Beneath Troublesome Stars : Two Orange County women overcome hardships and aim for a future they believe in : GOODBYE, SAIGON, <i> By Nina Vida (Crown: $20; 288 pp.)</i>

Orange County-based novels tend to offer up the obvious--shopping malls, executives, sailboats--trappings of wealth defining a small part of the county’s whole (even less now, what with the financial debacle). In “Goodbye, Saigon,” Nina Vida forgoes that territory to focus on card parlors, noodle shops and herb pharmacies, delivering a satisfying slice of Vietnamese family life along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster, Calif. The wealthy are present, purposely, but peripherally. Opulent Huntington Harbour and Newport Beach are viewed from a seasoned humorous perspective that unmasks the greed behind the grandeur. Here, the wealthy are not to be envied, but tilled and worked, until their good fortune rubs off. And “luck” is the heart of this novel. It fuels the quest of 33-year-old Anh Truong, a daughter unfortunate enough to be born under stars that don’t complement her mother’s.

Anh is destined to struggle a lifetime beneath those problematic stars: “The fortune teller told me to give her away when she was born in 1958. That was when the war started. Ah, she started the war.” Her sister is prettier, a brother who died in Vietnam possessed artistic talent, but Anh’s only gift seems to be perseverance. In Little Saigon, she continues to work hard to support her family and hopefully someday earn their respect. She can get the best price on designer look-a-like purses, arrange for a famous Vietnamese singer to perform at a dinner party, or lend money to start a business guaranteed to thrive. Working as a “shoeshine” girl in a card parlor, she attaches herself to Dennis Morgan, a cocaine-driven attorney who throws her large tips whether he wins or loses. Her job is similar to the Lady Lucks of old Westerns: “They didn’t shine shoes. They shined egos, reassured losers, fawned over winners. They picked a player and stuck to him, whispered advice to him . . . breathed in all the garlic breath and cigarette smoke that drifted above the table, waited for a few stray chips. . . .” When Morgan fails to return to the card parlor, Anh finds herself in real peril, because the most precious attribute a Vietnamese woman can possess is her “luck.” To retrieve it, she’ll scale any obstacle.

Traveling to Newport Harbor, worlds apart from Little Saigon, she seeks out Morgan, finding his legal secretary, Jana Galvin. Jana’s past couldn’t be more horrific. Her professor husband was murdered, his murderer kidnaped her, a month-long ordeal at his hands culminated nine months later in the birth of her son. Jana’s aging parents also present problems. Her senile father is continually wandering off; her obstinate mother refuses the safer atmosphere of a retirement village, but expects Jana to pay the bills. Jana struggles to retrieve the money Morgan--now hospitalized and comatose from cocaine use--owes her, wondering how she’ll make next month’s rent.

Meanwhile, police have raided Anh’s house, searching for her brother Trinh, who was arrested for assaulting an officer. They terrorize the family, help themselves to jewelry and the $5,000 she borrowed to make her teen-age brother’s bail. Anh, fed up, pushes for a partnership with Jana, a “law” practice to serve the Little Saigon community from such crimes as the one she’s just experienced at the hands of the so-called police. No matter to her Jana’s not a real lawyer. From Anh’s point of view, all’s fair when dealing with vermin, be they gamblers, sleazy cops or gang-boys. “Dennis a rat. Maybe we cook him. Not eat him. Just cook him little bit. Use his name, start law business. I know everybody in Little Saigon. . . . Everybody know me. . . . You won’t believe how many client I bring in.”

Initially, Jana is put off by pushy Anh, and the idea of passing herself off as an attorney frightens her. But she’s pressed to support her parents, and the money Dennis promised her appears to have gone up his nose. The moment she agrees, the clients flow in just as Anh promised, seeking restitution for crimes newcomers to an adopted land are fearful to report. Readers enjoy rooting for underdogs, and several tense courtroom scenes give ample opportunity to enjoy the prairie-justice Jana’s fast-talking dispenses.

All goes swimmingly for the pair until Anh refuses to cut Nep Lai, the local “gang-boy” who’s taken her brother Trinh into his hold, in on profits. Lai’s boys trash the law office, spray bullets into an important party and ultimately take their revenge on Anh’s family. This latest tragedy upends Anh’s world. Her search for luck is tempered by the more pressing need to balance the terrible deed done her family. Setting aside business, she focuses her energy on retaliation.

To keep the fever-pitch plot from spinning out of control, journal-like sequences deliver Anh’s previous life in Vietnam, establishing a dramatic parallel of the dangers Anh survived in each country. At once visceral and lyric, some of the strongest writing in the novel, these heartbreaking revelations highlight Uncle Kou forcing 13-year-old Anh (and her mother) into prostitution, Anh’s devotion to her mixed-blood baby, her family’s struggle to leave the country by boat and her father’s unforgivable betrayal as he tosses her son overboard. The flashbacks stack up so sturdily a second novel nearly emerges. As they are fleeing Vietnam by boat: “She kept looking at Ba, the way he sat out in the rain, his shoulders hunched over, the rain pelting him . . . blinking his eyes to see through the drops. Sometimes he tilted his head back and let the rain fall into his open mouth. Oh, she hoped he would choke on that rainwater, drown in it. . . . She wanted to beat him on the head, crack open his skull, look inside his brains to see why he had done this to her . . . no ocean in the world was big enough to hold the hate she felt.”

It’s too bad Jana doesn’t have her own journal, for the events surrounding her husband’s murder remain slightly shadowed. What’s important is that these two very different women, equals in their struggle for survival, each fiercely continue to attend the needs of family. Cultural prejudices are realistically explored, as when Anh consults a Balboa realtor hoping to buy her family a home. The realtor balks, so savvy Anh changes tactics. “You think I gon live here? Oh, oh, that the problem. There it is. This house for my boss. She big lawyer in Little Saigon. No Vietnamese. . . . Very quiet. One kid. I see what you thinking. You thinking I coming here with my sister and her four kid and my mother and Cookie and me. No wonder you so scare. . . .”

Toward the latter half of the novel, Anh garners a romantic admirer, Jana’s earlier courtroom adversary, Sam Knowlton, a Vietnam vet haunted by his own history. The riskiest undertaking of the novel, the romance causes Anh to uncomfortably recall her days of prostitution, and Sam to callously reflect, “It could even have been my baby you left in Vietnam.” At the story’s surprising close, Anh rides the Balboa ferris wheel with her sister’s children while contemplating the benefits of independence.

The female voices in this book are engaging. Lesser women would collapse under such hardships, but Anh and Jana dust themselves off and aim for a future they believe will be there. While the men are rendered a little less crisply, and certainly emerge less sympathetic, they still manage to redeem themselves by the novel’s close. Vida’s tensile plot embraces all her characters, and her gift for capturing idiom and inflection in dialogue provide a winning combination. “Goodbye, Saigon” is a fascinating look at Southern California’s Vietnamese culture and the shadowy side of Orange County. Vida also examines how immigrants try to maintain cultural identity while adapting to American ways. Generous of spirit, as full of loss as it is gain, the ultimate good luck here is the reader’s.