THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Advocate...

The Southern California office of Legal Assistance for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers (LAVAS) is almost in visible, tucked into a far back corner of a two-story Bolsa Avenue strip mall on the edge of Little Saigon. It is spare and cluttered, decorated only with posters extolling human rights and postcards painted by Vietnamese refugees living in detention camps throughout Asia.

It is a hot Sunday, and Lan Quoc Nguyen is getting ready to settle in for a typical day’s work. Throughout the day Nguyen, the supervising attorney for the office, and his staff will continue the often frustrating and labyrinthine job of reviewing case after case of Vietnamese refugees being held in the camps who want desperately to find asylum in a country--any country--other than Vietnam.

Nguyen, 30, says he does it because, as a former refugee who escaped from Vietnam with his family in a boat and who spent time in a detention camp in Malaysia, he feels it is his moral obligation. A general practice attorney with an office in Tustin, Nguyen says he puts in between 30 and 40 hours a week, evenings and weekends, at the LAVAS office doing free legal work.

He puts in even more unpaid hours each week on a series of radio and television shows broadcast locally to the Orange County Vietnamese-speaking population on Little Saigon Radio and Television. On both programs, he presents legal advice on a variety of subjects from property law to traffic violations, all tailored for an audience faced with the task of sorting out unfamiliar federal and state laws.

There is no sense that Nguyen is a careerist. His ground floor Tustin law office is small, neat and functional, but hardly the sort of legal sanctum designed to impress or intimidate. He dresses cleanly, but without flash.

His passions are genuine, but he has lived with them for so long--through years of his own persecution and confinement in an Asian camp--that he speaks of them in matter-of-fact tones, with conviction but without missionary zeal. He can tell of squalor and suicide in the detention camps with controlled force, but there are no theatrics.

Nguyen may be the most visible and best-known Vietnamese attorney in Orange County, familiar particularly to his own countrymen and women.

But as a result of all his high-profile pro bono work in the Vietnamese community (as well as the fact that he follows Vietnamese tradition by living with and supporting his elderly parents in Westminster), Nguyen says--smiling--that he is “barely making it. But I’m happy. That’s more important. I spend long hours, but I think it’s worth it. I do feel I have an obligation to the community to do this.”

By the time he turned 14, life in Saigon had become intolerable for Nguyen and his family. It was 1979, and Nguyen’s teacher father and his oldest brother, a former soldier, were both interned in “re-education camps.”

“Security was tight in the Vietnamese government at the time, and persecution was rampant,” Nguyen says. “Any intellectual family couldn’t do anything, and we had a black mark on our history because of (supposed political activities) by other members of the family already. We were always under surveillance by the authorities.”

The family planned escape by boat, but time and time again the attempts failed.

“You had to do everything secretly,” Nguyen says. “Get a boat, find petroleum, get food and water, find people you could really trust. Some of the people would just rip you off and run, and you couldn’t go to the police.”

Seven times the plans went awry before the Nguyens could even get to a boat. Family members were turned in to authorities, jailed and later released. Finally, on the eighth try, the Nguyen family of seven boys and their mother sailed away on a small boat with several other families.

During seven days at sea, the boat ran out of fuel and its passengers ran out of water before taking on other refugees from a smaller boat that had an abundance of both. After weathering a fierce storm, the boat finally landed at Malaysia, and the Nguyen family was immediately processed into a detention camp at its port of entry, where the family lived for 10 months.

Next, they were transferred to a transit camp in Kuala Lampur for two months and from there emigrated to the United States in 1979, where they were sponsored by a family in Orange County.

Nguyen’s father was eventually released in 1990 from his camp in Vietnam (the oldest brother escaped with the rest of the family), but the government refused to allow him to join his family in the United States. Finally, “he got a tourist visa to East Germany right about the time the Berlin Wall came down,” Nguyen says, “and when he arrived there he crossed into West Berlin, went to the nearest American embassy there and applied for asylum.

“When I passed the bar, he was my first client. I was scared to death, because if I lost that case I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

Nguyen, who was graduated from Hastings Law School in San Francisco, won his father’s case, and, when the family was reunited in the United States, Nguyen says he felt he was finally free to “work fully on behalf of refugees without worrying about retaliation against (my family) by the Vietnamese government.”

Nguyen’s experience as a boat person and a refugee interned in a detention camp “is what I think drives him,” says Van Tran, who works with Nguyen at LAVAS. “He’s seen as very committed, a very bright attorney who has a deep concern for the welfare of the refugees--his own people--as well as the community welfare.

“Lan is a person with a conscience, and that’s what I find appealing about him. He doesn’t forget his roots as a boat person. He’s definitely one of the key members of the future generation of Vietnamese Americans in this community, and we can expect him to contribute more as the years go by.”

Tony Lam, mayor pro tem of Westminster and the first Vietnamese American to be elected to a public office in the United States, called the amount of time that Nguyen spends in free legal work for refugees “amazing. He could be making a much better living at (his practice), but he spends so much time at LAVAS. I really credit him for that. He has a lot of passion and compassion. He’s already earned the respect and affection of the community here.”

The need for such advocacy, Nguyen says, is more urgent now than ever.

The asylum-seekers, he says, would almost surely face persecution in Vietnam as political undesirables. And, he adds, because of a deadline agreed upon by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the U.N. member nations, the camps likely will close at the end of this year, and thousands of refugees may face forced repatriation to Vietnam.

Hunger strikes in the camps in protest of the policy are common, he says. Some refugees, believing themselves beyond hope, have resorted to self-immolation, hanging or poisoning as a dramatization of their plight.

“Many of them would rather die than return to Vietnam,” Nguyen says. “Legal abuse over there is so rampant. Under international law, they’re no longer recognized as official refugees. It’s an unfair rejection of their refugee status. So it’s not really an immigration problem now; it’s a human rights problem. That’s where we come in.”

The work often obliges Nguyen to confront massive and sometimes impenetrable bureaucracies. From the LAVAS office in Westminster (the national office is in Virginia), Nguyen and his staff are working on about 230 cases involving camp inmates in Asia who have relatives in Orange County. Local LAVAS office estimates of the total number of inmates in the Asian camps hover around 50,000.

“Essentially,” Nguyen says, “we work on a specific person, but along the way we also engage in some (general) advocacy to some extent, speak out on the part of refugees and asylum-seekers.”

The process most often begins, he says, when a relative or friend of someone in the camps brings a file of data collected about that person to the LAVAS office and asks for help in getting that person out.

“Communications between here and the camps are difficult,” Nguyen says, “and some people we can’t contact at all. We have a case where we don’t know what a person looks like, and we can’t talk to them. We do what we can, though, and take their word on the basis of the papers they have, or talk to their relatives or associates here, people or activists who might be able to verify the information.”

If Nguyen determines that a case has promise, appeals to grant refugee status for the asylum-seeker are filed either with a reviewing board in the country in which the camp is located, or with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or with the U.S. State Department, depending on how far previous appeals have gotten.

“Once they are granted refugee status, a lot of times we never see them again, since the United States may or may not be their No. 1 choice,” Nguyen says. “They are seeking protection from persecution in Vietnam; they want to get out of the camp where they are now, and they will go anywhere they can get sponsored, any country that will accept them.

“It is frustrating work because you have a situation where some country will take in the person and the relative will sponsor them, but the local country will refuse to let them go, refuse to process their papers, even refuse to let us talk to them.”

The cases that Nguyen and his associates take on have already been rejected by one authority or another at least once. Their success record, however, is good. Hard percentages, listed by camp, don’t accurately reflect that success, says Nguyen--about 80% of the cases they take on in the camp in Hong Kong are won and about 45% in the Philippines camp--because some authorities are easier to work with than others, and circumstances often vary by country.

To see for himself, Nguyen traveled at his own expense to the Philippine detention camp known as Palawan in 1992. Working with international volunteers there, he began processing cases from the day of his arrival, often working outdoors in stiflingly hot and humid weather. He says he found the camp conditions deteriorating.

“Palawan is one of the best camps in the region,” says Nguyen, “but the living conditions are still very difficult. Families live in a very small space: 12 feet square for a family of three or four, with all the facilities there. They cook there, and much of the food is rotten. All communications with the outside world are censored. There’s no work, and people have nothing to do.”

To worsen matters, the U.N. high commission and the governments operating the camps “imposed things that made life difficult for them,” Nguyen says. “They had been trying to implement what they called a voluntary repatriation program, but it didn’t go well, so they made life difficult (in an attempt to force the refugees to return to their home countries). They cut out all information and material coming in or out of camp, cut out all overseas remittance from relatives.

“We try to tell them that it’s against the U.N. Charter, that it’s a human rights issue. We yell, keep up the fight as best we can and never give up. If we give up now, we lose.”

It is Wednesday morning, and Nguyen is a half hour from leaving for Long Beach, where he is due in court. At the moment, however, he is wedged into a corner of a tiny studio at the offices of Little Saigon Radio and Television in Santa Ana.

It is his weekly, morning call-in show from 9:30 to 10 on KWIZ (96.7 FM), during which he answers questions from listeners--he usually gets about 20 calls--on matters legal. The show is conducted entirely in Vietnamese, and today’s topic is how property taxes are assessed.

“I’m going to be talking about how people can apply for a reduction on their property taxes,” he says. “A lot of people don’t know they can do that. Next week I’m going to talk about what to do if people get stopped for a DUI.”

He gets no pay for the radio show, or for the 15-minute legal advice television spot he does for Little Saigon Radio and Television every other Tuesday at 6:10 p.m. on KRCA Channel 62. But the staff at the station says that in the approximately eight months since the shows began, his programs have become among the most popular in their lineup.

“I find his programs very, very educational,” says co-worker Tran. “It’s probably the first time, in a major way, that segments providing free legal advice by an accredited attorney are going on the air on a weekly basis. There’s a great need for that in our community because we’re very young; many of us are newly arrived, and we may be intimidated by the legal system here.”

Diem Do, who hosts shows on Little Saigon Radio and Television that deal with youth and human rights issues, says he and Nguyen often exchange ideas about their programs and occasionally appear together.

Like many local Vietnamese people, Nguyen “came a long way,” Do says. “He came with nothing, had lost everything, came to a strange land not knowing the language, being on the bottom of society, having to fight his way up. He has a lot of good ideas, and he’s a man with a good heart. I think what he’s been through helps him relate better to a lot of people.”

Nguyen calls his time in the broadcast booth “very fun. And it makes me do research. I can’t just get a lot of this stuff off the top of my head. It helps me learn.”

That thirst for knowledge, and the passion to put it to use, drove Nguyen even before his arrival in Orange County, poor and with a limited command of English.

In fact, one of the first acts on his arrival was to enroll at Garden Grove’s Bolsa Grande High School, where he graduated in 1983.

“When I was in the camp,” he says, “I always had a desire to become one of those people who helped. It’s very emotional for a boat person to return to a camp and do that. During my time in the camp, my education was still in my mind. And when I was in law school, I did research in international law. The refugees were my major concern.”

And likely will continue to be. Nguyen says that “the refugee situation won’t be over by the end of the year. Even though they say they’re closing the camps, there may be some people still there. So we’ll continue to work.”

And Nguyen will continue to divide his time.

“The guy’s really intelligent,” says Do, “and he could be really successful in his (private law practice), but he diverts his time and energy to so many other things. He’s managed to find the time to do that. Money is not the only thing in his life.

“I think all that he gives back to the community is what really enriches his life.”

Profile: Lan Quoc Nguyen

Age: 30

Background: Born and raised in Saigon. Escaped Vietnam as a boat person in 1979 at age 14 and settled in Orange County.

Family: Single. One of seven sons of Hoi Thuc Nguyen and Lan Thi Pham, with whom he lives in Westminster.

Passions: Reading, meeting people, visiting friends.

On his father’s reunion with his family after being held for 11 years in Vietnam: “It was very touching. My mother and my brothers went through a lot, but we didn’t know what he went through during those years. We had to fill each other in. It took a long time to get used to it.”

On the projected closing of Asian refugee camps: “I don’t think the refugee issue will be over by the end of the year. Even though they’re closing the camps, there may be some people still there. So we’ll continue to work.”