Adoptee living in UK reunited with father after Vietnam War separates them for 45 years

By Minh Nga   February 27, 2018 | 07:44 pm PT
Adoptee living in UK reunited with father after Vietnam War separates them for 45 years
Toni Harrison kisses her father in this still image captured from a screenshot of a video report by the BBC.
Her father, an American soldier, was forced to leave Vietnam before her Vietnamese mother gave birth in 1972.

Family has more meaning than ever for a Vietnamese adoptee now living in the U.K. who has finally been reunited with her father, an American man who left her as an unborn child in Vietnam against his will as the Vietnam War was coming to an end.

Toni Harrison, 45, grew up in the U.K. without any knowledge of her biological mother or father after she was adopted from an orphanage in Saigon.

She later learned that her father was an American soldier who fought in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and that her mother was Vietnamese, so she started the quest to find her father.

Her efforts finally paid off and she found him alive and well in the U.S., thanks to a DNA test.

Her father, Lee Bulter, 78, told her via Skype last year that he had lived with her mother for a year and a half before he had to leave Vietnam following orders before she was born, Harrison told WKAR in October last year.

And with all the paperwork done, Harrison was finally reunited with her father this week in the U.S., according to the BBC.

“I didn’t think I’d do this. Completely overwhelmed. It feels like a dream, a movie. So many adoptees have been on the same journey as I and unfortunately they haven’t been as blessed to find their parents alive” she told the BBC.

Toni said that now that she has found her father, she will continue the quest to find her mother.

 
 
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