Trading On 2 Cultures : Immigrants: A few Vietnamese entrepreneurs are launching innovative businesses that combine the customs of their native and adopted countries.

It’s the Vietnamese answer to microwave dinners.

For $8 a night, the A-Dong Restaurant in Tustin will deliver to your home a three-course dinner for two packed in a special thermal container. All you have to do is cook rice. The next day, a restaurant employee picks up the container and drops off a fresh meal.

In Vietnam, they call this home cooking service com thang, or monthly rice. In Southern California, these Asian meals-on-wheels have become big business for refugee entrepreneurs. From the San Fernando Valley to southern Orange County, roughly 50 restaurants and free-lance cooks compete to deliver thousands of meals to Asian neighborhoods each night.

“People order our meals out of convenience, because cooking Vietnamese food is time consuming, and they are working people. . . ,” says A-Dong owner and chef Oanh Kim Huynh, 32. “They get nutritious food at a low price, and the meals are delivered to their doorsteps five nights a week.”

Com thang is by no means the only entrepreneurial twist introduced by the Vietnamese refugees who began to arrive in Southern California 15 years ago.

Like many immigrant groups before them, the first Vietnamese to settle in Orange County opened mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, import-export companies and sewing shops. By the early 1980s, many had opened computer-assembly, furniture and machine shops, bookstores, video stores, insurance companies and travel agencies, and the Little Saigon shopping district, now home to about 1,500 businesses, was born.

But contrary to stereotypes of Asians as entrepreneurial whizzes, the majority of young Vietnamese Americans are collecting advanced degrees and going to work for large corporations or entering the professions, says Ho Ngoc Au, president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce of America.

Au, a former South Vietnamese deputy minister of economics now living in Manhattan Beach, would like to see more Vietnamese Americans start their own businesses. But he fears that childhoods shaped by war and teen-age years spent as refugees have made many of these young people cautious.

“The Vietnamese here by and large go to school to be doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers . . . “ Au says. “It’s less risky.”

Still, a small crop of 30ish refugees, many armed with American educations and work experience, are taking the entrepreneurial plunge.

Some have launched innovative businesses that straddle their cultures.

Here are portraits of four such start-up businesses and their operators:

The family behind A-Dong’s com thang company; the founder of the first telephone dating service for Vietnamese-American singles; two brothers who grew up reading French fashion magazines in Saigon and now design sportswear, and a couple who run a nursery specializing in rare Asian fruit trees.

Early in the morning, the kitchen of the A-Dong restaurant is jammed with giant colanders of chopped bok choy cabbage, huge bowls of meat and vegetables and about a dozen busy workers.

Dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and an apron, Huynh hovers over two giant woks, cooking food for 700. The day’s dinner menu is soup made with daikon, an Asian radish; beef sauteed with mustard greens, tomato, green onion and oyster sauce, and charbroiled chicken with vegetables.

Prices per night, including delivery, range from $5.50 for one person to $14 for four. A-Dong’s prices are on the high side, because some competitors who cook at home offer dinners for as little as $3 per person per night, says Huynh’s husband, Dinh Trung Huynh, 39.

“Our price is almost double--but you pay for what you get,” Huynh says. “Our vegetables, we have to buy the best ones to keep them longer, because we deliver at 3 o’clock and people eat it at 9 or 10 o’clock. We don’t use any frozen food.”

In a strategy used by many immigrant entrepreneurs, the Huynhs stay competitive by banding together with relatives to form a buying collective. Each day, Dinh Huynh orders thousands of pounds of meat, chicken, fish and vegetables from wholesalers, and arranges to split the food with four other com thang businesses run by relatives in Canoga Park, Monterey Park, Long Beach and Los Angeles.

By buying in bulk, he says, the restaurants can sometimes get discounts of up to 30%. In addition, several Asian meat suppliers trim the fat and cut the meat into wok-sized pieces, sparing his busy kitchen workers a time-consuming chore.

A-Dong’s storefront has a few tables, and also sells noodles and fast food to go. But the main business is delivering 100 lunches a day, most of them to offices near the Tustin restaurant, and 600 dinners, mostly to Asian families from El Toro to Norwalk.

In Vietnam, com thang meals were delivered by bicycle. Most of the customers were students or young workers who could not afford apartments with kitchens.

In America, however, the meals arrive by mini-van, and many of the customers are families with working women who do not have time to cook.

In the eight months that A-Dong has been open, about 20 Anglo families have signed up for daily dinners, Huynh says.

The Huynhs say they have learned to adjust the flavors for different ethnic groups. “Americans like it less salty, and no fat at all,” says Dinh Huynh. “And they don’t like shrimp with the shell on . . .

“But our customers, they’re happy with the food we have.”

At 26, Linh Thai is one of the youngest--and least conventional--of the new Vietnamese-American entrepreneurs.

Until a year ago, his resume read like an All-American immigrant success story. He came to the United States in 1975, graduated from high school, earned a degree in electrical engineering from Cal Poly Pomona in 1987 and went to work as a telecommunication engineer for Magnavox.

A year ago, he quit his job to launch the first 900 telephone dating service for Vietnamese-American singles.

“My parents got pretty mad about it,” Thai says. “They were furious. They said I shouldn’t have left my job for this. I just think it’s going to do really well.”

Although school chums and co-workers also looked askance at his dating service dreams, Thai borrowed from friends and family, sold his car, saved his income tax refund and moved back into his parents’ Placentia home.

By day, he continues as a computer consultant. By night, he has taken the $15,000 he has accumulated, rented a Chinatown office, installed telephone lines and computers, hired a silky-voiced young operator, and placed ads for his DC Communications dating service in Vietnamese-language publications nationwide.

In one year, Thai says, he has grossed about $200,000, netted about $50,000 and paid off most of his debts. Part of his success is surely because of demographics: Vietnamese refugees tend to be young men, because many families bought dangerous and expensive boat passages only for boys, who were then expected to get jobs and send money home. Official resettlement policy was to scatter them in communities across the United States.

And, Thai says, the ancient system of matchmaking has broken down in America.

“The Vietnamese tradition is that the parents arrange the marriage, but we won’t accept that any more,” explains Thai, who is single despite attempts by his parents to find him a suitable wife.

Still, he says, most Vietnamese are shy about approaching the opposite sex. Outside California, where roughly 500,000 Vietnamese emigres have settled, single immigrants--especially those with limited English--may have trouble even finding the opposite sex.

“It’s the Vietnamese in Wyoming and Missouri, in the states that have a real low density of Vietnamese, I want to reach those people and say ‘Hey, there’s Vietnamese out there, too,’ ” he says.

Thai says his hot line has received about 12,000 calls so far, about 70% of them from outside California.

Only the men are charged, at a rate of 79 cents per minute, for a maximum of 25 minutes, he says. “Bachelorettes,” as Thai calls his female customers, are introduced for free.

“Women, usually they look for someone with a (college) degree . . . and stability in their work . . . ,” Thai says. “The younger girls want tall men. The older women just want stability.”

Then the receptionist thumbs through index cards of women in the same area. When she finds a possible match, she puts the man on hold, calls the woman, and connects them in a conference call. If they like each other, they can exchange telephone numbers or arrange to meet. If it doesn’t work out, they can be introduced to someone else.

Some Vietnamese community leaders frown on Thai’s service.

“It’s not appropriate,” says Chuyen Van Nguyen, 41, a political activist from Garden Grove. “It’s too modern, it’s too fast for the Vietnamese people to accept.

“Vietnamese culture is very conservative, very strict. It would be an embarrassment to tell people how you met your sweetheart, how you met your wife.”

But Thai says his customers aren’t embarrassed. In fact, he says, his operators have been invited to a number of engagement parties.

“The old way is gone from Vietnam,” he says. “This is a way to fill that gap.”

As young boys in the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang, Khiem and Nghi Van Nguyen loved to draw the cowboys in American movies. As teen-agers, they sketched what they saw in French fashion magazines.

Two decades later, their drawings are influenced by abstract artists Vasily Kandinsky and Joan Miro. But their clothes are sold in American boutiques. Doing business as The Khiem and Nghi Design Co. in Los Angeles, the brothers are the design talent behind Trio Collezione menswear, the Basic Club line for women, and Kidd Kootoor for children. Together with free-lance designs, the brothers say, their clothes generated sales of more than $3 million last year.

The Trio Collezione men’s shirts, which retail for about $80, are an arresting combination of bold, modernistic appliqued patterns in subtly muted pastel colors.

One lettuce green-gray cardigan, for example, is patterned with surreal swirls of dusty rose, straw and ocean-colored fabric. And for the spring line, Khiem Nguyen is playing with lavender and sand-colored linen swatches.

If the brothers’ designs are unconventional, perhaps it’s because their lives have lurched down unpredictable paths. In 1965, their father, an economist for the South Vietnamese government, was killed during a Viet Cong bombing of the My Canh Restaurant in Saigon. Ten years later, the family joined the exodus of Southeast Asian refugees and were resettled in San Diego.

In 1976, Nghi Van Nguyen, now 33, won a design contest for high school students and accepted a scholarship to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. Not to be outdone by a younger sibling, Khiem, now 36, won the same contest the following year and also attended the institute.

“If I hadn’t won the award, I think I probably would have gone to school in engineering,” Khiem says. “We were interested in fashion in Vietnam, but we never thought of being fashion designers. We were interested in art, but we were worried about making a living first.”

Many refugees complain of intense pressure--originally from their families, but often internalized--to choose “safe” and respectable careers rather than pursuing their talents. The Nguyens say there are only about 10 Vietnamese-American fashion designers, of whom the best-known is probably Los Angeles-based Kim Dam.

The Nguyens worked for several designers in New York before moving back to Orange County and striking out for themselves in Los Angeles.

“L.A. is more interesting, younger, more freedom, trendier,” says Nghi, whose Basic Club women’s dresses will sport 1960s lines and geometric designs for spring.

Competition is fierce, and the Nguyens’ company is still tiny by industry standards. Still, the brothers are sizing up the field.

“My goal in menswear is to have every young man on MTV wear our clothes, and every rock and roll band wear our clothes,” Khiem says. “If they’re watching, they’ll buy.”

In a dusty lot in Anaheim, Sylvie and Gilbert Guyenne have created a tropical jungle.

Their crowded nursery is a botanist’s delight, with rare and exotic fruit trees from throughout Asia, India and the Middle East; ornamental banana plants and bonsai; tiny rose apples, sweet jasmine, and a low-slung bush called Queen of the Night, whose fragrant white blossoms open only between 8 p.m. and midnight.

Since opening in 1982, Mimosa nursery has become a big business, selling about 100,000 plants a year. It has branches on West Lincoln Street in Anaheim and in East Los Angeles, and opened another store in Riverside in May.

From its inception, says Sylvie Guyenne, 35, in French-accented English, Mimosa has attracted customers who are immigrants from all over Asia. Now, however, the nursery also has a steady clientele of other plant lovers, as well as landscape architects looking for something unusual.

Mimosa’s specialty is rare Asian fruit trees. Some are the offspring of a single mother plant, because agricultural regulations and costly customs duties make it extremely difficult to import plants, Sylvie Guyenne explains.

Others are grown painstakingly from seeds. “It takes a long, long time,” she says. In fact, the nursery lost money for several years while the plants slowly grew large enough to sell for a profit, she says.

The Guyennes are a study in learn-it-yourself entrepreneurship. They were university students when they fled Vietnam four days before the last American helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy on April 30, 1975.

Gilbert Guyenne, now 39, had studied business administration, and his wife majored in French and English literature. The academic training provided little preparation for refugee life--and neither one of them knew anything about plants.

The Guyennes spent 6 1/2 years in New Caledonia, where they first operated a restaurant and then farmed. In 1981, they joined relatives in the United States and saw it was difficult to find Asian plants.

Like many refugee entrepreneurs, the Guyennes had no house, no money, no collateral and no chance of securing a bank loan. Instead, they borrowed money from friends and relatives, and learned to run their business by trial and error.

“For the first two or three years, we lost a lot (of plants) because we didn’t have experience,” Sylvie Guyenne says. “We grew winter plants in summer or summer plants in winter, and we lost them. But we learned a lot.”

Some of the fruit trees, for example, flourish in moist climates. One of the most popular is a Vietnamese grapefruit called buoi , which is pear-shaped and sweeter than the Western variety.

To make the tropical tree resistant to the dry California climate, Gilbert Guyenne experimented until he managed to graft the buoi branches onto American grapefruit tree stock.

“My husband learned it from books,” his wife says simply. “Very hard.”

Mimosa also sells South American cherimoya with fruit the size of a cantaloupe, sweet lemon trees from Mexico and sweet limes from the Middle East. “Very good for throat pain,” Sylvie Guyenne says of the limes.

Older people, especially women, frequently prowl through Mimosa, homesick for the trees and shrubs, the fruits and fragrances of their homelands, she says.

“The young, they buy only the flowers. The old, they buy fruit trees--and roses.”