More Than a Flickering Love of Science : Education: Young immigrant captures top science fair honors and looks forward to the future.

Barely into her impressionable teens and new to the United States, there she was--a soft, sterile wind blowing back her hair.

The table setting was perfect: a flask, a sifter, a single flickering Sterno can.

When she lifted her glass, and her eyes held that dreamy gaze, you knew she was about to be seduced by that old Romeo.

Science.

Last year, Phuc Le met young love in her school’s biology lab.

The 17-year-old Chula Vista high school junior threw her all into finding out how many bacteria get killed off by pesticides and herbicides.

Her work netted a first prize in the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair. Soon to come was a second place in the California State Fair.

This week, Phuc (pronounced FOO), will exhibit her science project for a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology when the group honors high school students interested in science and medical fields.

The difficulties Phuc has endured have made her an individualist, able to decide what she wants to do, whether it is in school work or personal life, said her science project adviser, Steve Rodecker.

“She has her own way about her,” said Rodecker, a biology teacher at Chula Vista. “She is not one to be fazed by pressures from the outside.”

Phuc’s laboratory encounter and other academic achievements--she maintains a 4.0 grade-point average--are even more exceptional because she had less than two years to master English before going to Chula Vista High School.

Her motivation to do well, she said, comes from a feeling of having more opportunity than in her native Vietnam.

“My father worked for the old republic,” Phuc said in a telephone interview from the biology lab at school. “My parents were under a lot of pressure there.”

In Saigon, Phuc’s father was a surgeon; her mother, a gynecologist.

Under the Communist government that came to power in 1975, they were often interrogated by police. Phuc said police would come to their home to intimidate her father and mother, taking them into a room and closing the door.

Phuc wasn’t allowed to listen, she said.

“But afterward, I always could tell my father was stressed,” she said. “Because our father and mother worked for the old government, there was going to be much less opportunity for the children. Our family understood it that way.”

Phuc’s family left Saigon when her oldest sister finished high school. Because of the family’s connection to the deposed government, Phuc said, her sister’s entrance into Vietnamese universities was “blocked.”

“No one tells us this directly, it’s all understood,” Phuc said.

As political refugees in 1988, Phuc, her father, Anh, two sisters and a brother set out on a boat with another family, drifting for days in the South China Sea. Phuc’s mother stayed in Saigon, in order to fend for the family in case they were captured and jailed.

Filipino fishermen guided the family to shore in the Philippines and took them to a village near Subic Bay. They stayed in refugee camps for a year before immigrating to the United States in 1989. The Les have applied to the Vietnamese government for their mother’s release. Since May, Phuc’s mother, Kim Hoan Nguyen, has been on a waiting list to leave Vietnam. Her father is studying to be licensed in medicine here.

Phuc is now concentrating on the future.

She’s working on a project for the 1992 high school competition next spring. Phuc’s study is on “mammalian tissue cell mutagenesis,” which, she said, caught her interest as she was reading about “viruses and stuff.”

Phuc has been working on the project with a San Diego State University professor who was introduced by Rodecker. They meet in a laboratory at SDSU.

Phuc said she is considering being a researcher or a medical doctor, but hasn’t decided where she will go to college.

Amid the beakers, microscopes and other paraphernalia of the high school laboratory, Phuc said she has come to appreciate the finer points of taking a tissue culture.

She meticulously bakes her pipettes for proper sterilization. To clear away air impurities as she works, she faces the gentle gusts of sterile wind emanating from her lab’s chemical hood.

“In tissue culture, contamination is rampant,” Phuc said, “the tissue dies very easily.

“Sometimes, I wonder why I became so interested in these things.”

She said her idea of fun must be different from her peers’.

“Being into science is like being an artist,” she said. “I accept that others are going to think I’m different.”