She Sees What’s Good About America

‘The last thing I saw was a rice field and my mother’s face,” the blind woman was saying. “Those are the last two things I remember looking at.”

Her name is Anna Kim-Lan McCauley because she has lived in the United States three decades, but she was born in 1948 in a small village called Xuan Canh, 25 miles outside of Hanoi in North Vietnam.

Her parents called her Nguyen Thi Kim-Lan. She had five sisters and one brother, all of them growing up around a fierce war with the French, in a country where peace was a stranger. When the French left defeated, the fight continued, this time with Americans.

When she was 8, Nguyen Thi Kim-Lan lost her eyesight. She suffered blindness from poisons in weeds surrounding her family’s thatched hut. She was treated by her mother, who boiled herbs in a pot and made her daughter sit by the fire, head covered by a blanket, to breathe fumes in the hope they would expel the fever.

Because she could not see, her father considered her a hardship on the family. To lessen the burden, the parents walked two days and two nights, carrying her to a Catholic orphanage in Hanoi.

There, they left her with nuns. She can recall her mother’s crying voice still, uttering a mournful goodbye to a little girl without sight. It was nearly 40 years ago, and it was the last time she ever heard her mother or knew anything true about her father, sisters and brother.

As war with the United States built slowly, the nuns moved the children south to Saigon. There, in a beautiful, mysterious city, a small, abandoned blind girl met the huge, cheerful, charitable soldiers who changed her life.

“The Green Berets would take us to the beach at Nha Trang,” Anna McCauley recalled yesterday as she sat in her kitchen in a Boston suburb, smiling at the memory. “They would fly us there in a military plane. No seats. It was fun.

“The Marines would have picnics for us. They were always taking care of us to make sure we had a good time.”

In 1964 a Green Beret colonel named George Morton asked the nuns if they had heard of the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Mass. The soldiers wanted to pay for the pretty blind orphan to go to America so she might learn how to read Braille and live with hope.

So Nguyen Thi came to Boston. After the Perkins school, she won a scholarship to Emmanuel College. She met a man, Richard McCauley, an electrician, and the two of them fell in love, married, and had two children. Their daughter works in Southern California while a son attends the University of Massachusetts, where he is studying accounting.

She has no idea what happened to her parents or her sisters and brother. She was told that her sisters were all conscripted by the North Vietnamese Army for the war. She assumed her brother fought, too. She does not know if they lived or died. All she knows is that she is here, alive and well in the USA, the living legacy of a single good deed.

“The greatest gift is opportunity,” the blind woman said. “You can do whatever you want here. Become who you want without living your life in fear. This was my gift.

“We get water from a faucet. We have a washing machine. As a child, I carried water by bucket from the well. We have warm beds here. I slept on the ground there. We have air conditioning. Refrigerators. Automobiles. Telephones. Freedom. Wonderful things that everybody takes for granted.”

Anna McCauley is an immigrant in a nation that seems, more and more, to fear the arrival of new people from other places. In the short span of a few years, it seems too many Americans have forgotten that many of our parents or grandparents got here by boat and by luck.

Not that long ago the streets of cities big and small were a symphony of strange sounds: the Polish maintenance man, the Russian tailor, the Greek kitchen worker, the Italian laborer, the Irish cop. The strength of every block and the cement of the whole land was this medley of people becoming one. Now, instead of welcoming difference, we are afraid of it.

“I miss seeing everything,” Anna Kim-Lan McCauley said. “My husband. My children. The sky. The clouds. Birds. Water. Colors. But I can see in my own way if things are described to me. I can visualize and I love descriptions. And I am so glad I am here in America where we are free to see it all.”

Now it is 1996, another odd political year in the life of a land where a blind woman sees more than most.

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