THE NEW AMERICANS : AMERICA: A CONFLICT OF IMAGES AND REALITIES : LOC NAM NGUYEN, refugee director, from Vietnam

Whether through natural cataclysm, pestilence or genocide, the chronicle of history is rife with human dislocation. The Old World offered its uprooted the daunting spectre of the unknown. The new still offers America.

At 18, Dan Nadler of Romania is quietly flourishing in the heady atmosphere of free speech and other discoveries in his government and civics classes at El Rancho High School in Santa Fe Springs, and sensing as well the subtle distance his education is creating between himself and his parents, who still feel the grim constraint of Iron Curtain memories.

Marcelo Filardi, a 25-year-old Brazilian musician, is amazed at how eagerly American pop musicians jump at the chance to make a buck and re-tool their talents to the latest commercial blueprint; he claims that comparable musicians in Brazil are disdainful of get-rich-quick motives--or at least their outward show.

They are two of a number of people interviewed by Calendar who have come to the United States within the past two years and therefore still live in the anxious interregnum between two worlds--the old, with its ancestral universe of landscape, family and friends and the restorative moods of place, and the hard and fast new, whose unfamiliarity is redeemed by the promise of the future.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 625,000 immigrants showed up at our borders in 1986--at least that’s the number who registered themselves. Some came to make money or to get an education. Some got out the back door when a new dictator’s police force came through the front with guns blazing. Some left dead-ended economies, some sifted out of refugee camps.

What many fail to anticipate in their hoped-for freedom is that America is a culture as well as a polity, and that it can often assault old country values. Few know to expect the deep loneliness of being set apart by language and customs, the confusing voracity of the American tempo, the sheer enervating grind of having to make a living, and the endless traffic of media imagery.

In addition to Dan Nadler and his parents and Marcelo Filardi, we spoke to a Vietnamese refugee family whose American deliverance came through a bottled message that had drifted across the Pacific Ocean for years; an Iranian family twice removed from the pleasurable and orderly customs of the past, first by the Ayatollah Khomeini, then by the struggle to make ends meet in the United States; and a Cuban emigre to whom nothing in American culture is seriously suspect except its (to him) naive complacency toward communism--after 18 years in jail as a political prisoner, he’s just happy to be here.

How do they see our culture? Largely as a mirror of a prodigiously exuberant, outgoing, optimistic people, tinged with the portent of moral decay.

A couple of them are leery of the press--what was once a handmaiden of oppression is now impertinently, even dangerously free. All are more or less at sea in the language, whose unfamiliarity and elusiveness seals them off from the full-blown sense of having arrived, of taking part, of being here.

Almost all of them are concerned to one degree or another with the corrosive pressures the American Way puts on family life. They all come from cultures where the support systems of family are virtually sacrosanct. If family was hallowed then, it’s all they have now. Shahin Mohajer was raised in Iran’s tradition of sexual protectiveness toward women. Just what is she to make of her 6-year-old daughter’s report that a strange boy came up to her at school and said “I love you. I want to kiss you.”?

Loc Nam Nguyen tells of his constant struggle trying to counsel immigrant families. A former war correspondent, he’s refugee director at the Catholic Charities, an arm of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles that is contracted by the U.S. State Department to resettle refugees.

Loc is a friendly, youthful-looking 43 whose face often reflects nervous strain and whose body is kept trim by fitful, low-explosive energies. He’s nearly obsessively perturbed by the knowledge that there are tens of thousands of his Vietnamese countrymen languishing in Hong Kong and Thai refugee camps--the lucky ones who escaped despotic butchery or weren’t drowned at sea in overloaded, rickety escape boats.

“A couple from Iran came in here today,” he said wearily one afternoon. “The husband and wife were fighting because he has to work 14 hours a day. I say to them, ‘You want to escape to the Free World? This is what it takes.’ Some people think all they have to do is come here and everything’s taken care of. I tell them, ‘Stick together. It takes time.’

“Refugees are very lonely. They see people here with new cars, good jobs, new lives. I told the Iranian couple that they must stick together for their children’s sake. We sometimes get angry at the media, who don’t always see us as people, as sensitive. Life is feeling. Life is to make people happy. But you must work.

“I think they listened. I hope they listened.”

“Nobody understands the loneliness or the feelings of refugees who come to this country,” Loc Nam said. “The Europeans, who are more Westernized, come here with higher expectations. They feel immediate frustration. The Indochinese come from the worst to the best. They’ve seen the real face of communism. They’ve lived through more risk and danger. When they come here from the Southeast Asian camps, they’re overwhelmed by the freedom.”

One of the poster-sized photos hanging on his office walls on 9th Street, near downtown, shows a small group of people standing on the deck of a small dun-colored, sea-worn boat surrounded by an expanse of sea. The photo has the soupy, faintly globular texture of a poor-quality snapshot that has been overblown. It was taken by a passenger on a larger vessel, the last of 37 ships to pass by the boatload of refugees, two of whom are Loc’s brothers. The only reason it was the 37th and last boat is that its backwash swamped the smaller vessel, and its captain was duty-bound to take the refugees on board.

“The captain took them to Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, but they were turned away everywhere,” Loc said. “Finally it dropped them in Kuwait, where they were arrested as illegal immigrants. They stayed 30 days before I got a letter from my brother. I said, ‘Where’s Kuwait.’ I went to the Kuwait airline office for information. I called Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office. I was frantic for seven days. One night I woke up at 2 in the morning. ‘God damn it, this is America,’ I said. ‘You can do anything in this country.’ I called Kuwait on the telephone and spoke to the U.S. embassy. ‘Indochinese in Kuwait?’ they said. They didn’t know. But Kuwait is like a big small town. They got them out to Greece on an international passport, and I got them here.

“There’s a million stories like this. I spend my vacations in refugee camps in Southeast Asia, trying to give them hope. They’re told, ‘Forget it. It’s over.’

“It’s never over.”