The Amerasian Transit Center in Ho Chi Minh City Marks the First Stop in a Long Journey for the Children of Vietnamese Mothers and American GI Fathers to Claim an Uncertain Birthright in the U.S. : HAVEN’S GATE

The building in the city that once crumbled under a rain of artillery is clean, trim and inviting, not unlike a resort hotel, and the young Vietnamese people who live there are much the same.

But they are not quite Vietnamese, and they don’t want to stay. They long to be American, but they are not quite American. They are hopeful, but they are also bewildered, dispossessed, lost in a world of hazy culture and ethnicity between Orient and Occident.

They are Amerasians, the children of Vietnamese mothers and American soldier fathers who served during the Vietnam War, and they come to the Amerasian Transit Center in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, to take the first tentative step toward claiming an uncertain birthright in America.

If the Amerasians come to Orange County, they find at the other end of their journey a markedly different, and far smaller, facility: St. Anselm’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Center in Garden Grove.

The journey between the two centers involves nothing less than a social and cultural metamorphosis, or at least an attempt at it.

Mary Payne Nguyen knows how difficult the assimilation can be. She is the Amerasian services coordinator for the Garden Grove center, and she saw the operation of the Ho Chi Minh City center firsthand during a trip there last August.

“I was distressed to find that there were only about 300 Amerasians living there, in a place that was designed for between 1,000 and 1,100,” she said. “It was ridiculous.”

The Amerasian Transit Center, financed by nearly $500,000 of U.S. State Department money as a result of the Amerasian Homecoming Act, was completed in December, 1989. It was designed to be a residential and educational facility for Amerasians and their families who were preparing to move to the United States.

The Amerasians in transit live there for as long as needed--an average of six months--while immigration and transportation paperwork is being completed. They eat in a communal dining room and attend English language and voca tional classes in sewing and jewelry-making. And wait, and wonder about their new home in America.

If their future is uncertain, their past may be, officially, almost nonexistent and their present a tangle of bureaucracy, Nguyen said.

Amerasian homeless in Ho Chi Minh City can stay at the center indefinitely, and Amerasians from distant areas are permitted residency during their waiting period--an average of about 20 days, according to Le Van Thien, the director of the center--before departure for the United States. But economic hardship is always present.

Families from outside the city need about $100 just to travel to the center for the initial interview that begins the process. And this, Nguyen said, is “a fortune to most of them” and often prohibitive. They simply stay home.

And, the $130 per head that the U.S. State Department pays to the center for each emigrating Amerasian does not arrive until that person actually is processed and leaves. Cash advances are unknown.

Thien, through an interpreter, said that the money occasionally runs out and he must solicit donations from various Vietnamese businesses.

About 1,000 Amerasians per month must be processed through the center to raise enough money at $130 per head to keep the center running.

Also, many Amerasians are homeless and illiterate and have only vague memories of their backgrounds. Tracking this information down eats up more time, Nguyen said.

Phu Do, a 19-year-old Amerasian student at Orange Coast College, understands their frustrations. The son of a Vietnamese mother and an American serviceman, he left Vietnam in 1979 in a refugee boat and spent eight months in a refugee camp in Malaysia before arriving here to live with relatives.

As a boy, he said, he wanted to learn to speak and act like Americans, and spent as much time as he could in their company. But he remembers his first real look at America.

“Many of these people, the poor Amerasians,” he said, “are uneducated and they have a misconception that America is made of money. They can be rebellious and cause a lot of problems. The transit center should have a resident American who can tell them what America is all about.”

It did, but only for a short time. He is Jay McCarty, 24, a teacher from Fullerton who took a job teaching English at the center last summer. He became not only a teacher, but a mentor and role model for many Amerasian youths, their tangible link to their new home in the United States.

But McCarty was deported a month ago when the Vietnamese government declared that his tourist visa did not permit him to teach in the country. He is currently in Manila, teaching Amerasians there who are in transit from Vietnam to the United States.

Vietnamese workers at the center and in other official offices “are tough about the paperwork,” said Do. “It’s such a bad economic situation there that workers suggest bribery from the Amerasians. To get through the first stage of the paperwork, they have to pay $50 and the average Vietnamese working person makes $20 a month on the high end. Most of them are poor and they live on the streets. Where are they going to come up with $50? I met one Amerasian woman there who was a prostitute. She said she was doing it to get money to complete her paperwork.”

Nguyen said many never get the word at all: “A lot of people don’t even know they’re entitled to go.”

But simply getting here is no guarantee of an easier life.

The tiny Garden Grove center (which is, nonetheless, the largest of the 48 in the United States)has almost 600 Amerasians on its rolls, Nguyen said, but many of them continue to arrive lacking the most basic of skills needed to survive in their new land: a facility in English, a place to live and a marketable skill. And, Nguyen said, the older the children get--the oldest hover around age 30--the less likely they are to adapt.

“We’re talking about illiterate kids,” she said, “with a lousy self-image, totally dysfunctional in families. We’ve had 30 here in the last six months who were homeless. As they get older, frustration turns to rage, and the number of them in jail is going to go sky-high if we’re not careful. It may already be too late. Too many of them may be over the hill.”

They often experience frustrations early. A typical case, she says, was the young boy who had been entered on a flight list for the United States in December, 1990, but was held up because he did not meet the requirements for health clearance--a positive tuberculin test, Nguyen guessed. He completed his medical treatment in June, 1991, and was eligible to leave, “but nothing happened,” Nguyen said. His file had been forgotten in a computer, she said. She called the center staff’s attention to the case and the boy was placed on a flight list.

The overriding solution, Nguyen said, lies in awareness and funding. Specifically, she said, the center in Vietnam would benefit from a program through which Americans could sponsor individual Amerasians “right off the street” to cover the monthly costs of living at the center.

“If we don’t get Americans in there,” she said, “it’s not going to happen.”

At the U.S. end, Nguyen suggested a comprehensive three-year program to allow Amerasians to receive funds while they receive education and job training here.

“It has to get better,” she said. “I’m not going to let these kids come here and fail. They’re Americans who have been denied their potential their whole lives and we owe them something.”

Times staff photographer Gail Fisher contributed to this report.