President’s Visit Fixes Spotlight on Asians : Immigrants: Bush plans to honor the fastest-growing racial group in the nation with rally at Mile Square Park.

Andrew Kim came to America to get an education. Nothing more.

But when he graduated from Cal State Long Beach and returned to his native Korea in 1969, Kim didn’t like what he found. Good jobs were hard to come by, and the political situation was topsy-turvy.

“There weren’t that many opportunities,” Kim recalled recently. “I was there a couple months, and I came right back to the U.S. and said this is the place I would stay.”

Since then, Kim has created something of an all-American Asian family. He runs a firm that manufactures custom food processing equipment. His wife is a real estate agent. They live with their three children in a comfortable home nestled in a cul-de-sac in Fullerton.

Their eldest boy is studying journalism at the University of Texas. Kim’s 12-year-old son is the No. 2 tennis player for his age bracket in Southern California. Only his daughter has become immersed in her roots, taking time to learn the Korean language, attend a Korean church and sing in its choir.

Andrew Kim’s tale is one of many playing out these days. From Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Asian newcomers have arrived in droves, landing in America. And especially in Orange County.

For some, merging into the Western world has been a struggle laced with disappointment and sorrow. But others have flourished, gliding upward through the ranks. They are among the captains of the computer industry, the academic standouts, the eminent masters of music.

Today they all will be honored in an event rife with symbolism. President Bush will venture to Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley to pay homage to Asians and Pacific Islanders, who together make up the fastest-growing racial group in the United States.

Organizers expect more than 30,000 people to attend the 9:30 a.m. event. There will also be ancestral dances, food, and displays of ethnic crafts and skills. Bush will deliver a noon speech that aides say will both celebrate Asians in America and underscore the escalating importance of the nation’s economic and political relationship with Pacific Rim countries.

The President’s visit promises to train the national spotlight on the county’s vast and burgeoning Asian community.

During the 1980s, the number of Asians in the county jumped threefold, rising to nearly 250,000 people, or 10% of the county’s population.

The Vietnamese community alone ballooned 271% to 71,822 people, making it the largest Asian group in Orange County, according to 1990 U.S. Census figures.

The Chinese (41,403 people in the county), Korean (35,919) and Filipino (30,356) populations also increased dramatically, hurtling them past the Japanese, who only a decade ago were the largest Asian contingent in the county but now are fifth, with 29,704 people.

Nearly 4,000 Cambodians fled their war-torn homeland and established a life in the county during the 1980s. There are also 2,227 immigrants from Thailand, 575 Hmong and 79 Melanesians in the county, to name a few such groups.

Along with their belongings, these newcomers have imported a chorus of distinct languages, cultures and customs that have helped change the face of the county. Today it’s a more cosmopolitan community, a polyglot place where one often finds a Korean or a Thai in the corporate boardroom or behind the counter at the neighborhood video store.

Not all of the county’s Asians, of course, are fresh to this land. Most of the Japanese and many of the Chinese here have been around for generations.

Many have already made their mark, among them notables such as Dr. Sammy Lee, an American of Korean ancestry and a two-time Olympic diving gold medalist who lives in Huntington Beach, and international tennis star Michael Chang, the son of a Chinese expatriate.

The new wave of Asians is by and large foreign born. Although authorities have no firm figures, they estimate that at least two-thirds of the county’s Asians are immigrants from far-flung homelands.

Many of the Vietnamese newcomers arrived in the county to live with relatives who had already set down roots. The sprawling Vietnamese enclave in Garden Grove and Westminster, for instance, evolved from a core group of refugees who were evacuated after the war to temporary lodgings at Camp Pendleton. These refugees from a war-torn land trundled up Interstate 5 and discovered Orange County. Now their friends and relatives are following.

“What’s happening in Orange County isn’t at all unusual,” noted John Liu, a UC Irvine assistant professor of comparative culture and himself a second-generation Chinese-American.

“It has to do with chain migration,” he said. “Original immigrants act as a magnet for others. And the clustering that follows is a normal process. You’ve seen it before in the Chinatowns of Los Angeles or San Francisco.”

Liu said the waves of immigrants have typically arrived via two distinct routes. Many have been allowed to enter because they were sponsored by a friend or employer already in the country. But a growing number of well-to-do Asians, particularly those from Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines, have taken advantage of U.S. immigration laws that favor the wealthy, he said.

While many of the impoverished from Vietnam have flocked to ethnic enclaves such as Westminster’s Little Saigon business district, the growing ranks of well-heeled Asian immigrants have dispersed throughout the county, in communities spreading from Fullerton to Huntington Beach to Irvine.

Orange County has been a second or third stopping-off point for some Asians. Many Koreans first land in the thriving Koreatown district of Los Angeles. After hitting that beachhead, they migrate toward the suburbs in search of a slower-paced lifestyle. Others are looking for new territory to establish mom-and-pop businesses, trickling out toward Riverside, San Diego or Orange County.

“In Orange County there’s more opportunity for business,” said Wendy Yoo of the Korean-American Assn. of Orange County. “In L.A., (businesses are) established in all the good locations. So that’s why a lot of Koreans are moving here.”

For some Asians, it was simply a matter of the weather. After she fled Vietnam in 1975, Mai Cong was all set to begin a new life with her family in St. Louis. Then she talked with a couple of Marine Corps officers at Camp Pendleton, where she was being housed. The conversation set her straight.

“They told me St. Louis was cold,” she recalled. “So I went back to the administrative office and said we are not going to St. Louis. They said it’s understandable.”

Cong ended up in Orange County, where she has been instrumental in establishing a benchmark social services and cultural agency, the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc.

Such achievement is hardly unusual. In school and at the workplace, county Asians have shown all the traits of chronic overachievers.

Year in and year out, a favorable proportion of the 44,500 Asian pupils in county schools post top marks on achievement tests and find their way into the upper tier of graduating high school classes. Such immigrant brainpower will help the United States on the capitalist playing field.

“Our ability as a nation to compete in the international market is directly tied to the quality of the students we put out,” noted Liu of UCI. “These people, although they are of Asian decent, are Americans. They’ll be working in American industries and competing in the world market with people from Asia.”

Asian newcomers have also provided a fresh injection of economic investment and ingenuity for their new communities.

Lengthy swaths of Garden Grove and Westminster had gone to the weeds and wrecking yards before Vietnamese entrepreneurs began the revitalization process that has yielded the specialty shops and services of Little Saigon.

During the past decade, Korean merchants have helped pump life back into sections of Garden Grove and are now spreading their reach into parts of Santa Ana.

Today, the county boasts about 3,000 Vietnamese-run businesses and another 1,500 operated by Korean merchants.

Those immigrant marketeers have been joined in the county by a broad slate of Asia-based multinational firms. While firms such as Hyundai, Toshiba and Mazda were drawn primarily by the high-tech climate and broad market appeal of the region, the presense of a large Asian community also helped increase the area’s appeal to companies that often shuttle in Korean and Japanese businessmen on temporary assignment.

Economics aside, it is religion that remains the focal point for many Asians. Be they Buddhist, Roman Catholic or Protestant, people longing for contact with others from the homeland use these institutions both as places of worship and social centers.

Many of the religious centers also offer classes to tutor U.S.-born children on the customs and language of their ancestral land. The Chinese community has more than a dozen schools, and the Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese also offer courses to their youth.

Sometimes it’s a hard sell. Many children of immigrants are torn by bicultural pangs, trying to achieve a balance between U.S.-bred independence and the traditional devotion to duty embraced by most Asian cultures.

The social scene can also cause pressures at home between Asian parents and their children. Interracial dating is mostly accepted, but many first-generation Asian parents still wince at the thought of their children marrying someone of a different race.

Even home cooking can cause problems.

“They don’t even want to eat most of our authentic food,” noted Ernesto Delfin, a leader of the Filipino American Assn. of Orange County. “They would rather go to McDonald’s than cook fried rice. They are Americans for all intents and purposes.”

But assimilation has come painfully slow for some older newcomers. Although classes in English are widely available, language continues to pose a barrier in everything from job interviews to dealing with police.

Asian leaders say outright racism on the part of employers or outsiders is relatively rare, but there have been a few problems. Korean leaders cited more than a dozen incidents of hate crimes and vandalism in 1990 that were aimed at immigrants and institutions such as local Korean churches and schools.

During the early 1980s, the sudden influx of Asians prompted residents in some cities to begin debating whether Asian languages should be barred from merchant signs, but nothing came of the dispute. In recent years, at least two Asian churches in Orange County have been beset by difficulties in trying to establish quarters in predominantly white residential neighborhoods.

Some newcomers, meanwhile, have avoided straying too far from their own circles. Tony Luu, a 35-year-old construction worker, has been in the United States since he left Vietnam in 1984. But he rarely mixes with people outside the Vietnamese community. Days go by when he doesn’t use a word of English.

“There’s not really that much opportunity to mingle with them,” Luu said one recent day. “I’m sure that racially, ethnically everyone is good, but it’s better and causes less trouble if everyone stays to themselves.”

Others have simply failed to hew out a happy life in America, to find the fabled Golden Mountain that first drew Chinese immigrants in the 19th Century.

“If you go deep in the community, you still see a lot of people who have a lot of problems,” said Cong of the Vietnamese social service outfit. “It’s because of the language barrier, because of a lack of marketable skills. People are unable to make a decent living. We have quite a lot of that.”

Kha Nguyen first heard about Orange County while languishing in a Vietnamese prison camp after the fall of Saigon. Visiting relatives would whisper the words, the promising tales of a distant land.

Then and there, Nguyen made a pledge. Someday he would live a free man’s life in Orange County, California. The U.S.A. It was all synonymous with freedom. And opportunity.

Nguyen has been here six months now. With his wife and two teen-age children, the erstwhile major in the army of South Vietnam has settled in two cramped rooms in a friend’s home. He has not found work, getting by instead on welfare. He struggles daily with a new language.

But he hasn’t given up.

“Yes, we hope for something better,” Nguyen acknowledged recently, a California Angels baseball cap tugged down on his head. “But this is better than Vietnam. There we lived day by day. Here, we live for tomorrow.”

Bush Rally

President Bush will be in Orange County today to address Asian- and Pacific-Americans at Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley. The event is free, but tickets must be obtained. Early arrival is urged because of crowds.

Site: Edinger Avenue, near Euclid Street.

Tickets: They will be available at 9 a.m. at the Edinger entrance to the park.

Parking: Motorists can drive into the park through the Euclid or Edinger entrances. Parking costs $2 per vehicle. Limited off-street parking is available on Euclid and Edinger.

Time: The soccer field opens at 9:30 a.m. Because those attending will need to take the time to pass through a metal detector, people are urged to arrive in the park by 9. Bush is scheduled to arrive by helicopter at noon.

The Destinations: Orange County’s Asian Immigration 1983-86

During the mid-1980s, these seven cities attracted most of the 9,402 Asians who immigrated directly to Orange County. The largest numbers of newcomers were refugees arriving from Vietnam and immigrants from Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan.

Huntington Beach: 942 Santa Ana: 984 Buena Park / La Palma: 1,003 Irvine: 1,026 Fullerton: 1,032 Garden Grove: 1,095 Anaheim: 1,799 Source: John Liu, UC Irvine and U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service