SANTA ANA : Asian Seniors Tour New Cultural Center

Eighty-one years have thinned Dong Quang’s hair and made the voices of the past seem louder than the happy chatter that swirled around her Thursday.

But when a young man bent to her ear to relay a question in Vietnamese, she laughed, showing teeth darkened by years of chewing herbal gum. How does she find life in America? She cracked back a sharp retort.

“I have no other alternative but to live here,” Quang told the young man. “It’s OK because I have my children, my grandchildren. But I miss relatives and friends in Vietnam.”

Quang was one of about 40 elderly Indochinese who gathered Thursday for an advance tour of the $1.3-million Asian Senior Acculturation Center. The 6,000-square-foot building is now a naked shell of glass and lumber next to the Post Office on 1st Street. Its sponsors are still struggling to raise $80,000 needed to give the building a stucco shell and red paint for its pagoda-style entrance.

But when completed in September, it will be the first center in Orange County to offer full services to Southeast Asian seniors. Its sponsors hope the center will ease the loneliness and isolation of elderly refugees who often cannot drive, shop or even speak the language of their grandchildren.

One Hanoi native in her 70s recalled overhearing a conversation between her American-born grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.

“They were talking to each other in English, and they said, ‘She’s stupid, she doesn’t understand us,’ ” the woman said in Vietnamese. “Stupid!” she repeated in English.

A friend said she had felt like a prisoner in her children’s home until she began to drop in on a lunch program for the elderly run by the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., or VNCOC, a nonprofit agency. There, she explained, the outrageous behavior of Americanized offspring is a major topic.

“I found out everybody else has the same problem,” she said, laughing. “Now I just take it lightly.”

The VNCOC offices opened in 1984 as little more than a storefront about a mile from the site of the new center. Now it serves about 45 hot lunches a day.

On Thursday the single room was jammed with nearly 100 elderly men and women, playing Asian chess, Chinese checkers and a traditional Vietnamese card game called tam cuc . Several said they had brought their own lunches because they cannot eat Western food.

St. Anselm’s Church in Garden Grove runs a similar lunch program for elderly Vietnamese, and Korean Elderly Services Inc. also hosts about 40 people a day in a storefront center in Garden Grove, said Peggy Weatherspoon, director of the county’s Area Agency on Aging.

The new center will have a large central room, a reading room with Asian- and Western-language books, a kitchen, and offices upstairs for youth and job counseling, gang intervention and other programs. Chairman Mai Cong said she hoped to offer exercise and cooking classes, a site for lectures, concerts, English classes and even small weddings.

Fund raising for the center began five years ago with a $450,000 state grant, part of $3.3 million the county received from the state Senior Center Bond Act, Weatherspoon said. Much of the rest has been slowly collected from private and corporate donors and the refugees themselves.

Ca Le, a 75-year-old Westminster grandmother, said she hoped to give cooking classes at the new center to raise money. Plump and bejeweled, dressed in a mustard-colored traditional ao dai dress, she explained that she had trained the staff at her son’s Vietnamese restaurant in Los Angeles but now specialized in the fried chow mein favored by her grandchildren.

At the senior center, she promised, she will teach “many, many delicious (dishes).” Someday she hopes to teach her grandchildren.

“In Vietnam, food is the culture,” she said.