Pressing a Dream to Publish in Vietnamese : Books: An immigrant fulfills a dream by building a publishing company that informs and entertains his countrymen in their native language.

Born in a refugee’s basement, a desktop publishing operation here has become the largest purveyor of Vietnamese-language books outside Vietnam.

Using two rickety presses and low-tech collating and book-binding machines, the Xuan Thu press has since 1976 been churning out everything from ancient Vietnamese classics to modern kung fu novels--the memoirs of generals and postwar prisoners, epic romances and English textbooks, cookbooks, dictionaries and children’s books.

Xuan Thu hawks more than 1,000 titles through a catalogue mailed to 22,000 Vietnamese readers scattered from Northern California to New Jersey and from Paris to Melbourne, Australia. Profits are puny, however. A first edition typically consists of 500 copies. Anything over 2,000 copies counts as a bestseller.

But Xuan Thu, and more than a dozen even smaller Vietnamese publishers in Orange County, San Jose, Washington, Toronto, Paris and Sydney, Australia, are virtually the last literary resort for more than 1 million Vietnamese who have left their homeland since 1975.

Vietnamese-language books are difficult to come by. Anti-communist refugees here allege that after 1975, many books were confiscated, banned or censored by the Hanoi regime. Restrictions on publishing have been relaxed under doi moi , the recent policy of liberalization that is Vietnam’s answer to glasnost, but publishers here say many are still laced with propaganda.

“Even in the love stories, they get some communism in there, so it’s not acceptable to the community here,” said Xuan Thu’s owner, Pham. “Over there, they cannot even kiss. They just hold hands in front of a billboard of some leader.”

Technically, books published in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam may not be imported to the United States. However, several pro-Hanoi bookstores in Montreal do carry them and will ship them to Vietnamese-American readers.

Still, it is the writers who have left the country who are producing the most vibrant works, said Do Dinh Tuan, who owns a Westminster bookstore and has published 12 new works since 1984 under the Van Khoa label.

“Literature ceased to exist when the communists took over,” Tuan said. “They had so many rules and restrictions that nobody could continue to write. Only refugees can write the truth,” he claims.

Though these new works are anything but apolitical--the horrors of war, communism, prison camps and Thai pirates are central themes--Xuan Thu Pham says he tries hard to steer clear of politics.

An exceedingly shy man, he calls himself a “printer,” not a publisher. He keeps his name out of print, and uses a post office box for his business, which is registered under a different name. He agreed to be interviewed on condition that he be identified only by one of his three names, a common one in Vietnamese. He declined to be photographed.

Such precautions are perhaps not unreasonable. In California since 1987, two Vietnamese-American newspaper publishers have been hit by arson, one of which was a fatal fire, and two internationally known authors were attacked and seriously injured.

Pham published the novels of one of the victims. Long Vu, who lives in Paris, had written 20 books as well as columns critical of both the former South Vietnamese and the current communist governments. He was severely beaten during a trip to Westminster’s Little Saigon last year. He was left partially paralyzed and brain-damaged, and will never write again, said Pham.

Right-wing Vietnamese groups were suspected in Vu’s beating and in several other attacks. “I don’t have any problems with papers and machines and books,” Pham said. “I enjoy having books around me. With people, you have problems.”

Pham said his mission is to preserve his country’s literature and to remind fellow refugees of the pleasures and comforts of their native tongue.

It is an unlikely calling for a man who began his career writing tax laws in the South Vietnamese Ministry of Finance, became a soldier, and, after fleeing South Vietnam aboard a U.S. helicopter in 1975, did stints as a dishwasher, an assistant cook and the manager of a McDonald’s.

It was while he was working as a janitor in Lancaster, Pa., that he confided his publishing dreams to a friend, a banker from an Amish family.

“I had no money, no credit, no collateral, nothing,” Pham said. “He lent me $25,000. It was amazing.”

In 1978, Pham and his wife installed a simple press in their basement in Lancaster. The first book they published was a love story--the only book they had brought with them when they fled Vietnam. It took them two months to print 300 copies.

They sold it in markets in Philadelphia and Washington, but it did not do well. Nor did their second attempt.

“After three years, I still couldn’t sell enough books to get money to buy paper, so I wanted to quit,” Pham said. “But I still owed about $18,000 to the bank so I couldn’t quit. . . . I tried to sell the press but I couldn’t sell it. So I had to hang on.”

Pham now believes that in the early years, Vietnamese refugees were too preoccupied with finding jobs, homes and lost relatives to have time to read, let alone to tackle the weighty works he was printing. And his customers were isolated in tiny communities throughout the United States, Europe and Australia.

While Pham was having trouble finding readers, writers could not find him.

Ngoc Ngan Nguyen, a Toronto-based novelist who wrote his first book in a Malaysian refugee camp, now writes for Xuan Thu and at least six other publishers.

But when he first arrived in 1979, Nguyen said, “I wanted to get in touch with a Vietnamese publishing company, and there weren’t any. So I couldn’t get my book published. And I was so depressed.”

Nguyen decided to learn to write in English instead. His memoirs, “The Will of Heaven,” were published by E.P. Dutton in 1982. He has since published 13 more books in Vietnamese, published by Xuan Thu, Van Khoa and a half-dozen other companies. And he has achieved star status by selling 5,000 copies apiece.

For Xuan Thu, the big break came in 1981. By this time, a national Vietnamese magazine had started, and Pham placed an ad. Then a friend suggested that after long, hard days working two jobs, his immigrant clientele might appreciate some lighter reading. Pham printed a kung fu novel. It sold 500 copies--a relative smash.

In 1983, Pham learned that Houston was sprouting a large Vietnamese community, and moved his business there. When the economy soured, he decided that Orange County had become the real center of overseas Vietnamese culture. Besides, he liked the weather.

Xuan Thu opened its doors in a vastly overcrowded warehouse in the middle of a strawberry field in 1985. It now has seven employees, including Pham, and annual sales of more than $150,000 to mail-order customers, about 100 bookstores worldwide and libraries, Pham said.

The majority of its titles are reprints of works published in old Saigon, many of them borrowed from the Asian Library at Cornell University. Pham painstakingly reproduces the original art and type from these tattered volumes.

“Mostly, we use the same covers, because our people, they live with their memories,” he explained.

Last week, Xuan Thu’s two presses were clacking out copies of what may be a Vietnamese “Papillion.” It is the story of former South Vietnamese air force pilot Ly Tong, who claimed to have escaped from three communist prisons, then walked, swam, hitchhiked, bicycled and rode trains and buses a total of 1,560 miles. He finally arrived at the door of the U.S. Embassy in Singapore in 1983.

His exploits were chronicled in the Reader’s Digest, but Xuan Thu has secured Tong’s Vietnamese manuscript--all 600 pages.

“This one, we print 1,000 copies,” said Pham. “I know it will sell. . . .” He plans an oversized paperback edition that will sell for $15 or $16.

Such successes, however, finance editions of children’s books. These invariably lose money, Pham said, but he hopes they will keep Vietnamese youngsters from forgetting their ancestral tongue.

Later this spring, Xuan Thu plans to release the autobiography of former Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai, now 76 and living in Paris.

“Vietnamese never knew about his life,” Pham explained. “They thought he was just a puppet. But in this book, we see that he fought a lot for the rights of the people.

“That’s why the French kicked him out.”