He’s Gazing Ahead After a Long Trip : Journey: Linh Le, Los Amigos cross-country runner who left Vietnam 10 years ago, would rather discuss his sport than his path to the U.S.

It is about 30 minutes to race time, and Linh Le, a junior at Los Amigos High School, is entertaining his teammates near the starting line at Mile Square Park. Le, the team’s best runner, also is quick with a joke or an animated expression, whatever it takes to keep his team loose.

On this day, Le seems especially animated around his friends, though that may have something to do with the presence of a newspaper photographer standing to the side, taking his picture.

For a boy who becomes painfully shy around strangers--so much so that he actually runs away to avoid an approaching reporter--Le has little trouble being himself in the camera’s eye.

“I want to be a movie star,” says Le, 16. “I figure in running, if you look good, you might get into a commercial, maybe get to say ‘I’m going to Disneyland’ or something like that.

“I like to get in front of people. It makes you nervous, but it’s a challenge. It builds confidence, I think.”

If anyone could be better blessed with confidence, it would be Le. As a runner, he is talented--he won the aforementioned race by nearly a minute--and rates among the county’s best.

Suggest that to Le, though, and his eyes open wide in disbelief.

“Why are you doing this story on me? There are so many better runners,” he said.

Le, who plans to study theater arts in college, is a natural actor, earning the highest grade in his first-year drama class, said his teacher, George Taylorson.

“This kid has got some tremendous natural talent,” Taylorson said. “He can really get into the role. He leaves himself and becomes another person. That’s extremely difficult for a high school kid. Sitting in class, you hardly know he’s there. But get him up on stage, and he comes alive.”

As the focus of a lunch-time interview, however, Le is obviously uncomfortable. Just trying to make eye contact with him is a challenge.

Especially when the subject is of his family’s homeland, Vietnam.

“My parents say we’re lucky to be here, so do your best, get a job, support your family,” Le said. “They say in Vietnam they had it real bad. They never tell me why. They just don’t want to think about it.”

Le, who was 6 when his family fled the country 10 years ago, says he was too young to remember the details of the escape.

“It’s like a dream to me,” he said. “I can see it, but it’s like it didn’t really happen.”

According to Linh’s 19-year-old brother, Phuong (Philip) Le, the eldest of Linh’s five siblings, the Le family arrived in the United States on July 11, 1979, nearly eight months after fleeing the communist regime in Vietnam.

Like hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees before them, the Le family had to sell its home, a three-bedroom brick house in Saigon, a farm and livestock to afford the approximately $2,000 in gold it took to leave the country.

After selling their possessions, the family moved into a small hotel at Vung Tau, the port in which they would escape. After weeks of waiting, their turn came. At midnight, they crept to the dock and, along with friends and relatives, piled into two small fishing boats, 34 people in one, 29 in the other.

For seven days, the two boats chugged through heavy, sometimes violent storms in the South China Sea, trying to find Malaysia, where they hoped to find refuge.

But after the second day, the boats became separated by storm. For a long time, the families wondered if they’d ever see each other again, but on the fourth day, somehow the boats were rejoined.

The next day, with food, water and fuel nearly gone, they came upon a manned oil platform, which flew flags of many nations.

“At first, they didn’t want to let us in; they didn’t want to help us,” Philip said. But after some of the Vietnamese dived from the boats and started climbing the oil rig’s ladders, begging for help, they relented.

Finally, the Le family landed on a tiny island off the Malaysian peninsula, where they stayed eight months before being granted entry to the United States. There, relatives living throughout Orange County awaited and helped them get started.

The entire Le family--father Luong, mother Hoa, Philip, Chau, 18, Linh, Karen, 13, Linda, 7, and Johnny, 6--currently share a four-bedroom home in Westminster. They moved there from Fountain Valley last year.

At home, the Le family speaks mostly Vietnamese, enjoys traditional foods and discusses the current situation in Vietnam. “We talk about it a lot,” Karen said. “My father’s really concerned. It’s really hard right now; there’s no food and a lot of people are starving to death.”

Vietnam is not a subject Linh wishes to discuss. For him, running, with all its sidetracks, is the favored topic.

Asked whether he knew of any other Vietnamese runners of his ability, Linh shrugged and said:

“Not many Vietnamese people get into sport. They don’t have spirit. They don’t understand scholarships. My parents don’t. They say there’s too many Americans who are bigger and stronger, that I won’t make it to the Olympics.

“My parents are afraid I’ll hurt myself running. When I’m tired they say ‘Don’t try any harder.’ I tell them, you can’t get hurt, but they don’t believe me.”

This summer, Linh, who has been racing on and off since the sixth grade, attended a weeklong running camp for the first time. There, he said, a whole new world opened up for him.

“I learned so many things,” he said. “All the small stuff: sit-ups, push-ups, eating right, goal-setting . . . All those things can make a difference.”

Bill Sumner, the camp’s director, said the runners were encouraged to take notes during the camp’s mini-clinics, but Linh was one of a few who did so religiously.

“I did bed checks at night,” Sumner said. “And he’d have pages of notes with him.”

But when pressed on more serious subjects, namely his homeland, Linh speaks with a raised voice that soon begins to tremble.

“The stuff my family tells me, it’s sad stuff, bad stuff,” he said. “Sometimes I’m curious, but that’s because I don’t even know what’s going on. I mean what are we doing here? Why did North Vietnam come into South Vietnam? Why can’t it be one country?”

Had these words been spoken in drama class, Linh no doubt would have earned high marks once again. But they were spoken with sincerity . . . and reality. A reality from which Linh Le cannot run, or leave behind on stage.