News Story

In 1994 while working on the book “Land of the Ascending Dragon: Rediscovering Vietnam,” Media School Professor Emeritus Steve Raymer took a photo of a man and woman with their young daughter riding a motorbike outside of the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi during the Tết Lunar New Year.

The mother holding a Kumquat tree was the most striking about the scene to Raymer. According to Raymer, miniature fruit trees are often displayed in Vietnamese homes during Tết celebrations.

Fast forward 30 years and Raymer received an email from Linh Do, the little girl in the photo who had only just discovered the photo on Facebook.

The photo was uploaded to a Facebook page with Raymer’s watermark attached. Do immediately recognized her father and was able to track down Raymer through social media. He has been corresponding with Linh and her sister Hong Do Thuy since.

Raymer learned Do attended the University of Massachusetts Boston and majored in English and had also lived in Los Angeles before returning to Vietnam. Do is now a book translator and editor currently translating “The Long Reckoning” by George Black. The book is about the work of private Americans, including some veteran, to persuade the U.S. government to take responsibility for the massive numbers of birth defects in Vietnam attributed to the defoliant Agent Orange, which was sprayed by U.S. troops to deny communist soldiers their jungle sanctuaries.

Her father was a rose farmer outside of Hanoi which makes the yellow roses Linh is holding in the photo even more significant. Her sister has also been very successful as she is currently the managing director of an American software company in Ho Chi Minh City.

Do and her sister now refer to him as Bác Steve, an esteemed term of respect that is used to describe an uncle or a father’s eldest brother in Vietnamese.

Throughout his longtime career, Raymer has worked in over 110 countries, and this is the first time anyone has identified themselves in one of his photographs and reached out to him. Connecting with Do and her family has been meaningful to him as he has a deep adoration for Vietnam.

“It’s very important that something happens to you in your 20s, because a lot of times it directs your career, and it really influences the direction of your life. For me, it was going to Vietnam and to Southeast Asia and I have continued to go back there 24 times,” said Raymer.

When Raymer was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he took the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the artillery in the Army on graduation day in 1967 in Madison. In January 1968, he was sent to Vietnam serving three years in the Army.

“I feel like I left a part of young Steve Raymer in Vietnam. Despite the war and the killing and the lying, because I did work for six months in the press operations, it was the most beautiful country I had ever seen. I’d never seen a country so beautiful, and I still feel that way. It’s my favorite country for lots of reasons. Part of it is the beauty and the beauty of the people too,” said Raymer.

The relationship Raymer has forged with Do’s family in a short amount of time has healed some old wounds of losing many friends and classmates in the Vietnam War. Furthermore, being able to witness the U.S. work towards allyship and mending its sordid past with Vietnam over the past few decades has also been meaningful.

“We can’t change history, but we can work towards reconciliation.”

Although Raymer had thought he was officially done with teaching, Do and her family have been encouraging him to teach at Fullbright University Vietnam which would be a full circle moment for Raymer as he had a Fullbright scholarship in 2000. Raymer is looking forward to the new opportunities the future holds and continuing to connect with Do.