231 - Kirk Van Tran - Adoptee + Director of "Intersections"

Kirk is the Director and Executive Producer for the award winning documentary film series, "Intersections". In 2017, on a whim, Kirk submitted to a DNA test simply to determine his full ethnicity and maybe connect with a distant biological relative. The results led Kirk to discover that his birth mother and birth father were indeed alive and well and that he had brothers and sisters that he didn’t know existed. Kirk also discovered that his birth mother had been searching for him for over 40 years.

In the summer of 1969, during the peak of the Vietnam War, Kirk (Trần Văn Kirk) was born in DaNang, Vietnam as Tran Van Hung of a Vietnamese mother and an American Serviceman. Immediately after being born, Kirk was forcibly taken from his mother and dropped off at the Sacred Heart Orphanage in DaNang by his uncle on the orders of his Vietnamese Grandfather, who felt shame from his teenage daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy by an American.

When he was taken to the orphanage, his name was changed to Nguyen Viet Hung so that his mother wouldn’t be able to find him. In 1971, he was adopted by a US Army Major that was serving in the Vietnam War and became a naturalized US citizen in 1972.