COLUMN ONE : No Longer Looking Homeward : Nearly 20 years after the fall of Saigon, a generation of immigrants is coming of age. Their desire to build a good life in America often overshadows the anger and pain their parents brought from Vietnam.

Trouble seeped into Huy Tran’s tranquil childhood in Vietnam like blood on sand. Coming home after a day of chasing crickets, he would overhear his parents whisper urgently in the hallway. Dispatches from the war front would flash across the TV at the town church. Then came the jailings of his father, a teacher, by the Communist regime.

Finally, when he was 12, Tran and his father pushed off to sea, and a new life in America. The boat trip was some kind of hell, he says. During the trek, a woman crazed by dehydration tried to kill herself with her fingernails. Tran finally made it to California, but it was six years before he saw his mother and siblings again.

Tran, 22, will never forget his family’s ordeal, yet he favors America’s recent restoration of trade with the government that tormented them. He believes that doing business with Vietnam will be good for refugees in the United States and those struggling in his homeland.

“I’m still sorry our lives were disrupted by the Vietnam War. But you cannot compare my anguish or anger toward the Vietnam War to my parents’,” said Tran, a computer consultant in Irvine. “They expect me to feel the same, but they also understand that, because of my age, I might not be able to remember the persecution they had to go through, and the corruption, the hardship the South had to endure once the North took over.”

Vietnam-born but American-bred, Tran belongs to a generation that seems detached from the war that tore apart their birthplace, forced the exodus of 1.5 million people and left up to 2 million dead.

Most are under 30, coming of age as the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon nears next year. By the end of this century, they will make up a great part of the Vietnamese-American community’s Establishment, from business to political leadership.

Generally, they have not inherited their parents’ hatred of Communism or qualms about trading with a former enemy.

American schools do not teach them Vietnamese history. And most immigrant parents are so busy working to support their families that there is little time to review the past together--presuming they and their children can still speak the same language.

As for the children, they are trying to be a part of a society that wants to forget the Vietnam War.

“They are totally socialized into American society. I find that because there is nothing in the curriculum, even in the UC system, (about) their background, they are generally ignorant to the circumstances that brought them to the U.S.,” said Eric Crystal, coordinator of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkeley.

“For these kids, first of all, their whole lives are not oriented toward what happened in South Vietnam. They’ve never really lived there. And then there’s something vaguely negative about Vietnam to an American--it means war, soldiers, prostitutes.”

It is hard to find a voice of authority about the Vietnamese-American experience, Crystal said, because it has been largely ignored by U.S. universities, perhaps because it is a relatively new immigrant experience.

And those who are just now approaching adulthood, Crystal said, “have been studied even less.”

“But the story of this group is that their fundamental preoccupation is with the country that they know, not their parents’,” Crystal said.

First-generation immigrants generally retain most of their homeland’s customs and values. Their children are expected to adopt the culture of their own native country. Generational conflicts are predictable.

Straddling these worlds are young Vietnamese Americans who, like other children born in the old country but raised in the new, have been dubbed “the 1.5 Generation” by academics.

Born in a country where parental authority goes unquestioned, this in-between generation is growing up in a freedom-loving society whose aggressive anthem often is “Just Do It.”

They are “really torn between two worlds,” said a counselor at Westminster High School, home to the nation’s largest Vietnamese student population.

In California, where nearly half of America’s Vietnamese refugees live, many children of former political prisoners and war veterans say necessity forces them to focus not on past horrors but on their future: entering the mainstream and seeking decent jobs and the good life for their families.

“We as the younger generation expect a little bit more out of this country, and from ourself,” said Helen Nguyen, 21, a UC Irvine biology major who was born in Saigon and fled with her family when she was 7.

Her father was a soldier in the Vietnam War and was a prisoner for a year in the brainwashing “re-education” camps of the Communist North Vietnamese, Nguyen said. After a year of processing at a Malaysian camp, her family made its way to Ventura, where her parents live. This painful family history, she added, is seldom discussed at home.

“The first level (of immigrants), where our parents came in, were just grateful (to be here),” she said. “I can see how the younger people are just struggling to work and have a solid career. I think if you give the Generation 1.5 more time, after they’ve established careers and families, then they later will come around to activism.”

For now, though, such interest seems secondary. “My parents don’t speak much about the war. My dad did serve a year in a re-education camp; he took it as natural. (In the war), men fought, we suffered, it is past now and we move on.”

“I think the generational conflict is both universal and unique,” said Yong Chen, a UC Irvine Asian American studies professor specializing in U.S. immigration history. “If you look to earlier immigrants from Europe, you will find a similar generational conflict.”

More recently, new appreciation of ethnic differences and cultural diversity have reversed past patterns of abandoning heritage for the mainstream, Chen said. Those of the 1.5 Generation can select what they deem the best of past and present cultures.

Dr. Duong Cao Pham has a front-row seat to the 1.5 Generation. He is a visiting professor of Vietnamese history and culture at UC Irvine and UCLA and teaches high school full time. His four children were born in Vietnam. The eldest was 8 when the family fled just before Saigon fell in 1975.

The Vietnamese only began immigrating en masse 19 years ago, he said. For these immigrants, technology--including radio, television and faxes--has built unprecedented bridges between the old and new worlds.

“It’s easier to maintain ties and knowledge about what’s going on in each country,” Pham said. “We are now in another age, compared to the Chinese in the 19th Century or the Filipinos after World War II, or the Koreans in the 1960s.”

Despite the technology, Pham’s 21-year-old son, Vu Pham, sees greater differences between the generations.

Moving from Saigon to the United States when he was 3, Vu grew up in Fountain Valley and is a graduate student in UC Irvine’s humanities honors program. He is writing his senior thesis on members of the 1.5 Generation--particularly their lack of community involvement compared to their parents.

“In my research, I’ve found that there are very, very few people in the 1.5 Generation who are community activists,” Vu said. “Many are concentrating only on mainstreaming.”

In his interviews, Vu said he found that his peers are emotionally and intellectually removed from such issues as restored trade ties because they have only considered the financial benefits and not the political reality. If many Americans seemed resigned about renewed ties with a former enemy, he noted, why wouldn’t Vietnamese Americans be as well?

“More personal is that there is this alienation from Vietnam, aside from faint memories,” Vu Pham said. “A lot of the 1.5 . . . don’t plan to return to Vietnam, they don’t have any relatives in Vietnam, or if they do, they are usually relatives of their parents.”

Finally, he said, there is the handicap of ignorance. “One of the major reasons you don’t deal with issues about Vietnam at my age is that it’s not taught in school. I had nothing taught to me in high school about the Vietnam War. We reached the late 20th Century, and it wasn’t ever mentioned.”

To help fellow refugees, Vietnamese student organizations have formed at numerous Southern California colleges. One is Project Ngoc (pearl), which was organized in 1989 to help a new wave of refugees and asylum seekers.

The groups are less political than service and social and cultural clubs such as the Vietnamese Student Assn., which has chapters throughout the Southland, and the Vietnamese-American Coalition, formed by four UC Irvine students, including Tran.

Out of respect, Vietnamese American students often preface their own horror stories by stressing that others have suffered much more when their country was ruined by war.

“It was very hard for me, the first few years without my Mom,” Tran said. I’ve known families that didn’t reunite for 10 or 12 years later.”

From Vietnam, he and his father traveled to Indonesia, Texas and finally to Los Angeles, where they were later reunited with Tran’s mother and brothers. He graduated from John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, and enrolled as a biology major at UC Irvine. After one quarter he switched to political science. His parents virulently opposed the move, believing hard sciences to be a better-paying field and less discriminating against the foreign-born.

Tran had to pay his own tuition, although he was allowed to live at home. He has never regretted the decision, but he has not found work in social services and remains a full-time computer consultant.

Despite all the torment, he said, coming to America “has meant I have a better life than I would have had, a better education.”

At La Quinta High School in Westminster, about 60% of the 1,283 students are Vietnamese, the highest percentage in the country. Last year’s homecoming court was Vietnamese, as was this year’s queen. And all but one of the candidates for La Quinta’s highest honor--Aztec boy and girl student of the year--are Vietnamese, too.

The Vietnamese Club, with 200 members, is the biggest on campus. But all meetings are in English, and it is a service group that does not focus on culture or ethnicity. Co-President Lynn Phu is Cambodian but was born after her family fled to Vietnam.

It is a sign, some experts say, of the cultural crossroads that define Generation 1.5-ers.

In the days after President Clinton announced the renewal of trade ties with Vietnam, Rita Corpin’s World History honors class discussed what it all meant. A 20-year-old bumper sticker on Corpin’s lectern read “MIAs--Only Hanoi Knows.” The class was celebrating the arrival of the Tet New Year. Of the 36 students, 12 were born in Vietnam.

A show of hands revealed that the students were in agreement: They thought lifting the embargo was good. Why? Because it would make it easier to fly into Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.

Nobody mentioned the war, boat people, or concerns about doing business with a former enemy. Nobody mentioned prisoners of war.

“It will be better for two-way travel and to visit relatives now,” said one student, although he added that his family had already done this. “It will be easier for us to send money there,” another said.

At La Quinta, it is not just dating and curfew and report card hassles that Vietnamese-born children bring to school with them each day. There are 27 English as a second language classes taught here, and the school common is visibly divided between Americanized Vietnamese and the newcomers, who speak their native language and squat Asian-style through lunch.

“We had a girl commit suicide the month before I came here,” said Principal Mitch Thomas, “and it was over one thing: assimilation. . . . She was a bright, beautiful, capable kid. And those kids--who say what are you talking about, what embargo?--they are interested in the here and now. Their parents know all the politics, but the kids, all of their energy is striving for assimilation.”

One thing about kids is universal, say Thomas and other educators working with Vietnamese students. No matter what their nationality, they all want to fit in.

Senior Thanh Tang, 17, vice president of the student body and honor roll student, is something of an exception. He is among the students who seem to hold an educated opinion about the reopening of trade: He opposes it--perhaps, he says, more strongly than his parents do.

In Vietnam, his parents imported produce--mostly grapes and oranges. Before that, his father was a police officer. Here, they rise at 5 and work seven days a week at their Santa Ana restaurant. They lost so much to come here, he said, and Americans will lose plenty now, too.

“I think with the embargo gone we’ll be losing more of the workers. Soon we’ll see Sony in Vietnam; the labor is cheaper. And the environmental concerns . . . people building factories without standards and destroying the rain forest there.

“Someone’s killing your people (prisoners of war and soldiers listed as missing in action), and you’re opening trade with them?,” he said, his face turning incredulous.

Of those like him, born in Vietnam but raised here, he said: “Some people are too young to see or feel any of that: Why did you lift the embargo on people who hurt my parents and made me go through that?”

“When I first came here, my parents talked about Communists! Communists! But they don’t talk about it anymore,” said Tang, who works weekends at the restaurant and has dreams of attending Harvard’s business school. “When I have time to sit down and talk, it’s not about Vietnam; it’s more (about) what I’m doing after high school, where I’m going to school.

“I think parents don’t tell them about it,” Tang added. Like his family and those of his friends, “everybody is too busy trying to work to support their family.”