NEW YORK-They say that travel can broaden your horizons. For Katie Kelly, a vacation in 1988 changed her life.
Kelly, then the on-air entertainment critic for WNBC-TV in New York, took a month-long trip to Vietnam in December of that year.
”Travel is the only luxury I have ever had,” says Kelly, 56, explaining that she takes what most people consider to be ”exotic vacations,” hiking in Morocco, camping in East Africa. ”Vietnam was just another checkmark on my foreign travel list.”
But for the second time in her life, Vietnam proved to be a turning point for Kelly, who ended up quitting her TV job in 1990 to spend a year in Saigon teaching English.
The first time Vietnam changed her life was during the anti-war demonstrations in 1966.
A native of Boone County, Neb., with a bachelor`s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, Kelly moved to New York in 1959 and got an entry-level job in the documentary division at CBS. She married in 1961 and returned to the Midwest (including a stint in Chicago) where she taught elementary school and high school English. She later moved to California.
When her marriage fell apart, Kelly returned to New York in 1966 and, at age 30, got a job as a researcher for Time magazine.
During her second sojourn in New York her life underwent a profound change. Within six months, she says, she went from being a protester against draft card burners to one of thousands of anti-war demonstrators marching on Washington. The change partly had to do with what she read and heard at Time from journalists covering the Vietnam war, she said.
In the mid-`60s, she recalls, war correspondents complained that readers weren`t getting the real stories, the ones they filed and later told to Kelly and other colleagues during after-work discussions at a local bar.
”As usual, the discussion became heated with the on-scene correspondent accusing Time`s then-conservative editors of avoiding the reality of our presence in Vietnam,” she writes in her recent book, ”A Year in Saigon”
(Simon & Schuster, $22).
The war in Vietnam made her question the view of America and the world that she had grown up with, she says.
” `America Right or Wrong` was now open to serious debate,” she writes. Recounting how Vietnam changed her life in the `60s, Kelly also focuses on the experiences resulting from her second encounter with Vietnam, which began during that 1988 vacation.
Its effect on her is summed up in the lengthy subtitle of her book-”How I Gave Up My Glitzy Job in Television To Have the Time of My Life Teaching Amerasian Kids in Vietnam.”
What Kelly encountered in Saigon in 1988-after going through the red tape of getting a visa through a third country because the U.S. and Vietnam had not yet established diplomatic relations-was the forgotten legacy of American involvement in Vietnam: more than 30,000 children fathered by American soldiers and civilians, who were treated as outcasts in their own country. Kim, the first Amerasian she met, was selling postcards on the streets of Saigon.
With her brown wavy hair, hazel eyes and freckles, ”she looked like a high school senior on her way to cheerleading practice,” writes Kelly, describing her shock at seeing an American girl selling postcards and peanuts and speaking broken English.
”She told me that her mother`s name was Nguyet and she sold cigarettes outside the Rex Hotel,” she writes. ”She also told me that someday she would go to America and live with her GI father and have a wonderful life. I was swept with sadness at her ability to dream such dreams.”
Kim was one of dozens of Amerasian kids whom Kelly saw. They ran the gamut, from blonds and redheads to blacks and Hispanics. What they had in common, however, was their poverty and the discrimination they had encountered most of their young lives.
Many had been abandoned by their American fathers, and some by their Vietnamese mothers. Others had seen their families separated by war, their mothers and relatives killed when the communists took over in 1975. All had grown up under a dictatorship that ”unofficially despised them” for being part American, Kelly says.
And so they lived on the streets or, if they were lucky, under stairways. And they dreamed about finding their fathers and going to live in the United States.
Their situation haunted Kelly when she returned to New York. After months of thinking about them and trying to find ways to do something, she heard about an American GI who had visited Vietnam and had established a halfway house in Saigon for homeless Amerasians.
Kelly contacted him and found that he was enthusiastic about her plan to set up and run a program to teach these youngsters English.
Not only did she have a background in teaching, but also she had found out that in 1987 the U.S. government had passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which mandated the establishment of a cooperative effort between the American and Vietnamese goverments to locate and process Amerasians in Vietnam and bring them and their immediate family members to this country as part of the State Department`s Orderly Departure Program for refugees. Learning English, Kelly figured, would help prepare them for their relocation.
In what she describes as ”one of the most selfish things I have ever done”-because she was lucky enough to have the freedom and money to do it-Kelly negotiated her way out of a six-figure contract with WNBC and returned to Saigon in 1990.
She says that ”while other people had a midlife crisis, I was lucky enough to have a midlife career.”
After working her way up to becoming one of the first women writers at Time, Kelly had left the magazine in 1972 to write books and free-lance.
After five years as a free-lancer, Kelly was hired as a television columnist by the New York Post. The job lasted 14 months, at which time she was one of 250 people who were let go as New York prepared for what was to become a major newspaper strike. So in 1978, at age 41, Kelly found herself unemployed.
While trying to figure out what to do next, she received a call from WNBC-TV, offering her a job doing television reviews on air.
Her TV spots soon included movie and theater reviews. Over the next 12 years Kelly and her signature bow tie appeared on ”The Today Show,” ”The Morning Show” and ”Entertainment Tonight.”
In 1982 she moved to WABC, then returned to WNBC in 1987 as the resident television critic for a local news show. Her glamorous life in television, Kelly writes, was a sharp contrast to the way she grew up in Nebraska in a house without indoor plumbing, heated by a kerosene stove and wearing handmade or hand-me-down clothing.
”For years after arriving in New York, I sewed my own clothes, shopped at the Salvation Army, bought discount `designer` clothes with the labels slashed out of them and lived in a 5th-floor walkup on the Lower East Side with a bathtub in the kitchen and the toilet in the hall.
”But with television that all changed. I ended up with a landmark Victorian brownstone in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, a Gold Card and new clothes with the labels still firmly in place. I told myself that I deserved all this, that it made up for that outdoor privy and the fact that I didn`t have a date to the senior prom.”
As Kelly explains it, leaving her job and the comforts of her life in New York in 1990 was not a difficult decision.
”I really wanted to do this,” she says, adding that upon her return to New York after the vacation she felt guilty and started to resent having so much while these young people had so little and even less to look foward to.
Beyond that, Kelly says, ”I really thought that there was something over there for me.”
In many ways, Vietnam proved to be a learning experience. While she taught her students English, they were instructing her about life and about herself. Being with them, she says, helped her get over her ”foot stomping and whining” when things didn`t turn out the way she expected.
Upon arriving in Saigon, Kelly found out that unbeknownst to the GI who founded it, the halfway house where she intended to teach English no longer existed. With the help of the young people who befriended her, she was able to set up classes at the Amerasian Transit Center, a complex where Amerasians and their families who had permission to emigrate to the U.S. waited until their paperwork was ready.
After a few months, and without explanation, a Vietnamese center official told Kelly by that she no longer could teach classes there. Again, one of her students came through, and she continued to teach in his mother`s apartment. From a Victorian brownstone in New York, Kelly went to a walkup room on the top floor of a Saigon hotel that had her wearing a cone hat and carrying a broom when she returned at night so she could make her way past the bats that had taken up residence in the hallway.
Throughout her stay, attracting students through word of mouth, she taught 25 Amerasians, ranging in age from late-teens to mid-20s and ranging in educational skills from a street knowledge of English to limited formal schooling.
But what she gained from that year in Saigon, she says, was the joy of teaching young people who were hungry for learning, youngsters who ”had nothing and nothing to look forward to” and yet were loving and enthusiastic and full of hope.
In addition to sponsoring some Amerasians and helping them get settled in New York, Kelly became involved with St. Rita`s Center in the Bronx, a center for Amerasian and Vietnamese refugees.
She is working there as a full-time volunteer tutor, teaching everything from English to geography, politics and how to negotiate the streets of New York, as well as creating materials that can be used to teach ”someone who is 20 years old and still reads at a 1st-grade level.”
Kelly keeps in touch with her former students from Saigon, who are spread around the country working and going to school.
She looks forward to what her future will hold, but she insists she has no plans.
”I`m finally at a position where I don`t have to make plans,” says Kelly, explaining that, by chance, she had planned her retirement for age 55. She also admits to liking the idea of not knowing what is around the next corner.
For now, working with the young people at St. Rita`s is what Kelly wants to do. It reminds her, she says, of one of her favorite jobs, teaching 5th grade at a school in suburban Chicago.
”Fifth-graders love their teacher and have a curiosity about everything. These kids are as close to 5th graders as I can get.”
