Family reunion: War separated mom, kids for 46 years

Wednesday, May 1, 2002 | 11:16 a.m.

Tuy Seiler, at the age of 70, is looking forward to celebrating her first Mother's Day.

Seiler, who was separated from her two children during the Vietnam War when they were babies, saw her son and daughter for the first time in 46 years this week in her northwest Las Vegas home.

The reunion put to rest decades of uncertainty about whether they were dead or alive.

Seiler last saw her son, Thanh Vu, and her daughter, Cherie Holmes, when they were two months and 1 1/2 years old, respectively, in Vietnam.

In 1954, Seiler's husband, a Vietnamese soldier, was killed on his first night of guard duty as the Communists took over what became North Vietnam.

Seiler left Cherie with a relative of her husband in their hometown, Nam Ding, then fled south to safety with Thanh. When she got to Saigon, she left Thanh with her brother.

"She was poor and had no way to take care of us with everything that was happening," Cherie said Monday, after spending three days with her mother and brother trading life stories.

Seiler got a job selling shoes about 150 miles east of Saigon and sent money to relatives to give to the children. But because both families moved frequently, she was not always sure where they were.

Before long Seiler lost contact with both children, and she began another life that would include marrying an American soldier, owning a nightclub in Atlanta and losing about a million dollars gambling in Las Vegas, she said.

Thanh grew up not knowing for sure that he had a sister; Cherie didn't know she had a brother. Thanh wound up in Paris; Cherie, in Pennsylvania. Both now own their own businesses; both have three children. But neither heard the family history growing up.

"My dad's side didn't get along with my mother's side, and everyone thought it was best not to tell us the truth," Cherie said.

"When I was 12, 13, in Saigon, I was told not to listen so much when my relatives talked. But I knew something was missing.

"My brother, being with family on my mother's side, found out about my mom and me earlier, at about 8 years old. But he didn't want to confront his uncle, who raised him as if he was a son."

Thanh, at about 11, started looking for a sister he never met. He looked at schools. He went to an army base where someone said she was working. As Thanh looked he hitchhiked without money and slept on the floors of Buddhist temples, he said.

"When I knew I had a sister, I knew I had to find her," said Thanh, who speaks little English.

He escaped to Paris at age 25, saying he was part French to get the proper papers.

Cherie discovered bits and pieces along the way.

"I knew I had a mother, but didn't know her name, where she was or anything else. Some relatives said she had to be dead, or she would have contacted me. But this didn't make sense to me," she said.

Cherie came to the United States at 16 to study at a high school in Punxsutawney, Pa. She married an American soldier and grew accustomed to small-town America.

She later divorced and remarried, had three children, and opened a beauty salon in Clairon, Pa.

"All this time, I thought by then my mother was dead," she said.

Her mother had also moved to the United States. In 1966 Seiler met and married an American soldier, and she bought a nightclub in Atlanta. They divorced in 1980.

Seiler said she continued to look for her children. "I tried to find them, sent money, but letters would come back, or people would say they had moved. Time kept going by."

The long-overdue reunion started to come together in January when, at the behest of friends from Vietnam, Cherie went back to her homeland for the first time in 31 years to seek her history.

"When I got there, a cousin told me the whole story," she said. "They said I had a brother in Paris and my mother had lived many years in the United States. But they didn't know her married name. And I couldn't find anyone who had raised my brother either."

Two weeks later she was back in Pennsylvania, with a few clues and plenty of determination. She called 200 people in Paris with names similar to her brother's. No luck. Then someone in Vietnam she had paid to find the uncle who raised her brother called with an address. She wrote the uncle.

About three weeks ago Cherie was driving home from work when her cell phone rang. It was the brother she had never met.

"I pulled over and we talked for at least an hour. We mostly cried," she said.

Thanh, it turned out, knew his mother's married name, having met a friend of his mother's in Paris.

"But he spelled it wrong. We tried all these combinations on the Internet. Finally, we tried Seiler. The first number we got was in Rochester, N.Y. We called. It was my mother's ex-husband."

The trail led her to Las Vegas, but her mother's number was unlisted. She got an address from the Clark County Elections Department.

"I decided to send her flowers, with a card and my phone number," Cherie said.

By the next day arrangements were being made for a family reunion.

Stories would soon be told, including tales of Seiler's heavy gambling.

Seiler sold her nightclub and moved to Las Vegas in 1984, but gambled away money she made working as a real estate investor and later as a blackjack dealer. "I lost about a million dollars altogether," she said.

Since 1997, Seiler has lived on monthly Social Security checks. "With the checks, it's either eating or gambling, so I'm eating," she said.

When asked why she gambled, she nodded to her children. "If I had found them, I would never have gotten into it. When you see the lights in Las Vegas, you don't think about the money ..."

Then she added, "Thank God they're doing OK in life. If I had found them poor, I'd feel so guilty."

The three are planning a trip to Vietnam next year to visit the grave of Thanh and Cherie's father.

"We'll try our best to make up for what we've lost all these years," Cherie said.

"And we hope my mother lives to be 100."