sandgroper66 I really think that Heidi at only 22 with her cultural and emotional background showed extraordinary strength and tolerance. It is easy for others to judge when they have not walked in her shoes. I was surprised at how much she was willing to try to immerse herself in her birth family's world and how much she was willing to try and modify who she was to suit them and their behaviour. She was courageous in her honesty of how she was feeling and some people have betrayed that honesty by judging her. She's a tough cookie. She grew up with a cold, distant mother who told her that she should be grateful to have her, because essentially no-one else wanted her. She felt tremendous abandonment not only from her birth mother but her new mother also. She grew up in a very homogeneous American world & despite very little nurturing as a child grew into a remarkably self confident woman. She was of course totally unprepared for her experience with culture shock but did her best to integrate and understand. She was only 22 and meeting her birth family for the first time, away from her kids, husband, and all she knows. She's bombarded with her birth family's and birth mother's expectations of how she should respond & behave. It was too much. Her birth family are poor but they have not had to jump out of their comfort zone on their own as she has done. They were still all with each other and in the place they know. Their level of poverty is not extreme for their culture. Of course as westerners we are shocked by their living standards. For Heidi, she was willing to integrate herself into their way of life in a pretty brave way for a young woman from her emotional & physical background. She was upset by their request for money because it made her feel used, like it wasn't about her, but about the money she represented. It made her question the sincerity of everything. For a woman who grew up with no physical affection, the suffocating physical attention from a woman that to her is essentially a stranger, is as foreign as the country. No doubt she would doubt the sincerity of that contact when she is aware how much they want her financial support & she doesn't know these people and what they are really like. I don't blame her one little bit for her reactions. With all the resources she had - she did the best she could. I think her birth family were as insensitive as she has been accused of being, but. Because of their cultural and financial situation it is easier to expect less from them. Some of you may have done better, others may not have been able to have handled as much. I feel for her,now she has even more reason to think she's a "bad" person, when she isn't. She's human, a human who was not nurtured or raised properly, who is doing the best she can for herself & her own children. She had dreams for what kind of a mother she would find, based on years of fantasizing about it, when she finally meets her actual mother there's not the fairytale connection that she had expected, and instead of just being gently loved and given time to let it grow, they grabbed her & expected her to fit right in & behave as "one of them". She went to them as open hearted and as open minded as she was able to. If not, she wouldn't have had the courage to do it. She obviously only imagined the best outcome. I think her birth family were, in their excitement, too aggressive with her, hopefully well intentioned. But I'm not sure that all of their enthusiasm & emotion was entirely authentic, and this is what Heidi was reacting to.

m_ats Just like Heidi wasn't prepared for the way she was treated in Vietnam, I wasn't prepared for watching this emotionally violent documentary. I expected a "good feeling" documentary, showing what could be perceived as some kind of reconciliation between USA and Vietnam, by the public.. How can a daughter-finds-back-her-mother ever turn our to be a sad story? I had better braced myself.The first moments of the reunion, at the airport, already start to show a distance between the mother and daughter. Such violent emotions.. You can feel the daughter shying away. I was thinking that the documentary would hide the bad stuff and only focus on superficial emotions. It did not, and that's why it's such a great documentary.First off, it doesn't present a negative view of Americans nor Vietnamese. It just shows a few individuals from those two cultures, without attempting to make them look bad or worse. Heidi is not the typical American girl and neither is her mother the typical Vietnamese mother. It isn't any more Vietnamese than American to have strong emotions like Mai and pour out every time. Such characters exist in both cultures. Just watch Oprah and Dr. Phil and you'll see lots of crying and overreacting. As a matter of fact, many Vietnamese consider improper the display of strong emotions in public.Now this being said, the movie shows what culture shock is all about.Heidi has been raised in America, where bread is white and meat comes in burgers. She can't stand the smell of fresh fish in a hot market. She can't stand being in Vietnam for so long, with such heat, humidity, without her commodities. Many Americans and Europeans would feel just the same. To show it on film is not a stab at American culture or a display of American egocentricity. It is a mere fact of life : if you grow up in comfort, even at the expense of freshness and excitement, it is hard to give it up.On the other hand, the whole "fillial obligation" thing in Vietnam is real, but it is not just about the money. I don't think Heidi was crying because she was being asked money, but rather because she saw them clinging desperately at her as if she were a Saviour. No one can handle that kind of emotional pressure, combined with all the extra attention she kept getting. However, she just needed say No and they backed off.I think that the two sides need to work a little to make this a better relationship. I wonder how the viewing of this movie was perceived by both parties. It must be terribly difficult for them to watch.

bryedtan_02 This documentary was in my view the best I have seen in a long time. The main emphasis is the reuniting of mother and daughter despite of all those years of separation. Although the last part which shows of the differences in tradition comes out. It is in my view insignificant to the main idea of reunifying with the your parent. And although there are people who would be critical to Heidi for not supporting her mother financially. I say that is nothing wrong she did she went to see who her mother is and to be reunited with her. Both mother and daughter were placed in extraordinary circumstances and as painful as the decision was it was necessary. My grandfather died without finding out what happened to his relatives in China but even though he did not want to see them because he said he wanted to be seen not as a meal ticket but a love one for that is more important than anything.Heidi went to see her parent and her brothers and sisters that is all it would be wrong to depend on the more well off of any family member my grandfather would say that if he were alive today. Another point it has revealed to me that despite of the mess the Americans did in the Vietnam War the government still did one thing which was decent enough to save the lives of hundreds of thousands that if remain would be killed in a Ethnic Genocide which is mostly ignored by the world.The Americans involvement in the bloody war in my view at first was a noble intention however as the war reached the Johnson administration it became a disaster since then. For there was nothing wrong with the defending of a democratic country from a powerful totalitarian Soviet Empire it was the tactics which were a mistake. Most important is that the bonds of a parent and child is still strong despite of any problems.

cranesareflying I particularly liked John Petrakis's Tribune review where he writes in bold print: "not recommended for young children." There is no blood, no violence, no profanity, but this rating is due to the high emotional content. You have to search through your vocabulary for superlatives here, featured throughout are extraordinary glimpses of faces framed in their own natural environment, the underlying original music is superb and perfectly balanced, there is a wonderful golden-orange sunrise on a quiet riverbank following her first night in Vietnam where the camera finds a dragonfly resting atop the highest leaf, when her Vietnamese childhood memories return they appear to be almost sketched onto a canvas in an impressionistic blur, all beautifully layered together. This film begins in 1975 as the Vietnam War was ending with Operation Babylift, (an event which, on it's own, is worthy of it's own documentary, particularly the newsreel footage seen here of an American social worker attempting to convince Vietnamese women to send their children to the USA under the guise of an airlift for war orphans), when a 7 year old Amerasian girl is separated from her family and sent to the USA for adoption, supposedly for her betterment, and she becomes `101% Americanized.' Yet in her 20's, when she yearns to meet her real mother, she discovers her mother feels the same way about missing her, so after 22 years of separation, she travels back to Vietnam in what turns out to be one incredible re-unification, beautifully capturing unanticipated depths of an experience that even the filmmakers could never have imagined. Both the mother and daughter are immensely appealing and couldn't express more genuine affection, but both are overwhelmed and completely flabbergasted by the personal and historical abyss that exists between them, leaving them both reeling, as if stepping on a land mine, from the unseen, misunderstood emotional scars left behind from the aftermath of the war. What starts out as a well-meaning attempt to wipe away bad childhood memories only ends up compounded with still more complicated, bad adult memories. One irony here is that her Vietnamese name means `united.' Sometimes in a documentary, the most difficult decision is to let the cameras continue to roll when you know you are intruding into the personal regions of someone's private anguish. But here, it is the best part of the film – a heart-wrenching, emotional jolt for the whole world to see that is simply unforgettable. What this film has to say about love, that it is so much more than just saying words, that sometimes you are called upon to demonstrate your love with deeds, is indescribable.There may be an inclination to consider the girl too naive and spoiled and to disregard her out of hand. But I would urge people to reconsider this view, as she was unexplainably (to her) separated from her own family, raised instead by a single mother who eventually had no use for her at all, was also raised in one of the more racially intolerant communities in America, which might explain why she was so unprepared emotionally to handle something as simple as affection, a family notion completely alien to her, and which she found, at the time, completely suffocating. ("Get away from me!") Is it any wonder that she might prefer the more emotionally distant relationship with her adopted American family, as that's all she really knows? It should also be viewed in another perspective, as the translator reminded her, that the family pressure and the cultural differences would diminish the longer she stayed. Contrarily, by shortening her visit, which she herself chose, she put even more pressure on herself and her Vietnamese family to finalize what was missing for 22 years into one final day - a sheer impossibility. From a Vietnamese perspective, they were simply trying to include her, permanently, as a member of the family, not just in words, but in deeds. But what I found so compelling in this girl, who was born in Vietnam, was that she really had no more sensitivity or understanding of Vietnam than the US government, namely none, which certainly demonstrates how easily we can learn to drop bombs on one another, and how inadvertently, by being so Americanized, besides living in material comfort, she was also taught the arrogance and narrow-mindedness of our American values when it comes to understanding the importance or significance of cultures from other nations. What have we learned since Vietnam? Look at our Government in action today, and the contempt we show to other nations unless they agree with us in lock step. What I found so compelling about this girl is how she represents, through no fault of her own, a new image of the ugly American, that looks different but thinks so much like the old image, how little progress we've made on that front, and how far we have to go.