riddled roads, they made it.

Three days before his flight back to the US, Tuy left Ho Chi Minh City once again with his friends and the same hotel owners.

His desire to see Sa Dec for himself remained strong, and so he decided to make one more attempt to get there before leaving Vietnam, to finally close that chapter of his life.

For the next two and a half months, Tuy stayed with his friends in Da Nang, a coastal city in central Vietnam. He was having a great time, but felt torn.

“Sister Desiree was awesome,” says Tuy. “I didn’t think I was going to find anyone - so just finding the nun who’d signed the birth certificate was incredible.”

Turning the pages, Tuy arrived at entry 313 and saw his baby photo with the name Nguyen Quoc Tuy - the same as on his birth certificate.

The nuns presented Tuy with a ledger of all the orphans who had stayed with them.

“I thought that was astonishing, that they still had these records and my name in Vietnamese was indeed the correct one,” says Tuy.

Outside, the excitement on the street was growing.

“Some in the crowd outside had started to come into the church courtyard to get a look. My story was spreading like wildfire through Sa Dec.”

At one point, a woman came into the church - the nuns clearly knew her. She was introduced to Tuy as Phien, and was shown the baby photo in the ledger.

Tuy was told that in the orphanage, older children were put in charge of the younger ones. Phien, it turned out, had cared for him when she was seven years old.

It was pure coincidence that she was in town that day. She’d been heading to hospital to see a sick relative, but had stopped at the orphanage to visit the nuns.

Phien began to speak quite animatedly to the nuns - but Tuy didn't speak Vietnamese and had no idea what was being said.

David, Tuy’s Vietnamese friend from the DeBolt family, began to interpret.

And what he began to reveal, Tuy says, made “my head feel like it was boiling”.

Phien, it turned out, had information about Tuy’s mother.

She was still alive.

“She lives quite far away and it may take a while, but she can go and bring her back here to meet you,” David told him.

“I was going numb,” says Tuy. “I had no idea how long I had to wait. I was happy, scared and sad.

“’Who is she? Why is she? What is she?’ I thought. ‘What will it take to prove to her I am who I am, or vice versa? Is it a scam to take advantage of me? If it is, what do I do? If it isn’t, how will I handle it?’”

As they waited, Tuy watched as his friends ate lunch. Afterwards they gathered on the front steps of the church.

“Time was slow, and yet also a blur,” Tuy says. “I remember just looking back and forth across the sea of faces in the gathered crowd.”

Eventually, a commotion began at the gates. What seemed to be the town’s entire population was parting for a small group of people inching their way forward.

When the group reached the front, a small old lady wearing glasses popped out in front of Tuy.

In a rush, Tuy blurted out the sentence in Vietnamese that his friends had been trying to teach him.

“Con trai của mẹ đã xa nhà 20 năm nhưng bây giờ con ấy đã trở về.”

In English it translates as, “Your son has been gone for 20 years, but now he has returned.”

There was a moment of silence, before the people at the front of the crowd started gesturing to Tuy.

“People began pointing at a second lady who had stepped out from behind the first one,” he says. “The lady I spoke to first wasn’t the right one!”

“It was dead quiet, until someone in the crowd yelled out, ‘So which one is your kid?’” says Tuy’s friend Tich. “People laughed, and that broke the tension.”

The second woman walked over to Tuy and grabbed him by the back of the head, pulling him down to her level. She parted his hair, which at that time was quite long.

“I have this birthmark on my head,” says Tuy. “It’s one of the reasons why I had grown long hair, to hide it.”

When the lady saw the mark, she released him and hit him on the arm proclaiming: “This is my son!”

“Everybody cheered,” says Tuy. “I still had no idea what was happening or what was being said - so David and Tich translated for me.

“It was in that instance, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this woman proved to me that she was my mom and that I was her son.

“It was something only a mother could possibly know.”