A Long and Winding Road to America : Immigration: In Vietnam, Amerasians wait and worry while Ho Chi Minh City transit center processes their paperwork.

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 fathers who served during the Vietnam War, and they go 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 arrive in Orange County, they find a markedly different, and far smaller, facility: St. Anselm’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Center in Garden Grove.

The journey between the centers involves nothing less than a social and cultural metamorphosis.

Mary Payne Nguyen has seen how difficult and intimidating the process 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 during a trip there in 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 in U.S. State Department money as a result of the Amerasian Homecoming Act, was completed in December, 1989. It was designed as a residential and educational facility for Amerasians bound for United States.

They live there while their immigration and transportation paperwork is being prepared.

Amerasian homeless in Ho Chi Minh City may stay indefinitely, and Amerasians from distant areas may stay during their waiting period, an average of about 20 days, says center director Le Van Thien, before departing for the United States.

The U.S. State Department pays the center $130 for each emigrating Amerasian, but only after the person leaves. Le Van Thien said through an interpreter that the money occasionally runs out and that he must solicit donations from Vietnamese businesses. About 1,000 Amerasians, who range in age from their late teens to 30s, must be processed each month, he said, to keep the center running. Those outside the city may need as much as $100 to travel to the center. This is “a fortune to most of them,” Ngyuen said, so many simply stay home. Others, “don’t even know they’re entitled to go.”

Many Amerasians are homeless and illiterate and have only vague memories of their backgrounds, Nguyen said. Tracking down the background information for immigration papers requires time and, sometimes, money.

Phu Do, a 19-year-old Amerasian student at Orange Coast College, has witnessed the struggle to get to the United States.

Vietnamese workers at the (Ho Chi Minh City) center and in other official offices “are tough about the paperwork,” said Do, who arrived here in 1979, after eight months in a Malaysian refugee camp, to live with relatives. “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. . . . Where are they going to come up with $50? I met one woman who was a prostitute. She said she was doing it to get money to complete her paperwork.”

Once they make it out, many Amerasians are completely unprepared for life in the United States, he said.

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

It once did, but only for a short time. When Jay McCarty, 24, took a job teaching English at the center last summer, he also became a mentor and role model for many Amerasian youths. But McCarty, of Fullerton, was recently deported when the Vietnamese government said his tourist visa did not permit him to teach in the country.

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. Many arrive lacking the basic 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 they are--the oldest Amerasians hover around 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.”

Many of the Amerasians experience frustration early in their journey, Nguyen said. She found what she considers a typical case during her visit to the Ho Chi Minh City center:

A young boy had been entered on a flight list for the United States in December, 1990, but was held up because he did not meet the health requirements. After completing medical treatment in June, 1991, he was eligible to leave, “but nothing happened,” Nguyen said. His file had been forgotten in a computer. She called the staff’s attention to the case and the boy was placed on a flight list.

Nguyen believes the Vietnam center would benefit from a program through which Americans could sponsor Amerasians “right off the street,” covering their living expenses at the center. And she suggests that the center introduce comprehensive English classes taught by Americans and vocational courses in such trades as electronic assembly.

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

On the U.S. end, Nguyen advocates a comprehensive, three-year program in which Amerasians would 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.