Slaying Mars Youth’s Dreams of a New Life : Amerasians: The saga of Kiem Do, while extreme, points to the problems children face when they accompany ‘adopted’ Vietnamese families to America.

Kiem Do stares at the photographs of his family, his home and his church half a world away, momentarily oblivious to screaming children and shouting adults in the interview room of the Orange County Jail.

He looks at the simple cottage where he spent the first 19 years of his life, gazes at the pain-filled faces of his mother and brother-in-law. He buries his face in one hand and cries silently.

“I miss my country so much,” he says.

Kiem Do is an Amerasian, the son of an American GI and a Vietnamese woman. He knew neither of his parents, having been put in an orphanage and adopted when he was 6 months old by the woman he now calls “mom.” He left her to come to America to start a new life last October with a newly “adopted” family that included the 18-year-old girl he loved.

But after only a few days in his new land, something went dreadfully wrong. His girlfriend’s parents told him that they did not want their daughter to marry him. Do picked up a knife and stabbed his girlfriend, Hang Dinh, to death.

Eleven days ago, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 11 years in prison--meaning he may go free in 5 1/2 years.

At the house where the killing took place, less than a five-minute drive from the jail, no traces of the crime remain.

Hang Dinh’s parents have moved and left no forwarding address. So has her uncle, Viet Van Nguyen, who opened his Garden Grove house to them--and Do--when they first came to America.

Even before moving, Nguyen was willing to speak only briefly about the tragedy. Standing behind a screen door, he said Hang Dinh’s parents do not want to talk about their loss.

Hang Dinh’s “mother stays home, takes care of the” children, Nguyen said. “The father goes to school.” They don’t speak of their slain daughter much. Nguyen groped for the right words: “I think they miss her a lot.”

The drama of Kiem Do and Hang Dinh is extreme, of course, a tragedy one police officer likened to “Romeo and Juliet.” But many in the Vietnamese community see it overlaid with the special problems of the Amerasians, children of Americans and Asians brought together by a war whose problems endure 17 years after the Communist victory in Vietnam.

Rene Shakerin, director of the Amerasian Program at Catholic Charities in San Jose, says many Amerasians are exploited by Vietnamese who want to get to America but are ineligible to emigrate. They latch onto the children--often for only as long as it takes to get to the United States.

The Amerasians are called “gold kids,” bought and sold the way a trader deals in precious metals.

For many hastily arranged “families,” says Shakerin, “once they come here, they do break up. There is no natural bond between the family that ‘adopts’ them and the Amerasian. They get here and they may live together for a while and then sometimes the families just throw them out.”

When the family breaks up, “it’s really traumatizing” for the Amerasians. “They feel they’re alone here. And they are.”

The State Department says that from 1984 through 1991, 13,523 Amerasians, plus 34,324 accompanying relatives, came to the United States from Vietnam. The bulk of them came after March, 1988, when the Amerasian Homecoming Act took effect.

The U.S. government hopes to process a final 30,000 Amerasians by the end of 1993, though based on the past refugee departures, that goal may be ambitious.

An official says the State Department believes the number of Amerasians and family members who come to the United States fraudulently is “small compared to the overall numbers.”

Do refuses to talk about the slaying on the advice of a lawyer, so many questions about his relationships remain. But sentiment among Orange County Vietnamese is that the family used Do as a ticket to America, according to police and community leaders.

The State Department will let an Amerasian bring family members, adopted family, or even “whoever is the Amerasian’s primary support-giver throughout the years,” a department official says.

Do’s feelings about the Dinh family have changed.

“I didn’t feel that they were using me while we were in Vietnam,” he says. “It was only here that they turned on me.”

Some of Do’s earlier memories are of school days in Dong Nai marked by taunts and beatings from classmates who branded him a “half-breed.” As he grew older he avoided strangers who might comment on his parentage.

Dong Nai is an area where many North Vietnamese relocated after the partition of Vietnam in 1954 into the Communist north and non-Communist south. A two-hour drive north of Ho Chi Minh City, which was formerly Saigon, Dong Nai is in many ways a typical village, sprung up where dirt roads intersect, sporting alleys overgrown with lush vegetation.

Do says he wasn’t especially close to his friends in the village because he felt they treated him differently than they would a full-blooded Vietnamese.

“I don’t know how much of it was my imagination because I was self-conscious and how much was real,” he says. His closest friend was the husband of an adopted sister, but he didn’t discuss his parentage even with him.

No one in his family ever mentioned that he was Amerasian, Do says, “not even when I was doing paperwork to go to America as an Amerasian.” He says they wanted to spare him pain.

He says when other children teased or beat him for being different, he did not complain to family members. “There was nothing they could do. It was best for me to just bear it on my own,” he says.

Because school costs money in Vietnam, Do dropped out after only four or five years. He moved in with his adopted mother’s brother and his family, farming the rice fields with them. Do says the family, which included the woman he later fell in love with and killed, was “barely” able to scrape by.

Several years ago Do approached the Vietnamese about leaving for America. He says his mother “wanted to go,” but because his extended family was accompanying him, “she stayed home.”

Do says that besides working in the fields, he had been training to become a tailor, a job he hoped to find in America. He says he also shared the communal dream of Amerasians--finding his father. He has no name, no picture, no idea where to start.

“I grew up without the love of a father,” Do says. “I’ve always wanted to find that love.”

After U.S. officials approved Do and his 10-member “family” for passage to America, they sent them to the Philippines for the mandatory six months of English studies, vocational training and briefings on what to expect in the United States.

The first signs of trouble apparently came at the camp, though it is unclear if they were seen outside the family. Garden Grove police said Do and Hang Dinh wrote a letter asking for help in going off to live together by themselves. The letter was found in Do’s pocket when police arrested him.

The whole family made the trip to Garden Grove, moving in with Dinh’s uncle. Two days after they arrived, Do says, Dinh’s parents told him they didn’t want him to marry their daughter.

“Basically they said they wanted someone with more money and more prestige” for a son-in-law, he said.

The next day, according to court testimony, Dinh’s mother, Thieu Dinh, told her daughter to speak with Do and tell him there would be no marriage, even though the mother had overheard her daughter tell a friend that she loved Do.

On a rainy Saturday morning, the fourth day that Do and the Dinh family had been in America, the young couple went outside the house. Do reportedly said he took a knife from the kitchen to kill himself if Hang Dinh rejected him.

A Dinh family friend arrived, spoke briefly to the couple and went inside. Several minutes later she heard a scream, followed by a shout: “Mother, he is killing me.”

The friend and Hang Dinh’s parents ran outside. Do was gone. Hang Dinh lay in the driveway, bleeding to death.

About an hour later, Do was arrested walking along a nearby street. The policeman who arrested him says Do “began to say in broken English that he was sorry, that he loved her and that he stabbed her one time only.”

In Westminster, the editor of the Nguoi Viet newspaper, Yen Do, says the case of Kiem Do--the two men are not related--is a “big topic” in his community.

Vietnamese “understand the case of Kiem. They understand buying the ticket to America through an Amerasian child. The practice is popular.

“In general, the Vietnamese (media) didn’t report much about Amerasian children, and that’s the big tragedy,” Yen Do says. “They were forgotten by both sides.”

But Yen Do believes this case “helped the Vietnamese community, and the Americans, to recognize the tragedy of the Amerasian child, who was victimized by both sides.”

Kiem Do spends his time in Orange County Jail awaiting eventual transfer to a state prison or a California Youth Authority facility to serve out his sentence.

He finds the routine boring and says wistfully that he was in America for such a short time that “I didn’t get to go anywhere” or see anything.

He says he’s trying to learn some English--from the other inmates. And he desperately misses his mother and his homeland.

He says that when he was young and became depressed, he wondered if the woman who had adopted him really loved him. Each time he found out that she did.

“I mean, while we slept, she used to come to my bed several times a night to check on me,” Do recalls. “My bed was by a window and people were always talking about people dying because they caught a cold in their sleep, and she was worried that I might die this way.

“And this continued until I was grown. I always kidded her, ‘Mom, you treat me like I’m still a kid.’ She always said, ‘Well, who can know? Better safe than sorry.’

“That’s enough to understand that the woman loved me.”

Do recalls working in the fields next to his new mother at age 6, after her father died. “We have been through a lot of hard times, she and I,” he says.

Police say the one thing Do asked after being arrested for the killing was, “Can you help me go back to Vietnam?”

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Times photographer Gail Fisher traveled to Vietnam in January in a group that included Mary Nguyen, coordinator of Amerasian services at St. Anselm’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Center in Garden Grove. Among the villages they visited was Dong Nai, where Kiem Do lived before coming to the United States with Hang Dinh’s family.