Coming to America, Making the Grade : Culture: As a foster child from Vietnam, Joe Huynh says he ‘was forced to look at myself sooner in life than most kids.’

Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown wanted Joe Huynh in their freshman class.

So did Georgetown, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCLA.

All in all, a pretty good year for Huynh, who was accepted at to 13 of the nation’s top universities and was captain of the tennis team, dated the prom queen, earned an A-plus average and will be valedictorian at his graduation from Hoover High School in Glendale on Thursday.

And not bad for someone who was 2 years old when he left his native Vietnam for the United States in 1975.

Sixteen years ago, Huynh (pronounced “win”) was on a boat with his parents, four brothers and two sisters when Viet Cong soldiers pulled off all the men, including his father.

The elder Huynh remains in Vietnam and has written to his son only three or four times.

“Honestly, it’s not really important that I have no contact with him. . . . He didn’t raise me. I can’t even call him a friend. I have my own life to live. I’m not going to dwell upon the past,” his son says.

Huynh’s family eventually sailed to Guam and flew to California, where a Burbank church had agreed to sponsor them--and where a priest gave Huynh the name “Joe,” which he is commonly called.

Meanwhile, Huynh’s mother was affected by the pressure of leaving her country and losing her husband. She thought characters she saw on television were real and she stopped feeding her children because she believed the food was poisoned. She now lives in a psychiatric hospital in Norwalk where Huynh visits her once a month. But verbal communication is difficult, in part because of language differences and in part because of her illness.

Because of their mother’s illness, the seven children needed homes. The church sponsoring Huynh’s family contacted Russell Bly, a Postal Service supervisor, and his wife, Lola, an elementary school teacher, to see if they were interested in taking one of them.

“We had been trying to get pregnant,” Lola Bly says. Then she ran into a girlfriend who had three children of her own and was going to take in one of the Huynh children.

“I felt kind of guilty. I felt like we were being selfish wanting one of our own if we could help out,” Bly says.

At St. Finbar’s Church, the Blys saw the children from a distance. “That’s when we saw Joe,” Lola Bly recalls. “He was tiny and cute.”

The Blys took home 3-year-old Joe and six other Burbank-Glendale-area families made homes for his brothers and sisters, who now range in age from 16 to 26. Two of them work full time and the others attend college or high school. They see each other periodically.

The Blys attempted to adopt Huynh in 1982, but a judge turned down the request, ruling that Huynh’s father might come to the United States some day.

“It hurt me that we couldn’t give him our name,” Lola Bly says. “I had felt like he was our son a few weeks after we got him.”

The Blys settled for legal guardian status.

Huynh, 18, lives with the couple he calls “mom and dad” in a modest, Spanish-style home a few blocks beneath the Verdugo mountains. Tennis trophies and documents that are important to him line his bedroom walls: Copies of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address.

Huynh does not speak Vietnamese nor does he observe the traditions of his native land. Yet growing up in a new culture with predominantly Asian-American friends and non-Asian foster parents--his father is from Minnesota, his mother from Mexico--forced him to think about his identity.

“A lot of times at an early age everybody was asking if I was Vietnamese, why did I have a Mexican mom and an American father?

“It forced me to look at myself sooner in life than most kids. I had to find out who I was, what I believed and what I was going to do with my life,” says Huynh, who has encountered few problems because of his ancestry.

“There are a good number of Asians in Glendale,” he says. “It hasn’t been that difficult for me because there are so many people around who look like me.”

Upon deciding that academics were important to his future, Huynh--who retains material after one reading--studied hard.

He has the ability to do many things while studying. He once perused his economics book while doing pushups at tennis practice. He also can do his calculus homework while eating and watching television--all at the same time. “The only thing that kills me is studying and watching ‘Jeopardy’ because then I have to think,” he says.

This fall, there may be less time for “Jeopardy” when Huynh heads for Stanford.

Huynh says he picked Stanford because he liked the people he met during his visit to the Palo Alto campus, where his sister, Anne, is a junior.

“People were a lot of fun and very open and honest,” he says. “They were all excited about Stanford.

“They gave me a minority roommate, but everything else was geared to being a Stanford student. I felt I was a pre-freshman, not a minority pre-freshman.”

His other top choice had been Harvard. However, “I had certain experiences which were terrible,” he says of his spring visit to Cambridge, Mass. “The majority of the people I met at Harvard were very rude, pompous or unfriendly.”

And perhaps in an attempt to make him feel at home, organizers of the Harvard weekend made him feel “like a minority. They sent a paper welcoming me from a minority club,” he says.

Huynh, who loves to read, plans to study English at Stanford.

Says Huynh: “I can see myself in my writing and I can see myself improve and that’s very important to me.”

According to those who know him, Huynh has always loved learning.

“He’s very tuned in to academics,” says Carroll Irwin, an English teacher at Hoover. “His face is alive. There’s an eagerness or an enjoyment to learning.”

After college, he hopes to learn something else. He wants to go to law school and, eventually, sit on the Supreme Court.

“I’ve been watching the legal process since I was a foster child. It’s kept me interested.”