The Olympian: Document Display

March 10, 2001
Section: Features
Page: D1

Journey of faith
Sarah Jackson
Staff
The Olympian

Far-flung family is finally reunited in South Sound

BY SARAH JACKSON

THE OLYMPIAN

OLYMPIA - They say mere coincidence could never explain their stories.

Rani and Trong Hong live the "American dream" in Olympia with their own successful business, a spacious home, two children and another on the way.

Though they are 29 and 32 respectively, they each have endured their own unbelievable epic, a saga they'll recount publicly this week.

Their parallel journeys began when he, Trong Hong, the older of the two, was only 9 and lost at sea on a fishing boat packed with hundreds of Vietnamese refugees.

He was starving until he and others on the boat made it to an Indonesian island where he lived for two years.

While he was struggling to survive, Rani, a 7-year-old girl from Southern India was kidnapped, traded to a child broker and abused until she was physically and mentally ill.

Both were separated from their families as children and had little hope of seeing their parents again.

While on the fishing boat, Trong witnessed starvation, beatings, shootings and - when pirates attacked - rape and death.

Rani fears she was kept hostage in a brothel, but to this day doesn't remember any of her early life.

For most of her life, Rani didn't even know her last name or birth date.

Today she does.

Reunited

Though Rani and Trong thought they were orphaned, they eventually found their mothers and brought them to Olympia last week.

Today Rani holds the hand of Alia Chaku Konukudy, her mother, and thanks God.

Since they were reunited, they've had to communicate through an interpreter.

Rani's mother still cries when she thinks about losing her daughter as a child. But this same woman recently showed Rani how to wear her first sari.

Trong has the luxury of being able to speak in Vietnamese with his mother. And during their recent conversations he's learned new details of his journey from Communist Vietnam.

Though frequently overwhelmed by emotion, Rani, Trong and their mothers celebrate what they believe is a miracle.

They will join in a public celebration Thursday. And both mothers will be in the United States to witness the birth of the couple's third child, due in April.

During a speech at Olympia's Church of Living Water, Rani and Trong will explain their uncanny connection and the struggles they shared.

They believe God brought them together in the Puget Sound area and, eventually, reunited them both with their mothers.

Searching

Rani never went looking for her birth mother. As far as Rani knew her mother was dead. And she harbored a vague resentment, bordering on hate, toward India.

And Rani wouldn't have known where to look as she remembered very little of her past. She knew that she suffered when she was in India and was adopted at age 8 from an orphanage by a woman in Olympia. Compounding the tragedy, Rani's adopted mother died when Rani was 16.

In 1999 a friend who was visiting India on a trip for Shared Hope International asked Rani to go along.

While there, she began to recognize sights, sounds and smells.

"I was mostly going as a tourist," she said, "just going to see the countryside."

During the trip, Rani decided to visit the Families for Children orphanage in Tamil Nadu from which she was adopted. At the orphanage a woman recognized Rani, grabbed her, hugged her and wept, amazed.

The woman, Rani learned through an interpreter, was once her nanny.

She had said: "I know who you are and I know where you came from before this orphanage."

Rani was skeptical. But she wanted to know more and she decided to visit a boarding school six hours away (in the state of Kerala) that the nanny had told her about.

It was the place from which Rani was ultimately kidnapped.

Rani was taken from her family as her mother struggled to raise five children and tend to a husband who was ill and dying.

Desperate to feed her children, Rani's mother accepted the help of a friend who offered Rani a place to stay.

Konukudy reluctantly agreed to let Rani live at the boarding school down the street, reserving the right to visit her any time, which she did for months.

But the woman in charge sold children.

"They tricked her," Rani said, holding her mother's hand while sitting on a couch in her living room. "They promised her they would return me."

They never did. And after failed court cases and years of searching, Konukudy had lost hope of seeing her Rani again.

But when she heard that Rani was alive and in Tamil Nadu, Konukudy traveled three days to see her daughter.

And when Konukudy knocked at Rani's hotel-room door, Rani thought it was room service.

"It was her standing there," she said. "She just grabbed me and cried and cried. I didn't recognize her. My memory was so blocked."

Though touched and amazed, Rani asked for proof.

Eventually Konukudy produced a photo identical to the picture Rani saved from her passport.

It was the same girl in the same dress.

"Then I knew," she said.

Lost at sea

While Rani found her mother on her 1999 trip to India, Trong was reunited with his mother in 1992.

Trong's memories of a traumatic childhood were intact. But communicating with his mother after they were separated proved difficult.

At one point, both Trong and his mother, Pham Thi Giup, thought the other one was dead.

Trong went on with his life in the United States and met Rani in 1989 on a blind date. They married in 1992.

Trong knew he had to go back to Vietnam, find his mother and tell her the news.

That same year, he found her in a village in South Vietnam and was reunited with his six siblings.

Today he knows more of the story of his escape from Vietnam - some of it painful to hear.

Like Rani, Trong's father also died shortly after he was separated from his family.

Trong's father made the decision to get his young son out of the country.

"There was no opportunity," Trong said. "They wanted me to get an education."

So Trong's parents put up the family's life savings and secured him a place on a boat - set for anywhere but Vietnam.

Sitting with her son in his Olympia home, Giup remembers letting her son go. She speaks in Vietnamese. But Trong cannot translate what she says to a reporter because both are crying.

Trong remembers about 400 people crammed onto the fishing boat, most of them below deck.

"We literally could not move around," he said. "I remember hearing the engine running."

Food and water ran out after the first night. About three days later, the boat approached a Malaysian shore, desperate to land.

"They warned us if we go in, they will shoot us and beat us. At the time, we were desperate."

Trong remembers standing on the deck of the boat witnessing the beating of refugees who tried to reach shore.

Shortly after the assaults, the refugees were loaded back on the boat and shoved out to sea, Trong remembers.

A day later, pirates boarded the fishing boat.

Even though Trong had his parents' wedding rings, he wasn't searched. But others were robbed and some women were raped.

Despite the fact that many of the refugees were near death, the group traveled for another day before they reached a small Indonesian island.

"The navigator said: The only way we're going to get off this boat is we have to sink it," Trong said, adding that he did not know how to swim.

"I can't explain to you how I got onto shore. As a believer, I think that an angel out there came to take me onto shore," Trong said.

Trong and about 200 survivors eventually found places to live on the island, eating bananas and other fruits and finding fresh water pools for drinking water.

Occasionally, merchants visited the island to sell what the survivors would buy.

"People were scattered everywhere," he said. "We would live under trees. Anything we could find to survive."

Eventually the Indonesian government discovered the refugees and, working with the United States two years later, found a church and a family in the Seattle area willing to sponsor Trong.

While happy to be safe in Seattle, Trong realized the adventure was over and he was permanently separated from his family.

Though there was much to talk about, their reunion 16 years later left him speechless.

"I just held her hand," Trong said. "I didn't want to let her go."

Shared hope

Rani is still asking: "How can two lives like that get together?"

Her answer lies in scripture. It's helped her embrace her new mother and confront the avalanche of miraculous circumstances.

"It's my faith that's bringing me through all of this," she said. "Without my belief in God, there's no way I would be able to handle what came at me."

Rani has even posted Isaiah 42:16 to her wall with pictures of her long-lost three sisters and a brother:

"I will bring the blind by a way they did not know. I will lead them in paths they haven't known. I will make darkness light before them and the crooked places straight. These things I will do for them and not forsake them."

The passage has given her comfort since her first trip to India.

"It gave me that confidence," she said. "People wanted to know: `How did this all happen?' I use that. (My life) just absolutely fulfilled the scripture."

With Shared Hope, a nonprofit advocacy group for orphaned children in India, Rani hopes to help rescue other young girls.

"I want to work to make awareness that child trafficking is going on even today," said Rani, now a spokeswoman for the humanitarian organization.

"We're wanting to give other people hope," she said. "You can make changes and you can make a difference in someone else's life."

Sarah Jackson writes for The Olympian and can be reached at 704-6871.

Shared Hope

In partnership with other nonprofit organizations working in Bombay, Shared Hope International works to rescue girls and young women trapped in brothels or who are bought and sold. To learn more about Shared Hope, contact 2906 E. Evergreen Blvd., Vancouver, WA 98661, (360) 693-8100 or visit www.sharedhope.org.