Voices by Patricia Scanlan

Author:Patricia Scanlan [Patricia Scanlan]
Language: ita
Format: epub
ISBN: xx
Publisher: New Island Books
Published: 2020-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Where It All Began

Úna-Minh Kavanagh

From the memoir Anseo

The longest journey in life starts with one step.

How on earth did a little Asian girl become a proud Kerry woman, thick accent and all? It just so happens that another Kerry woman chose Vietnam to search for a child to raise as her own in ‘The Kingdom’.

This is my truth. I do not have that red-haired, freckled, pale-skinned look that tourists think of when they read about Ireland. I have black hair, dark brown eyes that curve like a cat and light brown skin. That’s right, I am a brown Irish girl! And if you saw me walking down an O’Connell Street anywhere in the country, you might, at a glance, take me for a tourist. Or, better still, an immigrant who has settled in Ireland.

It’s true, I was not born here. In fact, I was not born anywhere near here. My story actually begins on 4 July 1991, more than 10,000 kilometres from Ireland. I was born in the city of Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. The first part of my first name ‘Úna-Minh’ (pronounced ‘Oona-Ming’) is the Irish version of my grandmother’s name, Winifred. It is also a play on the Irish word ‘uan’, meaning ‘lamb’. The second part of my first name celebrates my Vietnamese heritage. ‘Minh’ is Sino-Vietnamese and means ‘bright’. I am the only person in the world with the name Úna-Minh. Let’s face it, I am not your usual Irish woman.

I know very little about my Vietnamese birth family. Over the years, the information about them that has come my way has been sparse and impossible to verify. In the parts of my Vietnamese birth certificate where my birth parents’ names should be, I find the words ‘no father’ and ‘no mother’. My sense of how I came to be comes from the accounts of others. Mom and the doctors and officials in the hospital where I was born. So I treat everything I’ve been told as a possible truth in my story.

What my mom, Noreen, knows is that my birth mother was much too poor and too young to look after me. She came from a village outside of Hanoi. And when she was pregnant with me she was unmarried. Being single and pregnant brought great shame upon her family. There was never any question of her keeping me, her first daughter. Like my birth mother, generations of Irish women and girls also suffered shame and stigma in their own families and communities.

While she was pregnant, to avoid rumours, my birth mother and her own mother moved from their small village to Hanoi. A huge city with a population of over a million people at the time. It was an enormous step for them to take. They worked together in a factory along the Red River Delta making red bricks. I often wonder what it was like for my birth mother. She had to leave everything behind and work in a city so different to her home village, just to save face.

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