02-05-2025
Colorado educator reconnects with her roots, 50 years after she left orphanage in Vietnam
BOULDER, Colo. (KDVR) — By some estimates, 20,000 Vietnamese orphans were adopted by families all over the world by the end of the Vietnam war 50 years ago.
Joie Lê is one of those adoptees. In 1973, the local newspaper in Loveland devoted a whole page to the American family that couldn't wait to greet her.
'This says the family expects a new daughter to arrive from Vietnam soon,' Lê told FOX31 as she held up the newspaper article.
Born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese father and a Cambodian mother, she was sent to live in an orphanage.
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'So, I have 15-some-odd siblings, 15 or 17 depending on who's counting and how we're counting. Not all living. But I was the only one out of the entire family to be adopted out. The rest were all raised by my dad,' Lê said.
She had a lifetime of questions, and very few answers about her origin. Until DNA testing came into the picture.
'And I was given my test in 2010 when we did a reunion with a bunch of adoptees. And I I didn't take it for like a year. Just sat on the desk for like a year,' she said.
Eventually, Lê took that DNA test and it helped fill in the blank pages of her life story.
'Finally, a match came through that was a second cousin. And I kind of was thinking, well, second cousin's pretty close to a first cousin, which could be close to an aunt, which could be close to my family. Ultimately, I came back with a match that they had found my brothers. And then from there, my biological father,' she said.
A decade ago, she traveled to Vietnam, not knowing what to expect.
'My two brothers met me at the airport. And they took me into the area that my dad was living in,' she said.
In the Vietnamese countryside, in the small home that he built by himself, she met her 90-year-old birth father for the first time.
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'He knew who I was. He could say that I was Dot's sister, and that I was Cambodian. But other than that, it was, I couldn't communicate too much with him,' Lê said.
He died a few months after their meeting.
'You always want to know, and I think that I'm really lucky that I do know. There's not that many of us that actually did find biological family again,' Lê said.
Lê is an educator at a Colorado high school and university. She has a PhD. And she says she isn't finished researching her past. One day, she might try to seek out her birth mother as well.
To learn more about the orphans who were adopted during the Vietnam War, watch our special report, 'The Vietnam War: Flight to a New Future,' Sunday, May 4 at 9pm ET on News Nation.
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