COLUMN ONE : Few Viet Exiles Find U.S.Riches : Refugees have forged an enduring stereotype of economic and intellectual overachievement. But most live in poverty, with significant language and cultural handicaps.

They were generals and peasants, schoolteachers and spies, physicians and fishermen, and they became in America a poignant symbol of the refugee’s will to succeed.

Nearly 600,000 Vietnamese fled to this country to escape the long war that rampaged throughout Southeast Asia, tearing lives and the political order asunder.

A few became millionaires. Many more have earned doctorates and found business success. Their assimilation forged an enduring stereotype of economic and intellectual overachievement.

But, 15 years after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, Vietnamese in the United States are still suffering from the legacy of defeat and the pain of exile.

In fact, a majority of Vietnamese refugees in the United States today live in poverty.

The disparity is glaring in Orange County, home to Little Saigon, the nation’s largest Vietnamese community. Among the 100,000 people who have flocked to the neighborhoods along Bolsa Avenue are wealthy exiles such as former Premier Nguyen Cao Ky--and thousands of refugees on welfare.

“Americans drive by Bolsa Avenue, and it’s so thriving, so prosperous, that that’s their image of Vietnamese refugees. It’s not true,” said Tuong Duy Nguyen, executive director of Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., a social service agency. “Most refugees are still living under the poverty line.”

Vietnamese-Americans of all backgrounds continue to describe themselves as refugees, not immigrants. And many say they are homesick.

“Most of our people have a hidden depression,” said Garden Grove businessman Phong Duc Tran. “We were uprooted suddenly from our country and had to come here. The Koreans, the Japanese, they planned for years to come here; they wanted to come here.

“We didn’t.”

The image of Vietnamese success in America is largely based on one segment of the refugee population--the Westernized, highly educated elite who left South Vietnam just before or shortly after Saigon surrendered.

But most, in fact, arrived after 1978, with significant language, cultural and educational handicaps. Many remain dependent on welfare, stuck in minimum-wage jobs, or consigned to an exploitative underground economy. Last year, refugee unemployment was twice the national average.

The collapse of Saigon came much more quickly than most South Vietnamese dreamed. Sixty-one percent of the 1975 arrivals had less than 24 hours to prepare to leave. Tales of well-connected South Vietnamese scrambling aboard U.S. helicopters in 1975 with suitcases stuffed with gold were probably exaggerated. Though some did take family jewelry or gold, their only portable asset, many more fled with nothing but their clothes.

What the first refugees did bring, however, was education, class and connections. Sociologists quickly discovered that the 130,000 refugees who fled in 1975 tended to be well-to-do (more than 40%, for example, had owned automobiles in Vietnam) and Westernized. Many had studied abroad or had American friends.

Most important, the 1975 arrivals were far better educated than their countrymen. Forty-eight percent had university degrees, whereas less than 1% of the Vietnamese population as a whole did. Three-quarters spoke at least some English.

Armed with these advantages--and an outpouring of sympathy from the American public that has not been sustained--the first Vietnamese adjusted relatively quickly. Though many did stints as janitors and dishwashers, most soon landed middle-class jobs. Men and women worked day and night, shared housing and pooled their earnings. By the early 1980s, federal tax returns show, household income of the 1975 arrivals had equaled the U.S. average. Many of their children were valedictorians.

But such refugees account for only about one-third of the Vietnamese-American population. The other two-thirds have less education, less upward mobility and less hope--characteristics that prompted one scholar to compare them to the permanent American underclass.

The later arrivals tended to be young, rural people who spoke little English and had few skills of value in the West. For example, a survey of Southeast Asians in San Diego County found that the average 1975 arrival was a high school graduate but that the average 1980 arrival had not completed sixth grade.

They had survived not only war, but often prison camp, persecution, genocide, rape by Thai pirates, and the numbing degradation of refugee camps.

“They arrived en masse, overwhelming existing resettlement programs,” said Ruben G. Rumbaut, professor of sociology at San Diego State University. “And they arrived at the worst possible time--during the highest inflation in memory, followed by the worst recession in 50 years.”

The boat people have stayed poorer for longer than the first refugees. In San Diego during the recession of 1983, for example, Rumbaut found that 75% of all Southeast Asian refugees were living below the poverty line, but that only 25% of the Vietnamese who arrived in 1975 were.

Today, 1.2 million Southeast Asians live in the United States. Most statistics tend to lump them as a group, masking important differences. A closer look, however, shows that post-1978 arrivals--and in some cases their children--are not climbing the economic ladder nearly as fast as their predecessors. After a decade in this country, some are still stuck near the bottom rung.

“The majority of the new arrivals don’t speak English very well, that’s for sure, and they don’t have marketable skills,” said Tuong Duy Nguyen, who argues that English and job-training programs are inadequate and geared to produce only short-term results. “Nearly 100% get entry-level jobs, but they have no hope for promotion because they have no skills. . . .”

Contributing to welfare dependency is a rising divorce rate. One Vietnamese social worker estimates that divorces among refugees have tripled, the product of long separations, treacherous shifts in traditional sex roles, and more lenient divorce laws. California welfare officials have also noticed an increase in the number of single-parent refugee households.

To be sure, the later arrivals are slowly improving their incomes. But by the late 1980s they had yet to match the income of the 1975 arrivals.

The gap has sparked subtle tensions within the Vietnamese community.

Over lunch in a chic French-style restaurant in Orange County’s Little Saigon, a proud and educated man from an upper-class background complained that the latest refugees are lazy and abuse American generosity.

“When I left in ‘75, I didn’t know what my future was,” said the man, who now owns a flourishing business and drives a Mercedes-Benz. “I just wanted freedom. And I accepted (sic) to die at sea. But now the Vietnamese who come here, they know they’ll have welfare, they know they’ll have an easy life. . . . They are not prepared to work.”

Others say the new arrivals have simply been worn down by more than 30 years of war, followed by 15 years of poverty and repression.

Quynh N. Nguyen of Lakewood, a former South Vietnamese navy captain who fled in 1975, blamed the communists for what he sees as the latecomers’ tendency toward demoralization and dependency.

“I talk to my friends and relatives who came later,” Nguyen said. “They are exhausted, mentally and physically, and do not have the will to live.”

Recent arrivals are aware of such attitudes and resent them.

“The latecomers, they say, ‘Those who came in ‘75, they stick their nose in the air,’ ” said Christine Nguyet Pham, who arrived in 1989 and is now a caseworker for Orange County Refugee Community Resources Opportunity Project Inc.

But if the 1975 arrivals seem elitist, some of the latecomers, who tend to have less experience of the West, often have wildly unrealistic attitudes about life in America, according to several recent arrivals from Vietnam.

Many denizens of Ho Chi Minh City read letters from rich relatives and dream of joining them in a life of ease, said Tien Tat Chu, a former re-education camp inmate who arrived in Huntington Beach in January. “In Saigon, they say that even the lamppost wants to go to America.”

Vietnamese, accustomed to a slower, more social way of life, are unprepared for the hustle and bustle of American capitalism, said Pham, calling it a “work, work, work machine.”

A growing number of scholars argue that the myth of the miraculous Southeast Asian refugee has made life more difficult for the struggling majority. Such stereotypes imply that those who are not instant successes have only themselves to blame, said Steven J. Gold, assistant professor of sociology at Whittier College, the scholar who compared the plight of the newly arrived refugees to that of the American underclass.

Kristy Tran, a 19-year-old Golden West College student who arrived in 1979, is one of those struggling. When she was 5, her father was arrested by communist soldiers. He never returned. At 10, her mother sent her off by boat with two cousins. Now she studies, works and lives in a rented room so she can save money to send back to Vietnam.

“Sometimes I think I’m weak, that I cannot handle the pressure, that I just want to forget the people in Vietnam and my mom,” she said. “But I have to support them. Fifty dollars here can support my mom and my brother (there) for a month. I send them about $600 a year.”

Most Americans, Tran said, think Vietnamese are rich, and some are jealous.

“Sometimes I go to the gas station, and American guy comes up to me and ask me for a dollar because he thinks I have money,” she said. “Americans only base (their attitudes) on the action of one part of the community and judge all of them.”

To some Americans, including a group of Orange County combat veterans recently interviewed, the Vietnamese refugees are a living symbol of a humiliating military defeat.

Vietnamese-Americans are well aware of such sentiments and often feel wounded. In a 1989 Times Orange County poll of 400 adults, 62% said there is “a lot” or “some” prejudice against Vietnamese.

Rich or poor, refugees are unanimous in noting that America’s welcome has grown cooler of late.

Liem Huu Nguyen, for example, a peasant boy turned successful attorney, is the stuff refugee myths are made of. But he says he might not have done as well had he arrived in America in 1985 instead of 10 years earlier.

Nguyen, born in a tiny village in central Vietnam, was once a skinny boy who went to school hungry. “My friends discovered that I never ate lunch,” he said. “In fact, I never ate breakfast.” When he was 12, friends brought him home to dinner, and he asked them why the soup was so delicious.

“They said it had meat in it,” Nguyen explained.

Nguyen’s youth and peasant background made him atypical of the 1975 arrivals. His English was poor, and he was unschooled in Western ways; his first contact with American culture had come as a teen-ager, when some passing GIs threw him cigarettes, chewing gum and a Playboy magazine.

Nevertheless, an hour after Saigon surrendered, he climbed aboard one of the last South Vietnamese army helicopters leaving the Can Tho army base. At the age of 18, he found himself in a foreign land called Oklahoma.

But, he says, Americans he met in 1975 bent over backward to help him. He was admitted to Oklahoma State, although his English was still inadequate. Once there, his grades were not good enough to join an international fraternity to which he wanted to belong. He went begging to the dean and was invited to join.

Nguyen earned a master’s degree, then a law degree at Hastings School of Law in San Francisco. He now has a private practice in San Jose and Oakland. Many of his clients are young Vietnamese who have run afoul of the law.

These young arrivals, he said, have been given fewer opportunities and received less hospitality from communities that already feel burdened by large Southeast Asian populations.

Nowadays, he said, “America is sick of refugees.”

Many Vietnamese-Americans say they are deeply grateful for the help they have received. But they feel they dare not ask for more.

“The community now is strong enough to help their fellows,” said Xuan Nhi Van Ho, executive director of the Orange County Refugee Community Resources Opportunity Project. “Many Vietnamese community leaders don’t want the government to feel that refugees are a burden on them. . . . If we keep asking for more help, they will cut the refugee quota.”

And Vietnamese worry that they have developed a bad image. Many are mortified by the presence of Southeast Asian youth gangs, which have grown more violent and almost always prey on their own countrymen.

Gangs and crime were cited as the single most serious community problem in The Times survey, named twice as often as problems with jobs or assimilation. But in recent interviews, Vietnamese-Americans expressed both shame and anger over what they see as overheated media coverage of the gangs, of welfare fraud, microchip theft and other crimes committed by Asians.

And though the recent flood of books and films by Americans about the Vietnam War may be cathartic for Americans, Vietnamese find them distorted and offensive.

“We despise these movies tremendously,” said Duc Au, host of a Vietnamese radio program at UC Irvine. Au said the films show Vietnamese people as prostitutes, faceless enemies or victims of American--never communist--atrocities. Vietnamese are never shown as soldiers fighting for their own country alongside the Americans, he said.

“If I didn’t know anything about the Vietnam War at all, I would think the Americans did all the dirty work and the Vietnamese were back in the cities having fun,” Au said.

Such images are especially undermining to young Vietnamese, said Thieu Quang Nguyen, 27, a graduate student in computer science at UC Irvine.

“Most of the things associated with the word Vietnam are negative: the Vietnam War, the cheating in Little Saigon, the gangs,” Nguyen said. “And kids grow up hurt inside.”

It is another paradox of the Vietnamese experience that the number of Vietnamese dropouts and juvenile delinquents is increasing at the same time that many other young Vietnamese are astounding their teachers with their academic prowess. Such contradictory realities belie facile stereotypes about Asian students as disciplined super-achievers.

In San Diego in 1986, Rumbaut and his colleagues found that although only 7% of the city’s students were Vietnamese, 23% of the year’s valedictorians and salutatorians were. And Vietnamese-American students had, on average, higher grades than whites. But Vietnamese were dropping out at slightly higher rates than white students.

That pattern is repeated at Orange County’s Westminster High School, where 52% of the straight-A students are Indochinese. But by 1987, the Vietnamese dropout rate had soared to nearly double the school average, prompting the district to launch a special anti-dropout program for them.

Rumbaut found that it was the children who came to the United States without one or both parents who were far more likely to drop out of school or get in trouble with the police.

Likewise, Liem Huu Nguyen, who has represented many youth offenders, said most of his clients are recent arrivals who come from broken families and speak little English.

Much of the Vietnamese-American experience cannot be explained by the mere facts of background, income or education. What drives many refugees is the immeasurable desire to reconstruct, from the shards of their former identities, lives to be proud of, families that are whole and enduring.

In a 1984 mental health survey of Vietnamese, almost half reported feelings of depression, anxiety, hopelessness or worthlessness, compared with only one-quarter of Americans.

Time does appear to be healing many of those wounds, the study found. But scars linger.

Dr. Ton-That Niem, once a secretary of health in Vietnam, now a psychiatrist specializing in refugee mental health, said he has treated many refugees with post-traumatic stress disorder. Many were rape victims or had seen relatives killed. Others, particularly middle-age women, complain of insomnia, anxiety, headaches, stomachaches and backaches--and a terrible feeling of isolation.

“They say, ‘I came here, I cannot go out. I cannot drive. All my children or grandchildren are gone to work or in class.’

“Then they break into tears and say, ‘Had I known life (would be like this), I would not have come here.’ ”

Niem says Westerners underestimate the pain that Vietnamese, especially elders, feel about the separation from their ancestral homeland and its 4,000-year-old culture.

There are, however, signs of hope in Little Saigon.

On weekends, the shopping district is jammed with families pushing strollers and children who chatter away in English and Vietnamese. Despite their poverty, Vietnamese-Americans have the lowest infant-mortality rate of any ethnic group in the nation. Researchers cite abstinence from smoking, alcohol and drugs.

Business is booming. There are cultural festivals, Vietnamese-language classes for children, more than two dozen newspapers, a $1.2-million senior citizens center under construction, a television station and a vibrant nightclub scene. Most of all, Little Saigon is a place to be Vietnamese in America, but at ease.

After 15 years of exile, many are also reaching back to Vietnam for solace.

A growing number of Vietnamese say privately that they support normalization of relations between Washington and Hanoi. Risking the wrath of devoutly anti-communist fellow exiles, thousands have quietly returned to visit.

During the Tet Festival this February, so many Californians headed for Vietnam that it was virtually impossible to get a seat on a plane, according to one who made the trek.

Mai Cong, chairman of Vietnamese Community of Orange County and a community activist, said she has not been back, but she has made peace with her memories of home.

“It’s the memory of your childhood, the places where you were raised, where your parents are, where your ancestors are buried,” Cong explained. “It’s priceless. It is inside you.”

Times staff writers Tony Marcano and Thuan Le contributed to this story.

Legacy of War: Vietnamese in America The Vietnam Exodus 1. In April, 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese flee south as coastal cities surrender. 2. U.S. Marines begin evacuating remaining Americans from Saigon. However, enemy shelling closes Tan Son Nhut Air Base, forcing evacuation by helicopter. 3. Gen. Duong Van Minh surrenders unconditionally on April 30 at 10:24 a.m. By then, more than 100,000 South Vietnamese had already fled. 4. In 1978, Vietnam invades Cambodia, and China invades Vietnam. Vietnam then expels its ethnic Chinese. The exodus of “boat people” begins. Life in the U.S. Most of the refugees who arrived in 1975 hailed from Vietnam’s military, professional and social elite. They account for fewer than one-third of all refugees. Later arrivals tended to be rural, with less education and fewer skills, and have had far more trouble achieving economic self-sufficiency. Average Years of Education: 1975 arrivals: 11.9 1980-83 arrivals: 5.2 White Collar in Asia 1975 arrivals: 79% 1980-83 arrivals: 49% Farmers or Fishermen in Asia 1975 arrivals: 3% 1980-83 arrivals: 38% Living in Poverty in 1982 1975 arrivals: 25% 1980-83 arrivals: 90% Refugee Household Income in ’86 1975 arrivals: $17,861 1980-83 arrivals: $12,907 Average U.S. Household Income in 1986: $17-$18,000 Southeast Asian Refugee Arrivals A total of 918,558 Southeast Asian refugees-567,600 of them Vietnamese-have arrived in the United States since 1975. More than 40% have settled in California. 1975: 130,000 War evacuees 1980: 167,000 Boat People 1989: 37,000 Source: Federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (1989), California Dept. of Finance (1990). On Being Vietnamese in America