Author finds inspiration for book close to home
By Michelle Ruby
The Brantford Expositor
An uncanny number of coincidences brought author Marsha Skrypuch and Tuyet Yurczyszyn together five years ago.
Skrypuch had long been interested in writing a book about Vietnamese immigrants. She had written, more than 20 years ago, an article about Vietnamese boat people for a local historical publication and their stories stuck with her.
She had read many newspaper accounts of operations to rescue South Vietnamese children from orphanages before the fall of Saigon and the capture of the capital city by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, which ended the war there.
The Last Airlift, the title of Skrypuch’s new book, was the last rescue operation to arrive in Canada. Among the 57 babies and children on the flight, sponsored by the Ontario government, was eight-year-old Son Thi Anh Tuyet.
Thinking the story of this flight, part of a mass evacuation of thousands of children to various countries in April of 1975, had the makings for a book, Skrypuch began contacting the orphans that had been rescued.
But, she said, all had been babies while aboard this last airlift into Canada and had no memories of the experience.
It was then that she discovered Son Thi Anh Tuyet, now Tuyet Yurczyszyn, living in Brantford, just a few miles from her own home.
In another strange turn, Yurczyszyn had attended Brier Park Elementary School, where Skrypuch’s son had been a student and where the author had some of her earliest experiences as a writer, conducting volunteer workshops in classrooms. Yurczyszyn’s own children, 13-year-old Luke, and Bria, 11, are current students at Brier Park.
“It was meant to be,” said Yurczyszyn on Wednesday as she and Skrypuch gave Brier Park students a sneak peek of Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War.
The book will be officially launched at the school next Wednesday at 7 p.m.
Skrypuch’s first version of the book was a work of fiction, drawing from the interviews of many people. At the behest of her publisher, she rewrote the book as the non-fiction account of Yurczyszyn’s early life.
The book begins in early April 2005 with a description of the conditions at the Saigon orphanage.
“Tuyet could not remember a time before the orphanage. She thought that all children lived together in a building with sleeping rooms, a play area, school, and chapel. She remembered sleeping together with the older girls on a wood-slat floor, without blankets or pillows. In the morning, she would line up with the other girls. One of the nuns would rip bread from a giant loaf and give a piece to each child.”
Yurczyszyn said she has no memory of her father and thinks a woman who visited her a couple of times at the orphanage may have been her mother, but she’s not sure.
Her life changed on April 11, 1975, when the doors of the orphanage opened and a white Volkswagen van screeched to a halt. Rescuers had arrived to transport the children to the airfield. Nuns worked frantically to pack up the babies and supplies and load them into the vehicle. Young Tuyet was surprised to learn she’d be going, too. She had given up hope of leaving the orphanage after a bout of polio withered her left leg and she was deemed “not adoptable.”
Although she was just eight, she said she remembers the terror she felt as she was shuttled out into the streets. The sound of gunfire was everywhere as hysterical South Vietnamese civilians tried to flee the city.
“I thought it was the Viet Cong coming to take us away, not nice soldiers coming to rescue us,” said Yurczyszyn.
Aboard the Hercules aircraft, babies were loaded into cardboard shoeboxes and strapped down with duct tape. Outside the windows, Yurczyszyn could see smoke billowing from a huge rescue aircraft that had crashed into a rice paddy just days before, killing 138 passengers, including 78 children.
Several flights later, Yurczyszyn arrived first in Vancouver and then Toronto, where she spent a couple weeks at a rehabilitation facility called Surrey Place.
A story printed in the April 23, 1975 edition of The Expositor appears under the headline, Viet orphan joins city family. John and Dorothy Morris of Brantford had applied about three weeks before to adopt a Vietnamese orphan and were told just three days before picking up Tuyet that she would be their child.
The speed with which their application was processed may have been due to the Morris family having already adopted two other children, one from Vietnam and another from Bangladesh.
Yurczyszyn said her adoptive parents were wonderful. Her father died in 2006 and her mother continues to live in the city. Both Yurczyszyn and Skrypuch dedicated the book to the couple.
Yurczyszyn, who still lives in the house where she grew up, said her story was difficult to tell, and for her children to read.
“I cried a lot when she asked certain questions,” she said of her many meetings with Skrypuch.
The award-winning Brantford author has enjoyed success with novels that tell people’s “coming to Canada stories.
“You pass people on the street and you have no idea what they had to do to make their life possible.”
Skrypuch plans to continue Yurczyszyn’s story in a second book that will recount the woman’s “childhood in Brantford, the challenges of being a new Canadian, a visibility minority with a disability, and being adopted.
“She is my hero,” the author said.
Yurczyszyn said she felt “honoured and blessed” when she first held Last Airlift in her hands this week.
“It was a struggle,” she said of her life so far. “But I couldn’t have asked for a better ending.”
