THE NEW AMERICANS : AMERICA: A CONFLICT OF IMAGES AND REALITIES : HOA VAN NGUYEN, from Hue, South 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.”?

The life of Hoa Van Nguyen is the stuff of an epic tale tinged with uniquely modern American overtones. Where many immigrants come to enjoy a ceremonial recognition of one sort or another once they pass citizenship requirements, Hoa has experienced the American phenomenon of being discovered by that great inexhaustible media behemoth that sucks up lives and events and in its wake litters the landscape with the excreta of used-up images.

Hoa (pronounced Hwa), 34, was born in Hue, South Vietnam, one of a family of 10 children. His father worked in a farming commune. Hoa said he didn’t know much about the United States before he joined the South Vietnamese Army and was taught English by U.S. combat-training officials. He recalled first hearing recordings of the Beatles in 1965, then American groups that ranged from the Carpenters to Chicago.

“I liked Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood movies,” he said. “All the Vietnamese did, because they wanted freedom so much; in those movies they saw you could live anywhere, anytime.”

Hoa is not uncritical of all American action movies. He takes bitter exception to “Platoon,” having fought 3 1/2 years as a combat infantry lieutenant. “ ‘Platoon’ is not real,” he said. “They said bad things. We never killed people or kicked people or set fire to villages.”

Hoa was captured by communist forces in January, 1975, and sent near the Laotian border to Lao Bao. “A lot of American Marines know about that place,” he said gravely. “They lost a lot of men.”

“The communists wanted to wash my brain,” he said. “We weren’t allowed to talk about anything other than communism. Then we were sent out to the fields to do very, very hard work. Sometimes they beat and torture us. If the soldiers saw you pick up something to eat, they beat you more. But we didn’t care. We were starving.”

When the Chinese Army began rumbling along the northern border, Hoa was sent south to a camp at Binh Dien, an area that he knew well as a youth. Sent out one day to dig up a phoenix tree in honor of the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, he fled into the woods and made his way to Saigon, from which he attempted to escape by boat with a group of others (all told he’d been imprisoned 4 1/2 years).

When a police launch fired on them, he dived into the river, made his way to the shore, and hid in a residential garden. The family took him in. Eventually he fell in love with their daughter Kim. They were married and once again he plotted to escape the country by boat.

For three days they sailed without drinking water (“I thought the children would die”) when he spied a bottle floating in the water. It had been dropped in off Hawaii four years earlier by a Whittier couple and contained a note and a $1 bill.

Nearly three years went by in Thai and Indonesian refugee camps before Hoa, his wife and child made their way to freedom. After a great deal of correspondence, the California couple agreed to sponsor them.

Hoa and his family live in a small duplex that looks out on busy Cypress Street in Mount Washington, adjacent to a grocery store that has bars on its windows. It’s that kind of neighborhood.

Framed photos on the wall include the sponsoring couple, who look around retirement age, meeting Hoa and family at Los Angeles International Airport. A letter from President and Mrs. Reagan extends “their warmest wishes during the holiday season and throughout the coming year in 1985.” A class photo of Swanson Elementary School children in Muncie, Ind. They had heard of Hoa’s story from an article in People magazine, collected money for his family and wrote to suggest a name for Hoa’s daughter, Dorothy.

Hoa had arrived in more ways than one.

“I signed two contracts with William Morris Agency to do my story. I received one check for $2,500 and another for $180; the producer found me a job in Commerce, but I didn’t have a car. Now I work for Ren Mar Studios at Cahuenga and Santa Monica. I clean machines, roll cable, clean sets, help with carpentry.”

A single overhead light burned in the front room all day long. Hoa’s wife padded quietly between the kitchen and the bedroom, and the children played freely through the house. A friend’s teen-age son and Hoa’s 18-year-old brother, Cuong, moved with sylph-like silence in from the street to a side room, where they conferred quietly on esoteric matters before slipping out again. Hoa confessed to feeling old at 34, and his face is indeed worn, but his body has a slender, almost feminine grace. When he sits, it assumes a deep repose, folding in on itself neatly like a pocketknife.

“When we studied American culture in high school, I knew it would be important to know how to work with machines,” he said. “We were taught America was top economic force in the world. It had real freedom. I can’t find the words to say how happy I feel to be here, to be free. I watch the news on TV and see what happens in the rest of the world. (Hoa is also in awe of the speed with which national and international news stories are broken.) I like to watch the cartoons, too--they help me learn English.

“My people are very sad to lose the war. We lost our world. A lot of people enjoy to watch Chuck Norris in ‘Missing in Action.’ I do too. Chuck Norris and his people fight in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. Many more prisoners there are waiting for liberation.

“My wife and I worry about our children growing up. The high school students have too much freedom. They don’t obey their parents.”

Hoa sees that tension as more crucial than any involving assimilation. “The old people want to keep the Vietnamese culture, but the young want to enjoy the American way. They don’t think the old can go into the future.”

On weekends, the family experiments with American food, hamburgers on Saturday, steak on Sunday.

As for his whirlwind courtship with celebrity, he revealed no grudges or regrets. “It’s not easy to make a movie,” he said. “My story is very the same as ‘The Killing Fields,’ but I don’t have enough American people in my life in Vietnam.”

He nodded quietly, as if to say that he understood that a movie couldn’t be about a life if it wasn’t first about a sale. But he said nothing. He’s seen worse.