GARDEN GROVE : Program Addresses Needs of Amerasians

Wearing a white smock and plastic gloves to protect her hands, Oanh Vo squeezed a bottle of hair color on a customer’s hair.

At another booth in the salon, her husband, Thach Bui, with a pair of scissors in his right hand, a comb in the other, practiced by giving a doll a precision cut.

Their dream is to open a beauty salon and become financially independent in this, their adopted country. Toward that end, the couple are getting help from a special program geared for Vietnamese Amerasians, who were ostracized in Vietnam and find themselves strangers in America.

The program--for people who grew up in Vietnam but have American fathers--is a joint effort between Fountain Valley-based Coastline Community College and the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc.

“It’s a unique collaboration. We combine our expertise and resources to serve the special needs of the Amerasians,” said Nghia Tran, executive director of Vietnamese Community, a nonprofit organization.

As part of the program, Vo, who is Amerasian, and Bui, whom she married in Vietnam before they emigrated, are enrolled at Tam’s Beauty College in Garden Grove. Three nights a week they also attend classes offered by Coastline, where they learn English.

Beverly Miklich, Coastline’s dean of instruction for basic skills and English as a second language, said a two-year, $100,000 federal education grant was awarded to start the program, taught in Little Saigon in Westminster.

The program’s goal is to integrate the Amerasians into society by finding them jobs and making them self-sufficient, Miklich said. A main part of the program, started last November, is to teach the newcomers English.

But it also builds self-esteem, offers counseling and cultural experiences, assistance to find jobs and plans to recruit Amerasian tutors to serve as role models.

Instructor Pat Roemer said 11 students are currently enrolled in the class, with plans to expand the program to 40 students.

Bui and Vo, parents of a 6-year-old son and with another baby on the way, live in a one-bedroom Garden Grove apartment. They left Saigon four years ago because Vo, 29, came looking for her American father.

“I want to find my father,” said Vo, after her mother abandoned her, “To see him would make me happy.”

It’s been a struggle since the pair, married eight years, came to America. They live in a crime-ridden area and feel unsafe, they said, but do not have enough money to move from their government-subsidized apartment.

Roemer, who’s been teaching English to Vietnamese refugees since 1989, said the Coastline program for Amerasian refugees fills a significant need in Orange County.

Amerasians were ostracized in Vietnam because they are half American and often were kept out of schools.

“In Vietnam, often they lived on the streets and survived by selling cigarettes or peanuts. Some never had a formal education, and a lot of them are orphans,” Tran said. “In their mind, their sufferings were a direct result of being an abandoned child of an American. By coming to the United States, some of these Vietnamese Amerasians believe their sufferings would be alleviated and that the United States holds a better life and better future for them.

“But once they get here, culturally and linguistically they are Vietnamese and they don’t fit in the mainstream either.”

Literacy problems with a new language created other difficulties.

“They need basic literacy skills to get a job here, because they want to be independent,” Tran said.