Soviet Essayist Says Her Peace : Education: A 20-year-old from the University of Moscow dispels stereotypes during a five-day visit to Huntington Beach after winning a U.N.-sponsored contest.

Thanks to the United Nations, a new chapter in Sino-Soviet-American relations is being written in Orange County.

When Irina Pavlova, a 20-year-old student at the University of Moscow, won second place in a United Nations-sponsored essay contest in the Soviet Union, she was awarded a five-day trip to the home of her counterpart in the United States: Lily Chinn, who was awarded $750 for placing second in a similar national essay contest.

That presented a small problem: Lily’s mother.

“My mom was kind of hesitant at first,” said Chinn, 17, a senior at Huntington Beach High School. “She’s Chinese, she was born in China, and the Chinese and Soviets don’t always have a perfect relationship.”

But after Chinn explained to her mother about the national Model United Nations program, in which students act as U.N. delegates and are assigned countries to represent, her mom “got really excited about it” and agreed to the visit.

“She was real worried until she found out (that Pavlova) was a regular person and not some communist or a spy or something,” Chinn said.

So in Orange County, home of John Wayne and millions of other anti-communists, there is a Soviet citizen sitting down to break bread in the home of a Chinese woman. Only in America.

Chinn’s mother was not the only one with preconceptions. Pavlova spent most of the day Friday dispelling stereotypes, answering questions from students at Huntington Beach High School on everything from the Soviet economy to Siberian prisons and the cost of Levi’s 501 blue jeans--which go in Moscow for about 500 rubles, about $71 in U.S. currency.

The question pressing on more people’s minds than any other: What did she think of the McDonald’s outlet in Moscow?

“I was there for about 10 times, and I’m so sick of it I’m not going back,” she said.

The spirit of international cooperation went beyond Chinn and Pavlova. Jay Kim, 16, a Laguna Hills High School junior, won third place in the U.S. contest, earning him $500 and the honor of playing host to Soviet third-place winner Marianne Nezhivaya at his home.

Kim was also a member of the California champion Laguna Hills High Academic Decathlon team, which took second place last month in the national finals in Des Moines, Iowa.

Pavlova’s journey here started in Moscow, where a model U.N. program similar to the one that Chinn belongs to at Huntington Beach High was formed. The daughter of a Soviet diplomat, she joined. Like Chinn, she took second place in an essay contest in which participants were asked to assume the role of the secretary general of the United Nations and report on the world’s environmental problems.

The two second-place finishers met in New York early this week, where they were feted at a U.N. dinner attended by captains of industry and heads of state, including U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar; the chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations, Thomas Pickering, and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

After three whirlwind days in the Big Apple, Chinn, accompanied by her program adviser, Lynn Aase, and Pavlova--accompanied by her adviser, Genady N. Golubev, a former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations--jetted to California. They arrived in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

So, besides hobnobbing with the nation’s highbrows, what did the two young women do in New York? “We went shopping,” Chinn said.

And what did they do on their first morning together in Orange County? “We went shopping,” Chinn said.

Pavlova, however, said she wants to take part in a few other typical California activities after she shops. “I want to go to Disneyland, that’s a must,” she said. “I also just want to go to the beach and lie in the sun, because it’s probably raining in Moscow.”

Today she will visit the Happiest Place on Earth. And on Monday, she will return to Moscow--which, she said, is definitely not the happiest place on earth these days.

When questioned Thursday by a group of sophomores in the Model U.N. program who were hungry for knowledge of life in the Soviet Union, Pavlova painted a surprisingly grim picture of a land that is supposed to be reaping the benefits of glasnost and perestroika.

“I told them (the students) that I personally am not too optimistic about the future,” Pavlova said. “Since all this (glasnost) has been going on, it’s only been leading to things getting worse.”

Young Soviet people, citing recent uprisings in Lithuania and the broken promises of perestroika , fear that the situation could degenerate into violence, Pavlova said.

“We feel we’re very close to a civil war, or maybe another revolution,” Pavlova said. “For five years, people have been expecting changes and not getting them, and that’s bound to lead to something bad.”

But things will be better if friendly U.S.-Soviet relations persist, she said. And her visit may have contributed to that.

“As one student told me, he now knows that Soviet kids and American kids are the same,” Pavlova said. “That’s one thing I wanted to get across to them.”