Canh Oxelson
Ambassador
USA
Born Tran Van Canh in 1971, Canh Oxelson spent the first ten months of his life at the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Da Nang, Vietnam, before being adopted by the Oxelson family and raised in a small farming community in Central California. The middle of three children, Canh grew up surrounded by the love and support of his parents and sisters while navigating the complexities of being an adoptee who was half-Vietnamese and half-Black.
An accomplished competitive swimmer as a teenager, Canh dreamed of representing the United States in the Olympics. Behind that ambition was another, more personal hope: perhaps if he won a gold medal, his biological parents would see him on television and find their way back into his life.
In 1998, Canh returned to Vietnam for the first time with his adoptive family. At Sacred Heart, they met the nuns who had cared for him and saw the orphanage’s historical registry, where his original name appeared among those of hundreds of other children adopted from Sacred Heart. The experience transformed Canh’s relationship with his own story and strengthened his desire to find his biological family.
That search would take decades. Canh took his first DNA test in 2011, eventually connecting with a distant relative who was also a biracial adoptee from Vietnam. Another DNA test in 2020 led him to a biological half-sister and nieces and nephews who had emigrated from Vietnam and settled in the Midwest. After two years of conversations and careful planning, Canh returned to Da Nang in January 2023 and met his birth mother for the first time.
Decades after imagining that his biological parents might someday see him and recognize their child, Canh found himself sitting across from his birth mother and looking into her eyes. He was finally able to hear her story and thank her for the difficult decision she had made more than fifty years earlier to place him at Sacred Heart. The reunion gave Canh something he had wanted since childhood: a deeper understanding of where—and from whom—he came.
Today, Canh helps lead an independent school in New York City and lives just north of the city with his family. As an Ambassador for Con Tìm Mẹ, he hopes his experience can help adoptees and birth families feel less alone in their own searches. He is honored to support an organization helping Vietnamese families separated by adoption find one another, discover pieces of their shared histories, and, when possible, begin writing the next chapter together.
