A Story of Assimilation, Told in Perfect English : A young Vietnamese refugee studied his new language until it was scrutable at last.

In those days, I drank Coca-Cola and secretly wished that it would erase the foreign accent from my English, that it would twirl my tongue so that I could properly pronounce words like girl and world , that it could help me conjugate irregular verbs.

In the summer of 1975, my family came to San Francisco as refugees from Vietnam. It was cold, but then it was supposed to be cold. This was America. In Vietnam, I had seen enough pictures of snow-capped peaks and Christmas cards of winter wonderland to be misinformed that the United States was always a frosty land, devoid of palm trees.

My aunt was going to school in San Francisco at the time, and my family--there were seven of us--stayed in her studio apartment. The West was inscrutable, an enigma. Everything was new and exciting and foreign during those first days. Even the smell of Joy, the dishwashing detergent, was a discovery. I still associate its scent with those days.

I strolled the streets with my brothers and sisters, marveling at such things as pay phones. We had never seen one until then, except on television and in the movies.

Later, we moved to a bigger place, a one-bedroom apartment nearby. We used the living room and the formal dining room as bedrooms. We slept on used mattresses on the floor, and we wore clothes donated by Catholic Charities. We were a family, and we were very happy. We had deep longings for the homeland, but we were also excited by the prospect of America.

I discovered Hostess apple pies and Twinkies and couldn’t have enough of them.

That summer, we all went to school. My parents and older sister went to adult English school. The rest of us went to junior high.

There were very few Vietnamese at the school I attended, James Lick Junior High. You could count them on one hand. There was one Vietnamese at the school who had been in the United States from an early age and could speak very little Vietnamese, but I envied her ability to speak English.

I thought of this recently when I was talking to Loi Truong, a Vietnamese outreach counselor at La Quinta High School. The new Vietnamese students there sometimes confided in him that they feel inferior to their Americanized Vietnamese counterparts.

“I try to tell them, if you learn English, someday you’ll be like them,” Loi said. “You’re just here a few years later.”

As with many of the newcomers today, the biggest problem for me was learning the new tongue. Most of my English as a Second Language classes were taught by Latino teachers. And the classes were made up of mostly Latino students.

It was hard to listen and understand English. It was hard to pronounce polysyllabic words. The grammatical structure was different. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that English is an illogical language.

I watched television to improve my listening skills. Starsky and Hutch became favorite English teachers. With the help of an English-speaking family friend, I got a job selling the San Francisco Examiner, though I didn’t know what the word examiner meant. I sold the most copies on Aug. 16, 1977, the day Elvis Presley died. A man asked me whether the news was true, and I said yes. My English was getting better.

I absorbed English gradually, almost subconsciously. I knew progress was coming when I could read numbers in English without pausing. But when a teacher gave me a copy of Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” to read over one Christmas vacation, I couldn’t finish it. It was too difficult; I had trouble with the perfect tenses and the vocabulary.

Years ago in Vietnam, I read “The Old Man and the Sea” in Vietnamese. My teacher tried in vain to explain to his young pupils that it was more than a story about a fisherman, a marlin and a baseball player. A few summers ago, while vacationing in Portland, Me., I bought a first edition of the Hemingway book in a used-book store. I thought of the teacher and the changes that had occurred since I first read the novella.

English was no longer a foreign tongue. The language has soared in its grandeur and poetry. But it has lost some of the magic of newness, its mystery. I lost the wide-eyed curiosity of a visitor. America is home. It is no longer the inscrutable West.