Viet Workers Find Bias in Prague : Race: Gypsies also are subjected to rising tide of discrimination amid growing unemployment in Czechoslovakia.

Eighteen months ago, Thuy, then 18 and just graduated from secondary school, left her family and friends in Hanoi, Vietnam, to come to Czechoslovakia.

“I didn’t have a job, and I wanted to earn some money and see the world,” she said.

Now, Thuy’s world, the one she shares with two other young Vietnamese women, is a cramped room in a filthy, one-story, fiberboard dormitory, squeezed between a landfill and railroad tracks. She has had no hot water for six months.

The dormitory is situated on the grounds of the Leciva pharmaceutical works in an outlying district of Prague, where Thuy works applying dye to vitamin pills in an unventilated workshop reeking of chemical fumes.

Her $135 monthly salary barely covers food, rent and living expenses, leaving her almost nothing to send home.

The nearest shopping district is several miles away, so she can only go once a week. One girl shops for all those in the dormitory and Thuy said she gets dirty looks from Czechs who wonder why she is buying so much.

She tells how she must ask a Czech colleague to buy Czech-made leather tennis shoes because the clerks won’t sell them to Vietnamese.

After a recent wave of violent attacks against Vietnamese workers in Prague and elsewhere in the country, all Thuy wants to do is return to her family.

“I just want to go home. I’m frightened that I’ll get beaten up or attacked. I’m disappointed with life here. Before I came, I thought I’d learn something more and get skills and get to know the countryside. But now, I’m afraid to visit friends in the other towns.”

There are 37,000 Vietnamese guest workers are in Czechoslovakia, skilled and semi-skilled laborers who came to learn modern industrial techniques.

Milos Brunclik, the Labor Ministry official in charge of guest workers, said recently that on several occasions since non-communist forces took over, his ministry has had to transfer workers to other factories because of the poor treatment they received.

Earlier this year, the Czech government announced that the Vietnamese workers would all be sent home at the end of their contracts and no new workers will be admitted. University students are not affected by the decision.

The government is looking for ways to speed up the departure of the Vietnamese.

That day cannot come soon enough for the Vietnamese, who have been stunned by recent violence against them.

“I’ve never had any problem with the intelligentsia at my faculty,” said a Vietnamese student who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.

“I think it happens because the discipline has been released and they understand the word ‘freedom’ in a wrong way. They think they can do anything they want,” he said of the attackers.

The student said the Vietnamese community in Prague believes police have taken a hands-off approach to the racial violence.

“I can be attacked anywhere, at any time,” said the student.

Vietnamese students at the electrical engineering college in Plzen in southern Bohemia have written President Vaclav Havel to protest the rise in racially motived attacks.

Similar attacks against Gypsies, who prefer to be called Romanies, led the Czech Republic Prime Minister Petr Pithart to appeal on national television for racial tolerance.

Civic Forum, the coalition of pro-democracy forces that led the revolution against communism, blamed skinheads and punks for the attacks against Romanies. The party expressed dismay at what it called the “buck passing” of police who failed to respond to the attacks, suggesting the army may be needed to back up police.

The attacks on Gypsies and Vietnamese appear to be motivated partly by racism and partly by a fear of growing unemployment as the new non-communist government’s free-market economic reforms take effect.

The Vietnamese say they are exploited by the Czechs, given the worst--and often the most dangerous--jobs and the worst living quarters, and paid far less than their Czech colleagues.

“Nothing good has come for us from the revolution,” said Thuy. “Only the security is getting worse and the prices will rise. Before the revolution I could walk on the streets and now I feel people look at me like I’m a second-class citizen.”

Chi Qui, a 37-year-old mother of two, agrees.

“I earn 1,800 crowns ($90) a month, and the Czech woman who works next to me makes 3,000 ($150) for the same work,” she said.

Leaving her husband and two children in Haiphong, she came to work in a shoe factory in Zlin, but her entire stay has been a disaster, she said.

“I didn’t learn any new technology, the Czechs don’t like our being here, I live far from my factory, my salary is low, and I’m far from my family.”