A Voyage Home : Cal Lutheran Junior Hopes to Find His Roots in Vietnam

In a sense, Micah Reitan will go back home this month. “I want to become completely Vietnamese for the five or six months I’m over there,” said Reitan, 21, a junior at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, who plans to spend his spring semester in Vietnam studying at the University of Hanoi.

“I’m going to eat like them, dress like them. I even want to wear a big rice hat--unless, of course, it’s not cool, unless it’s stupid.”

Born in the Vietnamese city of Da Nang in 1972 and raised until he was 14 months old by workers at the city’s Sacred Heart Orphanage, Reitan figures that his father was a black American soldier and his mother “a Vietnamese prostitute, or at least someone just trying to survive.”

No record survives of either parent, and Reitan does not know if they are alive or dead.

His real parents, he says, are Lutheran pastor Mark Reitan and his wife, Elizabeth, a music teacher. The Reitans are a white American couple who adopted Micah just after his first birthday and whisked him from Vietnam to their home in Minnesota.

Micah Reitan grew up in the small Minnesota town of Mankato and later in Tucson, where his family has lived since Micah was 9. In addition to Micah, his parents have two biological children, Angie, 22, and Julie, 17. He has never been back to Vietnam and what little he knows about his original homeland he gleaned from the movies.

“I picture Vietnam as ‘Platoon’ or ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ but that’s so Hollywood and not what I want it to be,” he said.

Instead, on Jan. 18, Reitan’s plane will take off from Los Angeles International Airport bound for Asia and, he hopes, a glimpse behind the tattered, war-era stereotypes to the reality of the land he came from and the ties that still bind him to it.

“Vietnam has always been a thing I felt I needed, that I wanted to go back to,” he said, relaxing on a tan sofa in the sitting room of his cluttered, college dormitory suite. “It’s a part of me I don’t know.”

Reitan said the idea of living again in Vietnam never occurred to him until he attended an overseas study meeting at Cal Lutheran in the fall of 1992. “They talked about Spain, England, other typical kinds of countries,” he remembered, “and then they asked if anybody had any other places they wanted to go.

“So I just raised my hand and said, ‘Vietnam,’ but really as more of a joke. I took it about as seriously as going to Jupiter.”

To Reitan’s surprise, a school counselor phoned him the next day with information about a program at the University of Hanoi, run by the New York-based Council on International Educational Exchange. Reitan called his parents in Tucson that night, and their enthusiasm helped encourage him to go ahead and apply.

“We think it’s a great idea,” Elizabeth Reitan said in a phone interview. “We’ve talked about him doing it, and one or both of us going with him, since he was a little boy.”

Indeed, Mark and Elizabeth Reitan, who have never been to Asia, plan to join their son for a week or two in Vietnam when his term ends in May.

The educational exchange program is one of only two programs available to U. S. students, the other being offered by the School for International Training based in Brattleboro, Vt. Both programs have been running since the fall of 1991.

Officials said they accepted just about everyone who applied to the program for the spring, as long as they met the application requirements.

Applicants were required to have at least a 2.75 grade point average, write a 500-word essay on why they wanted to do the program, submit two recommendations and take an Asian-area studies course.

The total abroad class for this spring’s Vietnam program is 12 students from around the United States, many of whom, like Reitan, do not speak a word of Vietnamese.

The students will live together in a group house in Hanoi and attend classes organized by the program but held at the University of Hanoi by American and Vietnamese instructors.

Reitan’s schedule includes the mandatory intensive Vietnamese language training, as well as classes in the country’s culture, history and literature.

The cost for the program, which includes a two-week spring break tour around the country, is $6,200. That figure covers all but pocket money and Reitan’s $1,000 plane fare from Los Angeles to Bangkok, Thailand, where the program holds its orientation.

“I’m worried that I’m going to be the most naive person in the whole country,” Reitan said with a nervous laugh. “I mean, I can’t even speak their language.”

Professors who have taught him at college, however, say Reitan will prosper through his own natural enthusiasm.

“Everything Micah seems to do is done with zest,” said Ernst Tonsing, a religion professor who’s had Reitan as a student three years in a row. “He has a zest for life.”

An English major at Cal Lutheran, Reitan is also a dedicated writer who has already produced two novels.

His second one, “Life Is Like That,” was published this fall by Cal Lutheran. Reitan said he has sold 50 of the 200-page volumes at $12 each, mostly to friends.

Reitan has also been deeply interested in music since high school when, his mother recalled, he and a group of friends recorded some music, designed a tape cover and went door-to-door selling the cassettes around their Tucson neighborhood.

Hoping to get into the music business after college, perhaps as a talent agent, Reitan interned in the fall at Atlantic Records and wants to work again for the company when he returns from Vietnam this summer.

Another of his teachers, religion professor Jarvis Streeter, said he thinks that the semester in Vietnam will be a turning point in Reitan’s life.

“I would say in many ways, this is a spiritual journey of looking for his roots and finding himself,” Streeter said.

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Reitan, deeply religious, says he finds his identity not in being black or Vietnamese, or the child of a white family, but in his relationship to God and church. Still, he said, he continues to wonder what Vietnam has do with him and with his life.

“People have told me to get ready for people to stare at you and follow you,” he said, referring to his alien status as an American in Hanoi. “But I’m going to be staring at them twice as much as they’ll be staring at me.”