COLUMN ONE : Vietnam’s Castoffs Come Home : At least 30,000 Amerasians are casualties of America’s national ambiguity about the war. Many end up in Little Saigon, looking for threads from the past.

Her mother sent her here, she says, fidgeting a little, breaking into a grin, not quite sure if happiness is called for or not.

People around her are speaking in English, a language that she recognizes only for its incomprehensible sounds. When she speaks, her words are in Vietnamese.

Thu-Ha Le has been in Little Saigon a week. She was born in Bien-hoa, on the outskirts of that other Saigon, the one that no longer officially exists. It was the Year of the Chicken, 22 years ago on Christmas Day. This makes Thu-Ha proud.

Here in America, she knows that Christmas is a big day.

“My mother told me to come and find my father,” she says. “She says that finding my father will mean that I will have a better future.”

Then Thu-Ha pauses, looking down. Her father is a black American, just a story from the war. Her mother is Vietnamese. The mosaic of cultures shows on Thu-Ha’s face and in her walk. She says her father was an engineer.

“I’m afraid to find him,” she says, more softly now. “I think he might have a family and not want me.”

The flash of sadness, however, soon fades. Her smile, reflex mixed with trust, lifts her eyes once again. Thu-Ha says she will search for her father nonetheless--because it is her mother’s will. There is hope, she says. She knows her father’s name.

It is John. Nothing else.

Mary Payne Nguyen, at the end of a very long week, sighs loudly, making a face. She has heard this too many times before.

She is coordinator of Amerasian services at St. Anselm’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Center, one of 48 so-called cluster sites across the nation where volunteers and near-volunteers work against time and odds to acculturate the often-unwanted offspring of an unpopular war.

The Amerasians--at least 30,000, maybe more--are casualties of America’s national ambiguity about Vietnam.

Never in the history of U.S. warfare has the nation undertaken such a mammoth effort to own up to fathering so many. But the effort took 13 years.

The Amerasians are too old for childhood now but not quite old enough to understand exactly why it passed them by. Derided as “half-breeds” in Vietnam, beaten down by discrimination and hate, they arrive here with the expectation that their American blood will quickly restore a future denied.

It is cruelly untrue.

Since the Amerasian Homecoming Act took effect in March of 1988, more than 12,000 Amerasians have entered the United States from Vietnam, three times as many as had arrived since the fall of Saigon in 1975.

The State Department estimates that up to 20,000 more--accompanied by 60,000 Vietnamese family members--will arrive by the end of next year.

Thousands of them are expected to settle eventually in and around Little Saigon, the largest Vietnamese community in the United States. So far this year, more than 600 have registered for help at St. Anselm’s, and that number is expected to double, at least, by the end of this year.

And the story, perhaps not quite as dramatic as in Little Saigon, is much the same throughout the rest of the nation as well.

A few studies about what this means, in human terms, have already been completed; others are under way. The key phrase seems always to be that the Amerasians are “at high risk”--for drugs, dependency and despair.

They’ve grown up feeling abandoned by their fathers and, at best, neglected by Vietnamese society at large. In America, they feel out of place too.

They all need education. They need jobs. They need fathers, and sometimes mothers as well. They need their childhoods restored and, failing that, they need luck.

Yet they show an amazing capacity to survive. And to forgive.

“There is no way to harden yourself to this,” Mary Nguyen says. “There is just no way. I come home emotionally battered every night. . . . What we need is a group home, someplace where they could all live and learn. Except that they are too old for that.”

Almost all of the Amerasians hope to be reunited with their fathers someday. They want to see how they look, how they move, and maybe connect with something inside them that will make them whole.

Odds are that maybe 1% will ever get that chance.

Dai Nguyen, 19, clings to a letter that his mother, Kim Lan Nguyen, pressed into his hand moments before he stepped on the plane that took him from her and Vietnam. They were both in tears.

Dai kept his promise and did not open the letter until he reached his father’s land. It tells him everything that his mother knows about his American father--a man that his mother married--and includes two photographs of his father’s friend, her English teacher in Kien-hoa province.

“To Nguyen Kim Lan,” the back of one snapshot reads. “A very good student and fine human being.” The date is Oct. 11, 1969.

Dai, who has been in Little Saigon a month, says his mother burned anything connected with her husband within hours of the Communist victory in Vietnam. Keeping the material would have been too much of a risk; already, their lives were very hard.

Still, Dai has a complete name, a military rank, a year of birth and maybe even a city where his father lived.

“Dad and I have our own song, never to be forgotten,” Kim Lan Nguyen writes in the letter to her son. “It is ‘My Sweet Lord.’ When you see your Dad, remind him of that.”

Most of the Amerasians have had little formal education in Vietnam. Illiteracy, in Vietnamese and English, is rife. Many cannot do simple math.

Those with a complete, happy family structure are rare. Morality was often learned on the streets.

“It’s really hard to get along with them, because they are Amerasian,” says Dean Le, a 25-year-old employment development counselor at St. Anselm’s.

“The way they talk, the way they eat, the way they walk, it’s different,” he says. “They’re different even than me, and I was born in Vietnam. They don’t have confidence. That’s what I try to teach them. It’s going to be hard to get them jobs.”

The concept of delayed gratification, of studying hard to one day reach a goal, is a particularly bewildering aspect of life in this new high-tech world. The Amerasians have usually lived day to day--many hand to mouth.

And even as they migrate toward Little Saigon, where the familiarity of the Vietnamese culture is a strong lure, they often battle the ghosts of prejudice that they thought they had left behind in Vietnam.

“These Amerasian kids were discriminated against in Vietnam,” says the Rev. Duc X. Nguyen, director of refugee programs for World Vision, one of eight nonprofit agencies helping to resettle the Amerasians.

“And now, for the Vietnamese here, well, they don’t change their attitude against them overnight.”

Others, more blunt, say the Vietnamese women who mixed with Americans were looked upon as traitors and whores.

“I remember when I was pregnant, people would half-smile and laugh,” says Tho Nguyen, who arrived in San Bernardino with her two daughters--the older, Amerasian, and the other Vietnamese--in January of last year.

“Then, when I have the baby, they say some bad things because I have an American baby,” she says. “When I have the baby, I not talk to them. I stay inside. I don’t worry about other people, what they say. I love my kids.”

But even Mary Nguyen, who is married to a Vietnamese man and has “adopted” 12 Amerasians herself, says that loving these young people takes work. They are often impolite, demanding and brash, quick to anger and quick to give up.

Many of the young men trumpet their shame on their skin. Vietnamese script, often tattooed by friends or the men themselves when they are drunk, chronicle their sins or the hopelessness of their lives. The words are sometimes misspelled.

Experts who have studied the new arrivals say that, as a group, they are depressed and desperate for someone to trust.

“I think there is hope, if we help them now,” psychiatrist Jean Carlin says. “We should not just let these people go down the tubes and then support them in prison later on.”

In Little Saigon, police say some Amerasians are already joining gangs, participating in home invasions, robberies and doing drugs. Gangs can offer a “family atmosphere” that some Amerasians have never really had.

For black Amerasians especially, the sense of being an outcast can be acute.

Loc Van Nguyen, a 25-year-old Amerasian transient, says he has been arrested “many, many times.” He has no home in America, and in Vietnam it was the same, he says.

He doesn’t know either of his parents. He says he only knows that his father was black.

Before he is arrested yet again--for stealing an American flag flying in front of the Postal Service station in Little Saigon--Westminster Officer Robert Trotter recites Loc’s name and date of birth from memory as he writes it down.

Loc admits to stealing other American flags before.

“I take them to throw them away,” he says. “I want to (expletive) the American people. They are very stupid.”

Resettlement officials stress that the word on the new immigrants is not all bad. They point to success stories in the making--young men and women learning English, finding productive jobs, attending college and nurturing hope.

A family in Springfield, Mass. just bought a new home. Some of the Amerasians have extraordinary talents that are just now being uncovered in their new land.

“They have not been here that long,” says Michael Kocher, director of the Amerasian program at InterAction, the umbrella organization coordinating resettlement. “What are we expecting? That they are going to jump off the plane, get a mid-level managerial position and buy a house in the suburbs to join the middle class?”

This will happen, officials say, with time. Unlike most of the other waves of newcomers, the Amerasians have no established community in the United States where people are exactly like them.

And like any other ethnic group, they cannot be painted with too broad a brush. One trait that links them all, however, is their capacity to survive. The Amerasians have already endured hardships that would destroy lesser souls.

Tai Tran, 22, says he doesn’t remember a thing about the first 10 years of his life. He never knew his parents.

He lived with a friend on the streets of Phan-thiet, near the bus station where he worked loading cargo on buses about to depart. He says a woman, who sold candy at the station herself, began to look out for him after that.

“One day when I guess I was about 12 years old, my adopted mother pointed out a woman on the street,” Tai says. “She said that that was my real mother. But I didn’t believe her.”

Tai has been in the United States six months. He is studying English in Garden Grove and one day hopes to get a job working on cars. He says that he is not particularly happy but that he has felt much worse.

“It was the Communists mostly,” Tai says of his life in Vietnam. “They would call me half-breed. They would say, ‘Why don’t you go to your father’s country?’ Well, now I am here. And I will stay.”

Maybe he will find his father, Tai says. Maybe not.

“If I would find him--but how?--I would say, ‘So long that I not see you. Why didn’t you take me with you? Why did you leave me in Vietnam?’ ”

The delay in bringing the Amerasians out of Vietnam--blame politics, bitterness, indifference, racism or guilt--has detoured the course of thousands of lives. Not all of them in Vietnam.

Hundreds of veterans and other men who spent time in Vietnam have asked the government and the American Red Cross for help in finding the Amerasian children who share their genes. Very few searches produce a match.

The vast majority of potential fathers, however, never ask.

“I have one friend from Texas who was in my unit,” says Benjamin Romero, vice president of the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter in Denver. “And when he left Vietnam, his Vietnamese girlfriend was three months’ pregnant. He tried to get her out, but the military and the U.S. Consulate there told him to forget about it, that it wasn’t his problem.

“He lost track of her, and he has no idea if the baby was ever even born. He’s married now and his wife doesn’t know about it. I’m surprised he brought it up to me. It wasn’t that long ago that we talked.”

Other U.S. military men succeeded in getting their Vietnamese loved ones out.

Andy Stone, born in Saigon 18 years ago, arrived in Portland, Ore., in 1973 with his Vietnamese mother and older brother--and his American dad. Stone is curious, but not overly so, about the Vietnamese in his blood.

“When I was young, my mom took me to a Buddhist temple,” he says. “But I wasn’t interested in it. My mother is a Buddhist, and she prays every night. My dad is just a regular American. I’m just totally Americanized.”

Reps. Robert J. Mrazek (D-N.Y.) and Tom Ridge, (R-Pa.) co-sponsored the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which removed any quotas on Amerasian immigration to the United States. The legislation sailed through Congress in December, 1987, its genesis a tellingly feel-good American tale.

Five years ago, a photographer for Long Island’s Newsday newspaper captured an image of then 15-year-old Minh Van Le, a crippled, baby-faced Amerasian boy, as he hunched on all fours on a street in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. Minh was selling flowers made of crumpled aluminum foil from discarded cigarette packs.

Appalled by the image, students at Huntington High School, in Mrazek’s home district, enlisted the congressman’s help in what eventually evolved into a successful international crusade to allow Minh to immigrate to the United States.

Mrazek himself traveled to Hanoi to bring the Amerasian child back, sweeping him in his arms as they boarded the plane and then, days later, holding him aloft on American soil. The entire episode was recorded on miles of film.

At the time, relations between the United States and Vietnam--which still do not officially recognize each other--were especially tense, and the number of Amerasians and Vietnamese allowed to leave the communist country, never high, had slowed to an erratic drip.

The case of Minh Van Le, officially referred to by Vietnam and the United States as an exception, is credited with improving cooperation between the two countries. They are still a very long way from being friends.

“For whatever reason,” a State Department official says, “it is working. The last couple of years, the cooperation in this area has been excellent.”

But during those years when it was not, the Amerasians were growing up, any way they could.

“I think it is a shame that it took this long,” InterAction’s Michael Kocher says. “I think both the Vietnamese government and our government have to share in the responsibility for that. The war between our two countries did not end in 1975.

“Without question, it is more difficult for a 20- or 21-year-old to make adjustments than it is for a 5- or 6-year-old.”

“We could have done this so well ,” Mary Nguyen says. “But the public just wasn’t ready to deal with Vietnam.”

Many who work within the refugee community say that the French government had the right idea in 1954. It brought the offspring of its soldiers home to France--as full citizens--at the same time that their parents lost that nation’s war against the Vietnamese. Reports from Paris say the French Eurasians have done well overall.

It is still too early to know what will happen here.

“I often wonder if we are doing the right thing by bringing them here,” says San Jose attorney Bruce Burns, a Vietnam veteran who founded a loose-knit organization that helps Amerasians leave Vietnam and others find their fathers once they are here.

“I have been doing this since 1985,” Burns says, “and I haven’t been able to figure out what we are doing, what the purpose is. My fear is that in 1995, I’m going to start getting calls about how screwed up the Amerasians are and why did we bring them here. . . .

“The only thing I keep falling back on is--looking at people’s lives in Vietnam and looking at people’s lives here--at least the chance for a productive, happy life is greater here.”

Thu-Ha Le, the Amerasian visiting St. Anselm’s for the first time, has traveled a well-worn path to her father’s land. It is mined with deceit and fraud.

Thu-Ha’s mother, desperately poor, gave a Vietnamese man permission to pose as her daughter’s husband so that this man might enter the United States too.

The two were flown to the Philippines as part of the Orderly Departure Program and stayed in the Bataan refugee camp for the routine six months. Both were given resident alien status in the United States, as are all others who enter the country in this way.

Once they were resettled in Arizona, however, Thu-Ha’s “husband” abandoned her, leaving for Louisiana, where he has friends. He took with him a decades-old address that Thu-Ha had hoped would lead to her father, John.

He took other, intangible things as well.

“Now I hear that my mother is sick because she misses me so much,” Thu-Ha says.

She has moved in with some friends--seven people in a small, three-bedroom house--whom she met at the refugee camp. They live close to the center of Little Saigon. She will collect refugee cash assistance--in California, $341 a month--for 11 months and help pay the rent.

It is unlikely that anyone will be held accountable for Thu-Ha’s paper marriage charade. Fraud in the Orderly Departure Program, officials in government and voluntary agencies concede, is almost built in. Estimates are that 10% to 30% of the family applications involve some degree of stretching the truth.

Neither the State Department nor the Immigration and Naturalization Service, however, can recall anybody being deported from the United States for such crimes.

Dai Nguyen says his mother wanted to accompany him to the United States but could not afford the costs. Instead, he says, she connected him with a new “family,” people who would use her Amerasian child as a living passport to the immigrant’s dream.

Even though the United States pays the Vietnamese government $137 for each Amerasian and accompanying Vietnamese leaving Vietnam, U.S. officials acknowledge that the immigrants often pay bribes, that favors are traded for cash and that false documents can be passed off as real.

Estimates of black market rates, per family, range from $300, to $500, to $1,000. A recent newspaper article published in Vietnam detailed the trade as well. An Amerasian is one of the quickest tickets out of Vietnam.

Dai says he misses his mother more than ever, now that the “family” he arrived with wants to kick him out of their home in Garden Grove.

“When I lived with them in Vietnam (in preparation for the interview with U.S. officials to determine whether the family unit was real), they would yell at me,” Dai says. “I would come back to my mother and tell her, but she said I must come to the United States, that I didn’t have any future in Vietnam. . . .

“Now that I am here with these people, they don’t like me anymore. They just want me out. We live together, but they don’t talk to me. They don’t look at my face. They say that I am not a child anymore and that I have to go. They say I am American. They see Americans drinking, smoking and they say, ‘See! Americans like you!’ ”

Dai’s aspirations for the future are vague. And Thu-Ha too says she has no idea what it holds for her.

Both new immigrants hope to bring their mothers here.

“Here I have freedom,” Thu-Ha says. “I want to go to work, but I don’t know where. I want to study, maybe hairdressing. . . . America is very different than I thought it would be. I thought it was going to be a lot easier. I thought more people would help.”