A TALE OF TWO STUDENTS

On March 19, in a parking lot at San Gabriel High School, a group of Latino students beat up two Chinese brothers, kicking and punching them until they were bruised.

One week later at the same school, four Vietnamese students, one wielding a large garbage can, attacked a white student and jumped another coming to his rescue. In both fights, racial epithets were used.

Overt racial tensions may draw attention at a school that is 42% Asian, 44% Latino and 13% white.

But the majority of the school’s 3,036 students--who come from Alhambra, San Gabriel and Rosemead--never become embroiled in schoolyard violence. For most, a more telling fact of high school life is the de facto segregation that occurs daily both inside and outside the classroom.

There are Spanish-language math classes for Latinos. There is a social club for Vietnamese, with meetings in their native language. At lunchtime, Chinese teen-agers converse in Mandarin at one

table, while at the next table, other Asians speak fluent English. After school, a pickup football game pits a team of Mexican students against students from Central and South America.

Interactions between the groups, especially for foreign-born students, are relatively rare.

San Gabriel school officials have tried a number of methods to break up ethnic cliques. With help from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a New York-based human-relations organization, the school has held annual retreats for students, parents and teachers to explore ethnic issues. But this year, the session was canceled because of a lack of funding, said Stephen Kornfeld, one of two deans of students at San Gabriel High School.

For a firsthand look at the daily realities of student life in the ethnic mishmash that is San Gabriel High School, The Times followed two students around campus--one Vietnamese-

American and one Mexican-American--who have lived in the United States less than a year and speak minimal English.

Van Quan and Eduardo Garcia may never cross paths, but they share a common experience.

They both struggle to understand and to be understood. Sometimes, they feel lost when teachers rattle off sentences in English, and find solace in a teaching assistant who can speak their language.

In classes without foreign language assistants, they rely heavily on classmates for translation, even if the classmates speak only a little English themselves.

Here, through their eyes, is a look at a day in the school lives of Van Quan and Eduardo Garcia.

At 8 a.m. on a recent school day, 17-year-old Eduardo Garcia found himself in a room full of Latino and Asian immigrants learning about country-Western culture from their English teacher, a transplanted New Yorker.

The scene had a strange, only-in-Los Angeles feel to it. Here was Eduardo--who last September left his hometown of Tehuacan, Mexico, all alone to start a new life in the United States--trying to follow as the talk ricocheted from fried chicken to Dolly Parton.

“It’s a type of lifestyle that is very different from what is typical here in the Los Angeles area,” instructor Mark Fuhrmann told his English as a Second Language class. “(One of) the three most common states where we think about country music, country dance, country lifestyle, is the state of Kentucky. Anybody know where Kentucky is?”

“Kentucky Fried Chicken!” someone yelled. The students laughed.

Fuhrmann went on: “And Kentucky Fried Chicken comes from . . . “

“Kentucky!” Eduardo and others answered promptly.

“Kentucky,” Fuhrmann repeated for the class.

He unfurled a map and pointed to Kentucky and two other “country-Western states”--Tennessee and West Virginia--then proceeded to describe a part of the United States that most of his students had never seen.

Fuhrmann mimicked a Southern drawl and a cowboy’s swagger, and played a tape recording of his favorite country song, “All the Fun.” He asked if anyone had heard of Dolly Parton. No one thought they had, until he began to describe the physical attributes of the famous singer. That brought smiles of recognition.

But the highlight of the morning was the square dance.

Eduardo, a tall, pensive-looking youth, paid close attention as Fuhrmann demonstrated the dance steps, using a female student as his partner. But the lesson became complicated when Fuhrmann told four couples to form a square and step to the music.

“Honor your partner!” a male voice boomed from the tape player, calling out steps in quick succession as fiddle and banjo music played in the background. “Honor your corner!” “Swing your partner!” “Now, promenade!”

Someone in Eduardo’s group swung their partner in the wrong direction, triggering a chain reaction of bungled dance steps that turned the eight students into a web of tangled arms and bodies. To undo the mess, students began shouting directions to their peers--first in their native tongues, then in stilted English as they realized it was easier to use a language that everyone understood.

“No, this way,” Eduardo told an Asian student. “Left, left! Not right!”

“You turn around . . . other way,” an Asian girl told her Latino dance partner.

After a few more tries, the group was stepping to the music, laughing and enjoying this dose of a foreign culture. More importantly, the dance lesson had forced them to speak English to each other.

For much of the rest of the school day, Eduardo is free to speak Spanish, which he also speaks at home in Rosemead, where he shares a rented house with his brother’s family.

Eduardo’s brother, Miguel, preceded him to California by about five years; their parents remain behind in Tehuacan, maintaining the clutch-repair business Eduardo’s father built up over years of hard work.

Since enrolling at San Gabriel High School 10 months ago, Eduardo has been able to get by using his native tongue frequently.

Two of his six classes use Spanish-language textbooks and tests. Another class--mathematics--is taught mostly in Spanish by Ernesto Casanave, a native of Lima, Peru, whom school officials compare to renowned Los Angeles math teacher Jaime Escalante.

But in Fuhrmann’s class, “No Spanish,” Eduardo said solemnly. “Only English.”

This may seem harsh for a newcomer like Eduardo, especially since he knows Fuhrmann is fluent in Spanish and even teaches Spanish language classes for part of the day. But he refuses to utter a word of it in front of his ESL students.

“I want to let them know that learning the (English) language is very important,” Fuhrmann said. “You only learn by forcing yourself to speak. Right, Eduardo?”

“Yes,” Eduardo answered, but fell silent afterward.

In his third-period class--bilingual physical science--the rules were much different.

As he took his place behind a lab table on the right side of the portable classroom, Eduardo explained how the whole thing worked.

“The class is divided,” Eduardo said in Spanish through an interpreter, San Gabriel High School student Blanca Saldana. “That side speaks English, and this side speaks Spanish.”

When the bell rang, teacher Michael Lujan made an announcement in both languages.

“Five more days till finals!” he said. “Cinco mas dias!” But the teacher didn’t finish the sentence in Spanish, and left half the class on its own to figure out what was coming up in a week.

Nevertheless, Eduardo said he liked the arrangement: His tests and homework were in Spanish, and his textbook, La Materia y La Energia, was a Spanish language translation of the regular text. He was getting As and Bs in the course--a graduation requirement--without first having to learn a lot of English.

“If they didn’t offer this in Spanish,” he said, “I wouldn’t be able to pass.”

Although the class is fully bilingual--students are allowed to respond in either Spanish or English--Lujan said Eduardo and others “won’t ask questions because they’re ashamed of Spanish,” he said. At the same time, he added, they avoid using English because they’re intimated by their more fluent classmates.

Lujan, a Mexican-American born in East Los Angeles, said he is “almost fluent” in Spanish, having learned it three years ago. But because he doesn’t know science terms in Spanish, Lujan lectures mostly in English and depends on Dolores Maes, a teaching assistant, to translate.

“I probably scare them by speaking so much English,” he said.

After lunch, Eduardo was nervous: it was oral presentation day in his bilingual speech class, but he wasn’t quite ready with his report on los Vikingos, the Vikings. Luckily for Eduardo, the teacher, David Barrios, only had time to call on four students to make their presentations, and Eduardo wasn’t one of them.

Even when the school day proceeds routinely, tensions can lurk below the surface.

Toward the end of Eduardo’s English as a Second Language class, for instance, teen-agers became restless in their seats as they waited for the bell to ring.

Amid noisy chatter, a Latino student leaned over and playfully punched an Asian student on the arm.

Seemingly amused, the Asian student began wrestling with his classmate. As others looked on, a few Latinos joined in to help their friend, grabbing hold of the Asian’s arm and twisting it behind his back.

The student, suddenly annoyed, struggled and broke free. He bolted toward the doorway and darted out as soon as the bell rang. The whole incident happened in a few seconds--too quickly for the teacher to notice.

While walking home from school, Eduardo and his friend, 14-year-old Carlos Mejia, said Latino and Asian boys fight all the time, but rarely does it turn bloody or as serious as the two incidents in March.

“It happens every week,” Carlos said matter-of-factly. “But it’s not a big deal.”