The Vietnam air lift baby - 40 years on
Coming to terms: Tanya Mai Johnston has battled physical and mental ill-health
Window of opportunity: Tanya displaying some of her artwork that has proved a runaway success, selling at a stall in St George's Market
Tanya's dad, Bishop Ken Clarke
Fresh start: Vietnamese children on their way to a new life
In 1975, Tanya Mai was among 100 orphans flown to London. Adopted by an Ulster bishop and his wife, she adores her new family... but is still haunted by the past.
Tanya Mai Johnston was a starving infant, with a cleft palate, when she was found on the steps of a Buddhist temple in 1974. The malnourishment she suffered as a baby in post-war Vietnam has led to chronic health difficulties throughout her life, while her abandonment and the identity crisis it fostered are factors in the depression that has afflicted her.
Today, over tea and mini tray-bakes in the Europa's lounge, the talented, east Belfast-based artist is mostly sunny and giggly. Petite and pretty, with delicate features and enviably silky, long black hair, she's also extremely determined in her ambitions. But there's a lost, haunted quality in her beautiful eyes every now and then, a troubled look that dims her natural radiance.
"I have no idea who I really am," she says simply. "I don't know who my real family are, what characteristics or gestures I have inherited from them. I don't even know when my birthday is. My records were among those destroyed after the war in Vietnam; all I have is a pretend birth certificate the nuns who found me made up. I am determined to find them one day but I have to consider my mum and dad - I love them."
Mum and dad are Ellen and Ken Clarke, former Bishop of Kilmore Elphin and Ardagh, and now mission director of the South American Mission Society (SAMS) for the UK and Ireland. They were watching a television report on the approximately one million children left orphaned after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, when Ellen, a former nurse, suggested they adopt one of them.
The chance came when the Daily Mail flew 100 of the orphans - including Tanya - to London. There were 200,000 applications for 100 children but by chance, Ellen found herself, at a wedding in England, sitting opposite Pat Ashe, the organiser of the rescue mission.
"He fast-tracked her application and when she saw me in the children's home in Oakenden, she said she knew I was hers. It was serendipity that she met Pat Ashe and it was a miracle that I was one of the orphans chosen by the nuns from one million. They were American nuns, working for a charity in Saigon, and they took me in."
Of the 99 babies in the airlift, two died and two went to Northern Ireland, the rest to France and the US. Tanya had her cleft palate repaired in London's Whittington Hospital before she joined the Clarke family, then living in Dundonald. She became the fourth daughter for Ken and Ellen, after Ali, Linda and Nicky. She was much cherished and given the nickname Tawny - "I was a wise child, apparently - I'm not any more!"
But her early childhood happiness, including spells in Dublin and Chile, came to an end when her father was appointed Rector of Coleraine in 1986.
"I felt different growing up but I blended in when we lived in Chile, with my black hair and brown skin," she recalls. "My teenage years at Coleraine High School were very hard though. I was bullied, mostly verbally. I would have loved white skin and brown or blonde hair, like yours. To be accepted by the other girls. Instead I got called names based on the colour of my skin. I thought it was normal to cry every day."
The pain in Tanya's life has been physical as well as mental. She was given a couple of hours to live in July 1999 when she was rushed to hospital in Dublin, in agony from a perforated ulcer. She has suffered slipped discs and severe dental problems from her "wobbly" teeth, all springing from her neglect as a baby. But it seems that it was the racism that hurt most. Her acceptance by Lancaster University to study art and design helped save her sanity at 18.
"I was so happy to get away to Lancaster - it was so liberating and necessary for me or I would have cracked up," she says.
"I did get some racist abuse on the street - 'Get back to your own country' - but not within the university.
"Art became very, very therapeutic but for some reason I didn't draw or paint after I left university until last year. I had all sorts of different jobs before I came back to it."
In 1996 Tanya went on a group trip to Vietnam to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the airlift from Saigon to London in 1975.
"It was just so strange to see so many brown people like me!" she recalls. "The warmth, the smells, the rickshaws - there was nothing familiar about it at all. One day I was walking down the street and even in the 40 degree heat I got this chill all over, like a cold wind crossing over me, and that night the team leader, Terry, told me that was where my orphanage used to be. It was a Honda garage then. When I went back there to teach for a while, it was a fruit and veg shop. I'll always have a connection with that place."
After Saigon Tanya took up a primary school teaching post in London - "I hadn't the patience for it" - but suffered from homesickness. She came back and found a job as a clerical worker with the Church of Ireland on Belfast's Ormeau Road, where she met her husband (a very "practical and reliable" civil servant whose identity she prefers to keep private).
"I've faced some racism back in Belfast but I'm happy here. What gets me are assumptions - people assume I'm Chinese (I'm one quarter), that I'm at Queen's doing maths, that I can't speak English - all based on my appearance. My Northern Ireland accent floors them! The lesson I've learned from that is never judge a book by its cover."
She speaks glowingly of the support she is given by her husband and parents, but it was not enough to counter the return of the depression which took root in her teenage years.
"I didn't even realise it was depression until 15 years ago when a doctor diagnosed me," she admits. "I got counselling and medication for it and it changed my life. I hate the idea of having to take pills to feel normal but I'm not ashamed of it any more.
"I want to give people hope - it's possible to be fully human and functioning despite having these difficulties. I've been through hard times - it's how you deal with them that's important."
She has two ways of coping. One has led to a burgeoning career in art; the other to 18 chapters of a memoir she hopes to have published one day.
"I write in my journal every day - I get it all out on the page instead of blurting it out. I have massive issues around identity. I'd love to know the characteristics of my ancestry, gestures and so on, my real family, but I've been given a lovely family, a nice house, good husband - why should I want more?
"It's not the right time now, but maybe some day, through DNA testing. I have heard of so many disaster cases though, of double rejection when some of the orphans managed to track down their real parents. And one thought she'd found her mother - she looked exactly like her - but she wasn't."
In the meantime she's concentrating on Mai Bendy Art, her colourful, quirky - and yes, bendy - freehand depictions of iconic Belfast buildings. She took up drawing and painting again after being made redundant last year, and to her surprise her work began to sell through Facebook. Since then she has set up a small business and a stall in St George's Market and at the Dock Market, beside the Dock Cafe.
"My parents very supportive of my wee business - it's called after my middle name Mai, which is also the name of a flower that grows in Vietnam and endures rough weather and storms. That's my logo and the bendiness of my work reflects my journey of 40 years - not a straight road, bendy with twists and turns. Only now are the pieces beginning to fit together," she says.
"It has been tough but I'm very thankful for what I've been given, and I want to make enough money to set up a trust in Saigon for children who have not been given the opportunities I have had. I want to help people.
"You see, I have so many questions - if there was no war, would I be in Belfast? What is the purpose of my life?
"I could have gone to France or the US. I feel my life has been engineered by someone. I'm organised but there's no way I could've engineered my life. From my point of view, existence is not random. There's a reason why you're here and a purpose for everything, mine's to help others."
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