“MY NAME IS MIMOSA,” the sign says on the exhibit entry. It was her nursery name. A name given to her as an orphan by those who cared for her at To Am nursery in Saigon. A mimosa is a plant that is native to Vietnam. It protectively closes inward when touched, but reopens when it is safe. It is the title of Devaki Murch’s exhibit, which shares her journey through archives to reconstruct her origin story.
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From the beginning, Devaki’s life was marked by sharp decisions from the universe: To be born or not. To be picked up and brought to an orphanage or not. To be matched to a family, to survive a plane crash, to be given an opportunity to change people’s lives through archives…or not.
Her mother remembers the moment she picked her new daughter up at the Presidio in San Francisco after the plane crash, “They put this little baby in my arms. She put her arms around my neck. She didn’t cry. She didn’t let go. I said, ‘I’m going to take care of you the rest of your life.’
That moment, full of love and commitment, set the tone for the rest of her life. Devaki grew up on Kauai, a diverse, open, and loving paradise. Her cousin remembers it as “an idyllic setting… running free, climbing trees, collecting eggs, riding bikes.”
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Adoption was never a secret. “I was a local-looking kid with haole parents. But no one ever questions hapa-haole kids.” Her childhood was full of wonder and security. The fact that her history was meager never mattered because she had everything that she needed.
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For her entire life, Devaki never focused on her origin story as an identifying factor. She talked about it openly, but didn’t really dwell on it. It was her past, but it was sort of just there.” What others noticed instead was her intensity. Her ability to enter any project fully, sometimes ferociously. “She dove in headfirst,” Karen says. “She brings so much liveliness and excitement to anything. Sometimes you’re like, ‘Take a breath,’ but that energy is her gift.”
In the outdoor industry, Devaki became known as someone who could hold chaos without flinching. Rich Hill, a longtime colleague, describes her as unforgettable: “Somebody really gives a shit here. You can feel it. She doesn’t do things the standard way. She studies deeply, but she doesn’t announce it. She just says, ‘This is the right thing to do.’ When things hit the fan, there was only one thing to do. Move forward, make it happen, cry later. Rules are guidelines, sometimes need to be adhered to for legal reasons, but for the most part, every element of what she does is deliberate and with intention - and very often it is a rather wild idea. Rich says. “You have to let her go.”
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Linda Boris remembers the moment Devaki told her about the thirty-three boxes of records kept by Sister Mary Nelle Gage, the last remaining documents from Friends For All Children, personal correspondence, clippings, film reels, passenger manifests, bus lists, nursery lists, records and photographs. . “I was so excited,” Linda says. “I’m a records person. I thought, this is a treasure trove.” She began transcribing late at night, page by page. “These aren’t just data,” she says. “These are real people. ”One of those names was Devaki’s.“I was the first one to show her a piece of paper with her name on it,” Linda recalls. “It was public record. Anyone could find it. But it was the first time she’d seen it.”
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For Linda, it was ordinary research. For Devaki, it was crazy. Seeing her name on an actual list put her for the first time, in that time and place, that time was as a survivor of the C-5A plane crash. The gravity of seeing her name on a list, then more lists made her existence before her adoption real. It was her life. Slowly she began to understand how THIS was what was not missing, it was the facts and timelines that led up to where she is now in her life. She knew that if this was so important to her, a person who was not looking for her past. What could it mean to others? Karen Daly saw what followed as inevitable. “No one else could have done what she’s doing,” she says. “Who else would go into a nun’s basement and just… start?
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This is her life mission now - to create an archival collection that is accessible, protected, and preserved. In order to do that, she knew she had to understand the process of creating an archival collection. She knew that there was more to the files in the collection. She realized that without context, the files mean nothing. They are just lists. Devaki began to attend conferences to further her archival education. She went to the Texas Tech University Vietnam Conference, and that week changed her. She learned about a history that she had never been exposed to. It was a history of her people, her culture, her past. It was the history of Vietnam.
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She had never known what ARVN was, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. She never heard, in first person, the accounts of the years after the US left Vietnam from the ARVN soldiers. She had never met so many Vietnamese people.
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Growing up in Hawaii, she was enveloped in a diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander Community, but not many Vietnamese. She did not see herself in the Vietnamese communities that she had interacted with. Her only knowledge of Vietnam was the 80’s conflict movies. The US history class presented an overview with a focus on the war and conflict. It was never about the people, the culture, or the lives behind the events and the timelines.
Shannon Walton, one of her closest friends, sees how deeply personal that process is. “Devaki is a very complicated human,” she says gently. “She has a fast, fast mind and a huge heart. What I see is how her brain and her heart work together. I can trace how she gets from an idea that looks wild to something that’s actually gold.” Shannon also names the cost: “She’s still learning how to be generous in a way that doesn’t hurt her.
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This introduction to a new part of an adoptee’s life is not something Devaki takes lightly. There is so much more to the process than organizing and inventorying the archives. What started as a seemingly straightforward project has morphed into a multi-faceted, magically entangled ball of invisible threads that has gained incredible momentum. (Visualize that!)
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This project has evolved into a calling. “It is something that I was missing,” Devaki states. “There is so much more to a file delivery than the paperwork. She has developed what she calls the Love Ethic Archive Practice. A methodology that puts people first in trauma-informed archive processes. It integrates bell hooks’ Love Ethics into every interaction she has with the collection and with the people it touches. This quest has been given. “I have no desire to find my first family. I am learning, by no choice of my own, that my past has been looking for me. For now, it’s in the paperwork and connections, but beyond that, who knows?”