BRINNON — There is this hug that happened. After half a century separated, a brother put his arms around his sister.
Violence, war, relocation and loss had torn these siblings apart. This embrace represents healing, something Don Skanchy of Brinnon regards as a Christmas gift he was afraid to wish for.
Born in 1954 in a village near Ba Ria, Vietnam, Skanchy reunited last month with the siblings he left behind when he was a boy of 11.
Their father was a traditional man, not well-educated, Skanchy said, but with survival smarts.
He served in the South Vietnamese army, fought the French regime, was captured twice and survived imprisonment.
His father was a harsh man, Skanchy remembers, and “when he drank, he would lose control.”
Speaking in a soft voice, he adds that his father beat him, sometimes so badly that he couldn’t leave his bed for some days afterward. One morning, after another beating — he remembers his head snapping back and forth as his father hit him again and again — the boy left home. He caught a bus and rode to the last stop: Saigon.
It was 1964, and the youngster lived on the streets for four months. He knew it was that long because he watched four full moons wax and wane.
There were times when he awoke to sharp pain in his fingers and toes. Rats had bitten him.
One day, while walking with his head down, the boy bumped into a police officer who asked where his family was.
I have none, he said. The officer placed him in an orphanage, where he was to live for nearly four years.
U.S. serviceman
An American serviceman, an Army captain named Robert Skanchy, visited the place in late 1967, and noticed the now-13-year-old kid, who was playing kick-the-can with the other boys.
“I wasn’t paying attention [to him],” Skanchy recalls. “I didn’t want to leave the game,” even when the American asked to speak to him.
He asked the boy if he was interested in adoption. Then he disappeared — to return four months later.
Teen adopted
The captain did adopt the teenager. He named him Don and, along with his adopted Vietnamese daughter, Nancy, brought his new family home to the United States. They arrived Feb. 29, 1968.
Don and Nancy grew up as the children of Robert Skanchy and his new wife, Ann, who gave up her career as a lawyer to become a full-time mother.
While his adoptive father served in the Army, the family moved around the country, from New Jersey to Texas to Logan, Utah.
Skanchy remembers a day in 1971 when he, at 15, had to say goodbye to his father. The captain had been called to Vietnam again for a second tour of duty.
“I was devastated. My father was my best friend,” Skanchy said.
“I was really fearful for him, and for me.”
Skanchy remembers sitting on the grass in the backyard, weeping, when his mother came to his side.
“She let me cry. Then she asked: ‘What’s wrong, son?’ ”
He said that he missed his father, and then asked a question he said he’s still ashamed of.
“Mom, if Dad doesn’t come back from Vietnam, would you still love me?”
“No matter what,” she answered, “because you are my son.”
“From that moment on, I gave my heart to my mother,” Skanchy said.
When he met his siblings again, they asked a painful question. Why didn’t you search for us before now?
Skanchy’s response was that he did not want to hurt his parents, Robert and Ann.
“I was adopted into a family that loved me and cared for me. They sacrificed for me . . .
“I’m not going to say, ‘Thank you very much, but I’m going to look for my family now.’ ”
Served in Army
Like his father, Skanchy served in the U.S. Army, with postings in Fort Sill, Okla., and Hanau, Germany. He ultimately reached the rank of captain.
After leaving the service in 1989, he became an estate planner working in King County until eight years ago, when he and Kaylene moved to Brinnon, where they are closer to many of his clients.
The couple took their children on a mostly sightseeing trip to Vietnam in 2006, but Skanchy wasn’t yet emotionally ready to search for anyone.
Though Skanchy’s adoptive father died relatively young — at 61 — of complications from multiple sclerosis, in 1990, his mother lived into her 80s, dying four years ago.
Don and Kaylene Skanchy, who were high school sweethearts in Utah, have been married 37 years now. They have brought up a family of their own: sons Robert and Eric and daughters Tonya and Jennie.
This year, the family has faced an unthinkable tragedy. Last winter, Eric was driving to Brinnon and his car began leaking carbon monoxide. The Skanchys’ youngest was just 26 years old when he died Feb. 3.
The loss of his son made Skanchy want to find his birth family members — if they were still living.
Begins search
Skanchy began his search using Google Earth, the global mapping program. He pored over images of Ba Ria, the city nearest where he had lived as a child.
“All I could remember was a Buddhist temple, a bridge and swampland,” he said.
The temple still stands, while the swamp has been filled in with buildings. The Google Earth view provided just enough information for Skanchy to think about traveling to Ba Ria.
This fall, he and Kaylene bought airline tickets from Seattle to Ho Chi Minh City. But even days before the trip, Skanchy felt sure of nothing.
“Looking for my siblings was like looking for a needle in a haystack — a haystack the size of Texas,” he said.
“If I do find them, will they accept me?”
If you don’t go, Kaylene reminded him, you may never learn what happened to your brothers and sisters.
They spent the first day recovering from the long flight. The next morning, Nov. 19, they set out for the Buddhist temple.
Before leaving their hotel, Kaylene looked at her husband’s attire — shorts and a T-shirt — and asked if he wanted to be wearing that when meeting his family.
That’s a highly unlikely scenario, he replied.
But at the temple, Skanchy prayed: “I am back,” he said. “Help me.”
Some minutes after, he met a man who went with him into the streets, where they began asking stranger after stranger if they knew of Skanchy’s siblings. No one did.
Finally they went to the police station, where the supervisor said no, can’t help you, come back tomorrow.
But a young woman working at the front desk overheard the conversation. She knew one of the sisters’ names — and was a friend of her daughter.
Next thing Skanchy knew, a staffer from the police station left on his motor scooter to find Skanchy’s sister.
Finds sister
Not much later, Tuyet burst in to the station, her eyes wild. She didn’t believe this man was her brother. So she quizzed Skanchy: What were your Vietnamese parents’ names?
He knew, of course: Duong Van Khoat was our father; Nguyen Thi Nhat our mother.
When Tuyet heard her brother, Duong Van Dat, say those words, she allowed his hug.
While in Ba Ria, Skanchy also met and spent time with his brothers, Ngoc and Son. Another sibling, Thuy, lives in Paris, where he is a singer, while another sister, Nga, was visiting her daughter in Ohio, of all places.
That first reunion day was an overwhelming one. He and Kaylene had planned to spend a few weeks in Vietnam, searching. Instead they found his siblings within four hours.
“I wrote in my journal: ‘I’m drinking water from a fire hydrant,’ ” Skanchy quipped.
A few days after that, the Skanchys took a trip to the beach with their Vietnamese family. They played some music together, with Skanchy playing the harmonica as his Vietnamese father once had.
During that jam session, “I just felt the love in that room,” said Kaylene.
One of Skanchy’s nieces hopes to come to the United States and get to know her American cousins. She also hopes to find work so that she can send money home to her parents, who are struggling.
Father’s poem
Skanchy experienced another life-changing thing while in Vietnam. His siblings showed him a poem his father had written in 1980. It was a remembrance of his lost son, a kind of prayer that he would be safe.
The poem ended with his father’s plea “for a little boy . . . Heaven above, please help.”
As he read this over and over, Skanchy’s heart changed.
“I realized that he had missed me, longed for me. My tears of anger became my tears of gratitude.
“For the first time in my life, I could say I loved my father.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
