At 9:00 p.m. on November 29, 2004, Tu Du hospital received a pregnant woman with signs of giving birth. The pregnant woman was urgently transferred to the obstetrics department and half an hour later, despite being premature, a 2.1 kg boy was born. That pregnant woman’s name is Pham Thu Dung. The baby was named Quang Sang, taking his mother’s last name.

After giving birth, Dung decided not to look at the baby’s face, which was fateful in the future lives of Pham Quang Sang or Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt. Because just 2 days later, Dung escaped from the hospital. At that time, he still owed hospital fees because he had no money.

Pham Quang Sang, the name came from a sudden thought of his mother, related to the short story The Ivory Comb by writer Nguyen Quang Sang, which Dung was very moved to read when he was a child. A few days after being born, Pham Quang Sang was taken to the Tam Binh Orphanage Center.

Before 9 p.m., Pham Thu Dung was still on drugs. She had severe stomach pain but did not think she was in labor. To reduce the pain, Dung asked her friend to give her another dose, but it still did not subside and she decided to go to the hospital. Pham Thu Dung’s life before and after the Pham Quang Sang incident was all related to a cruel thread: Drugs.

A fallen life

Dung still remembers the days of partying at some famous nightclubs in Saigon nearly 15 years ago. When I was 18 years old (1995), when I went to My Man or Thai Son dance hall, almost everyone knew Dung and was extremely disruptive. Dance halls all night long, alcohol, white goods, daily fights, fighting gangsters… Whenever you enter the dance floor and see someone looking shocked, Dung will immediately attack you without thinking. She beat her so much that when the security guard saw her face, he had to beg, “Please don’t do any more tricks tonight.”

The Brangelina family always has each other

Her comrades-in-arms are also full of blood, people from District 4. Dung is famous for fighting to make money, meaning that after the fight, the next day, he forces the victim to go to a coffee shop on Le Thanh Ton Street to “punish him”. The whole group of young players, about 20 or so, did not go home, spent money to rent a house on Le Van Sy street, gathered there during the day, and at night each went their own way. Some go to work at discos, some go out and almost all of them are “white”. Many of Dung’s friends died from drug overdose, some died from HIV.

At the age of 19, she started to indulge in drugs and became addicted. Dung said, at that time, her friends kept giving them to her but she refused and then they kept giving them, saying “try it and your life will be different, in the end my life will be really different”. At that age, Thu Dung was also quite impulsive. If anyone encouraged her, she would do it right away.

At that time, Dung’s family was quite wealthy thanks to his father being an ocean ship captain. But Dung was so famous that he couldn’t get any money back. To get money (because at this time Dung’s parents decided to “financially embargo”), Dung pawned the car and sent the papers home to redeem it. Dung remembers one time her father came home from a business trip but couldn’t find the locker key, so he asked her to go to the market to find her mother to bring the key back. Dung found her mother and took the key, but before bringing it home, she turned to the line to make her own “plot” key. So later on, she had money quite easily, sometimes taking money, sometimes cutting gold to sell. Or there were times when she borrowed money, and when she couldn’t repay it, the creditor kept coming to the house and her mother had to pay, and she became used to it. Dung recalls that she probably destroyed half of her parents’ fortune and later when her parents’ business failed, the family situation fell into real difficulties.

Pham Thu Dung at that time was very different from Pham Thu Dung at the age of 19 and before. She is the most beloved child in the family. When she was young, she studied well. She studied at Au Duong Lan (District 8) for primary and secondary school, and at Le Quy Don school for high school. In grade 12, she took the graduation exam and scored more than 38 points in 4 subjects. For 9 years, Dung has been a good student. When I was in 10th grade, I was riding a bicycle and broke my leg, so my dad immediately bought me an Astrea. At that time, only rich kids were allowed to do that. Perhaps because she was so happy, she spoiled early.

Dung started to fall when she was in 11th grade. At that time, her father was always on business trips, and only her mother was at home. Dung often lied to her mother that she was going to school, but in reality she was going out, going from one dance club to another, arriving at home at exactly 10:30 p.m. Someone saw it and reported it to their family, but Dung’s family did not believe it. Just like that, after graduating, Dung “exploded”…

Pax Thien with mother Angelina Jolie

Dung still remembers, on March 25, 1998, when her mother took her to rehab at Binh Trieu Center (Dung was 21 years old that year), her father knew the truth. In the evening, he sat on a chair in the living room, and cried. Afterwards, he went to the altar to burn incense for his grandfather and stood crying again. At that time, Dung promised herself that she would quit. She told her father, “Please take me to quit, I can’t live like that anymore.” But after 3 months, when she returned, she relapsed, then quit and relapsed again. Dung can’t remember how many times she went to rehab, finished rehab, and became addicted again. Thinking back now, Dung said that her life had no destination, it was her fault, she ruined her future.

Dung said she idolizes her father. It was his father who guided his siblings in the family, but Dung was the child who deviated. If she had followed the right path, her life might have been different. And if her first love had gone well, perhaps her fate would have been different. First love broke down, pushing the young girl into a feeling of revenge in life. Dung gathered at dance halls and white goods as a way to forget. The men she comes to are just for money, they don’t need love.

Later, when he met Quang Sang’s biological father, it was partly because of money. At that time, Dung was a garment worker at a company in Lai Thieu (Binh Duong). This man was her team leader at that time and had a wife and children. It seemed like there was friction between the two, so in 2004 Dung decided to break up and stop working. At that time, she did not know she was pregnant. And then the pregnancy grew bigger, the baby’s father did not know and Dung also decided not to say. She also intended to have an abortion, but felt sorry for the innocent baby, so she decided to keep it.

At that time, Dung had quit drugs, but when she found out she was pregnant, she felt bored, her life was deadlocked, she had no love, and she was unemployed, so she got hooked again. As the child grew in her belly, Dung did not even think about going to the doctor, she just needed money to support her addiction. “At that time I was a very different person, irresponsible towards myself and my children, there was nothing that could be defended,” Dung recalled.

After the night of November 29, 2004

After that night, Dung’s friend informed her biological sister and two days later, the two sisters escaped from the hospital. “I can’t raise my child like that. I thought that if I raised it, it would have no future. It would be better to do so, maybe it would have a better future. When I made his birth certificate, I don’t understand why I gave him his real name and his real address, because if I had done it differently, no one would have known… Now that I think back, there was something going on at that time. urged me to tell the truth, to do something sincere, even if it was very small, for my child. At that time, I couldn’t think of anything else. I thought I would leave him at the hospital and never come back to him. But honestly, my heart hurts.”

At that time, Dung’s family was very poor, the family moved from District 8 to Thu Duc. Taking Dung home, no one knew she had just given birth. Her sister only said she had a fever and needed to go to her room to rest. Her father didn’t know anything “because it’s so difficult for him, if he knew this truth he would be shocked”. It wasn’t until later when people from the Tam Binh Center came to the house to look for Dung’s father that Dung’s father knew…

Change your life

When a group of foreign journalists came to Dung’s house in 2007 (later there was an article about her getting her child back published in News Of The World), Dung was feverish and didn’t know anything. In fact, Dung doesn’t care. She recalled the time before, on the 28th of Tet (2006), “Uncle Hao (Deputy Director of Tam Binh Center), accompanied by a person from the Women’s Union and the area police, stopped by the house to talk to my father (Dung in the room) and they asked my father to sign a paper for me (ie Pham Quang Sang). Then I asked Dad why he didn’t let the center handle it but he had to sign. He said, there was a foreign family that adopted Sang and they required all the documents. At that time, my father was very happy to hear that a foreign family adopted Sang. I myself, too”.

Pax Thien, 7 years old, had a relaxing summer afternoon playing on the beach in Malibu, California.

And at that moment, Dung thought he had to change. In mid-2007 Dung went to Nha Trang determined to quit. She self-medicated at her inn. When she was tired, she took medicine, and when she was tired, she went to the beach to bathe. She promised herself that she had to live differently, to live “so that one day if my child comes back to find me, I will stand up straight and not look down.”

It was not until 2009 that Pham Thu Dung learned about Pax Thien. That was when her grandmother passed away, she returned to Saigon and was told by her brother. “I went home and asked, and finally my parents told me everything. But at that time, there were many false articles written about me. They wrote that I wanted this and that child. I was very upset when I read it.”

“So if you knew about the incident at the right time when Angelina Jolie adopted Pax Thien, would you have asked for money or done anything?” Dung replied: “If I do that, it’s like selling my child a second time, it’s very cruel. I never had the concept of meeting Jolie to say: how much money do you have to give me to build a life? I just hope Sang is happy, has a good life, better than being with me, that’s all.”

Dung thinks her life is like that, but Pax Thien’s happiness in the end is like a compensation. “My life’s unhappiness is because of me, that vicious circle that I wanted to escape but couldn’t. Turns out maybe that’s a compensation rule, my child will be happier than me, he deserves it. If I met Jolie, I probably wouldn’t know what to say, but in my heart I believe she is a very wonderful woman and I thank her for everything. I read many articles saying that Jolie adopted a child to seek more fame, but I believe that is not the case, Jolie adopted a child because of her heart. I understand that and respect Jolie for that. I am an irresponsible mother.”