Going Home Again : As children, they fled Vietnam. As adults, they are compelled to return to a nation devastated by war.

Trinh Vo understands the pain and bitterness that divide the Vietnamese American community. In her household, she said, “all my father ever talked about was how evil the Communists are.”

So when the 27-year-old free-lance writer from Santa Ana told her father last year that she planned to return to Vietnam to teach high school English, he didn’t speak to her for days.

Eventually, however, he relented. A little.

“He told me, as angry and sad as he is at my decision, he also understands why I feel this need to do this, to go to Vietnam and do what I can to help,” Vo said before leaving for Ho Chi Minh City last month. “A Vietnamese will always love his country.”

Vo joins a growing number of young Vietnamese Americans who are journeying back to Vietnam to help strengthen the nation their parents fled 20 years ago. Engineers, doctors and business people, they are lured by cultural ties and altruistic impulses to mend a society devastated by the war.

Generally in their mid-20s and 30s, they are part of a generation old enough to appreciate their parents’ loss and suffering, but young enough to have reconciled with the Communist regime now in control.

But like Vo, some risk conflict with the generation that fled here as South Vietnam fell on April 30, 1975--many of whom still harbor deep hatred for the government that forced them into exile.

“I don’t think I’m going to change anything by being there, but I am going to make a difference,” Vo said. “I am going to touch someone’s life just by teaching them some English, and that’s all that I could ask for--to make a small difference.”

Thuy Pham of Westminster returned to her homeland this month for the first time since leaving in 1976. A UC Berkeley political science major who dreams of becoming a U.S. diplomat in Southeast Asia, the 25-year-old is in the country shooting a photo documentary on the daily routine of Vietnamese women.

“All my life, I’ve heard stories from my grandmother about how hard life is for women there, and those stories have touched me,” Pham said in April. “I hope to be able to capture such stories on my camera and share with others who want to understand the culture, the people.

“I think in learning about these women who struggled so much and worked so hard for their family, I will also learn a lot about myself and where I came from.”

James M. Freeman, a San Jose State professor of anthropology who works with Southeast Asian refugee communities, said his Vietnamese American students have in the past few years become more interested in journeying back to their birthplace.

“I’ve seen young people--those from 25 to 35--go to Vietnam, and they’re coming back and saying the country needs help and they . . . want to be the ones to do it,” Freeman said. “They’re idealists who do not carry the emotional scars and animosities of their parents.”

With a population of about 70 million and an economy that has been mostly closed from the rest of the industrialized world in the last 20 years, Vietnam is one of the poorest countries in the world.

As a result of President Clinton’s historic ending of the economic embargo with Vietnam last year, business people--including many Vietnamese Americans--have been rushing to the Southeast Asian country in search of profit-making opportunities. But for more idealistic Vietnamese emigres, making money is of little importance.

Some are offended at the very suggestion.

“If I wanted to make money, I’d stay here instead,” said Chau Nguyen, a 33-year-old Westminster optometrist who has been to Vietnam three times since 1992 to provide eye checkups, glasses and medical supplies to the poor in rural villages. “Taking off at least a month every year is not exactly good business.”

Vo has lined up English teaching positions at Nguyen Thi Minh Khai and Nguyen Dinh Chieu high schools, where she will earn about $1.20 an hour. She hopes to supplement that by tutoring foreign business people in Vietnamese.

“Some people have said $1.20 an hour is a lot for a Third World country, but what they don’t understand is that the cost of living for Vietnamese Americans and other foreigners is very high,” said Vo, who lived in Vietnam for three months last year before deciding she wanted to stay indefinitely. “The money is not what is bringing me back. It’s wanting to do something to help Vietnam in my very own small ways.”

But not every idealistic venture has met with success.

Hien Nguyen, a computer graphics designer by trade and an environmentalist by avocation, returned to Vietnam in 1992 with a few friends to establish SEA2000, an environmental awareness program designed to educate the Vietnamese about such growing problems as water contamination and air and waste pollution in their country.

“We had to shut down the program soon after it became clear to us no one was interested in saving the Earth here,” he said in a telephone interview from Ho Chi Minh City.

Nguyen, 35, who immigrated to the United States in 1975, divides his time between Orange County and Pittsburgh when he is not in Vietnam. On his second trip to Ho City Minh City last year, he worked with local builders to reconstruct the city’s historic opera house.

In March, he and two friends set up an advertising agency. The team is also working on an ambitious plan to design affordable housing and orphanages in rural areas and work with schools to teach computer graphics. Nguyen also volunteers his time with a charity group, Hope International.

“Many of us are doing everything from social to technical work . . . and are willing to work for anything from $100 to $600 a month,” he said. “I’m glad to be able to contribute to something. People like me, in the younger generation, are feeling a bit more brave about coming back, I guess.”

Yet, many are clearly not comfortable talking about going home, especially in Orange County, where the largest Vietnamese community outside Southeast Asia has settled. Here, efforts that may be seen as overtures to the Communists are politically volatile. With the 20th anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam this year, that anxiety is more acute.

“The timing is not right to talk of going back because the political tension here in the Vietnamese community is still strong,” said Luc Le, president of the Vietnamese-American Science and Professional Engineering Society, based in Orange County. “The ones who are going back are going on their own and want to keep a low profile, because they don’t want to stir up any animosity here.”

Vo spoke only reluctantly about her departure for Vietnam, saying she wanted to spare her father deeper pain. Yet, like many who are bound for Vietnam, she has no regrets about working in a country whose government forced her family into exile.

That was part of the past, they said, and the younger generation should not be constrained by past animosities.

“I cannot take away my father’s pain, and he knows not to try to take away my quest to do something for the country that holds my birthright,” she said.