Vietnamese Adrift After Center Closes : Immigrants: The facility, shut by a cutback in mental health funds, was a gathering spot for the dispersed Valley community.

Most of the 20,000 Vietnamese who live in the San Fernando Valley risked everything for freedom. “Every refugee,” said one, “played Russian roulette with his life.”

Once here, however, they found freedom brought with it a whole new set of problems.

Until July, there was a place where the Valley’s Vietnamese could go for help in learning how to fit into their new culture. But when a lack of county mental health funds forced the closure of the Southeast Asian Community Center (SEACC), the Vietnamese community found itself again adrift on rough waters.

Now, the Americanized teen-agers who listen to rap music and feel misunderstood by parents, and parents alarmed by the changes in their offspring, have one less place to turn. The old values no longer seem to apply and the old answers won’t work because the questions are new.

“Since the center closed, a lot of people come here to get advice,” said Buddhist monk Rev. Thich Duc Niem, as he poured tea at the Buddhist Meditation Center, a modest monastery in Sepulveda. “But we can only advise on spiritual life, we can’t do things that the center could do.”

The loss of the center is felt acutely here because, unlike the large Vietnamese community in Orange County, the Vietnamese in the Valley are dispersed and have no central neighborhood where people can meet and share news.

“Basically, they try to rely on their own families, but they don’t know how to get services,” said Sue Thompson, a former advisory board member to the mental health facility. “So mental health needs are stuffed back for years. It’s a tragedy, because services aren’t there right now and there are people in need. There are family conflicts, seniors isolated by language, teens acculturating very fast, parents working all the time, a lot of conflicts to be addressed.”

The SEACC was funded four years ago by the county under the auspices of the San Fernando Valley Mental Health Center, which saw the new center as a way to reach out to the burgeoning Asian community. Since 1980 alone, 138,000 Vietnamese refugees have come to the United States, and the U.S. Committee for Refugees estimates that 60,000 more will enter this year. Many are settling in the Los Angeles area.

The center, located in a plain office building in Van Nuys, became a gathering spot for people who wanted to chat or read Vietnamese newspapers. A Vietnamese counselor was on hand for the growing number of refugees who were having problems.

After all, these were people who came from villages where bicycles were often the main mode of transportation, from a country where the main language was their language, from families that lived together until marriage and then just kept expanding to include new spouses and offspring.

A visit to Trinh Dao’s modest Van Nuys bungalow, where blaring rap music shook the walls and her two younger brothers danced around, is a textbook illustration of the culture clash that produces mental stresses. Dao, 18, helps support her family as a seamstress. With her mother still in Vietnam, she finds herself playing mom to her brothers, and she doesn’t like what she sees.

“I’m worried about them,” she said of 13-year-old Tri and 16-year-old Truong, trying to make herself heard over the din. “They’ve adjusted, too much. They’re too American, the way they dress, the way they do their hair and the people they hang around with. They’re not bad right now, but I can see them becoming bad. They’re definitely capable of it.”

Before it closed, the center had applied for funds to start a youth group aimed at teen-agers such as Dao’s brothers. “Basically, if you had any problems, that was the place to go. If you needed a plumber, or financial aid for school, social security information, welfare, an interpreter, basically they could do everything for you that involved a language barrier,” she said. The center put her in touch with a cleft palate team at St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, which is helping Truong.

Ian Hunter, director of the San Fernando Valley Mental Health Center, through which funding was provided to the SEACC’s staff, regrets the closing of the center.

“Our hope was for more money to be forthcoming and that never happened,” Hunter said. The facility fell victim to the recent state and county budget cuts in mental health programs. There was only enough money for services to the most severely mentally ill, so facilities classified as outreach, like the Southeast Asian Community Center, lost funds.

Hunter said he is unhappy about the loss but was more concerned about trying to keep open the San Fernando Valley Mental Health Center, which was also threatened by budget cuts. United Way, which wanted to fund some programs for the Asian community, had offered money, but it was not enough to replace the county’s $50,000 allotment.

Hao Doan, who escaped from Vietnam in 1975 and eventually went on to study at UCLA’s School of Social Work, headed the SEACC’s counseling program and was key to its success. He knew the difficulty many Vietnamese have in seeking mental health counseling.

“There is a lot of stigma attached to using services,” Doan said. “We can’t serve Vietnamese like Americans. Among the Asian community, there is misinformation about mental illness. In Vietnam, they just know about state hospitals not family services, counseling services, mental health services.” And in Vietnam, state hospitals signify serious mental problems such as schizophrenia or psychosis.

“It’s the typical American story,” Doan said. “America is not just the land of opportunity but the land of struggle. In adjusting to a new life, there is a lot of stress to deal with.”

Confronted with cultural upheaval and without the center to lean on, some families are seeking comfort in the church.

“It is totally different here than what they expected,” said Father John Vo, a Vietnamese Dominican priest who says twice-weekly Mass in Vietnamese at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Sepulveda. He estimates that there are 4,000 to 5,000 Catholic Vietnamese families in the Valley.

“I couldn’t imagine the way of life here, the way people treat each other. The old people don’t find a warm environment here. They have to lock up the house like a prison. In Vietnam, everybody knows each other by name.”

Van Thanh, 36, works with teen-agers as a volunteer at Our Lady of Peace and finds many of them troubled. “The kids I work with, they all want to get away” from their parents. “Parents are afraid the girls will get pregnant,” she said, even though Vietnamese families never discuss such things.

“If we could just combine the American and Asian way, it would be better.”

Vo too has lost a resource in the closing of the center, which he said helped him get in touch with social services for his parishioners.

Unable to ask for help in a foreign land, some people turn inward.

Lost in thought in a smoky cafe, a man sat oblivious to the chatter of the afternoon patrons, the clink of spoons stirring thick, sweet coffee and Vietnamese music wafting through the air. If you didn’t look outside to see the traffic whizzing by on Sherman Way, you might think you were in Vietnam.

But, as Doan says, his countrymen here can never become completely American, yet no longer are they completely Vietnamese. Still, for a few moments at least, if he closes his eyes, the man in the coffee shop might feel that he is back home.

Lee Phuong has been in America almost five years, having left his mother and escaped from Vietnam in 1983 with a brother and sister. “There were lots of reasons to leave,” Phuong said. His father had been in the army before he died and once the Communists took over, any family with even remote affiliations to the old regime had to move to “new economic zones.” There, they were not permitted to work or to go to school. He knew he had to leave.

But Phuong, 31, who supports himself doing cable television installations, misses his mother. “It was very hard to leave her,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But she understands. I tell her that here, it’s a freedom country.”

For Tran Do, 70, life in America is also bittersweet. Do joined her family in the United States three years ago, finally succeeding on her fifth attempt to escape from Vietnam. She is happy to be with her loved ones, but not happy to see how they live.

“She tells her family in Vietnam that they should stay in the country,” her son, Tran Thanh, 30, says, translating. “There, they have the army and not enough food to eat. Here, we can go the wrong way. We work hard for material goods, for food, cars, houses. There are misunderstandings and fighting. We are fighting with the spirit and the family.”

Doan, Thompson and others say the needs of these struggling Vietnamese have strengthened their resolve to create a Vietnamese-run community center to fill the gap in services.

“A growth and evolution in the Valley needs to happen. Now the Vietnamese community is becoming aware that they’re missing something,” said Thompson, who is on the board of the newly proposed Vietnamese Community Center. “My hope is that there will be enough ethnic-oriented people to stand up and speak for themselves.

“Like the Chinese character, the word for crisis also means opportunity. Throughout life, crisis can also bring opportunity.”