Amerasians

For years, Lee Yu Jin kept her secret. Whenever anybody asked -- and they did all the time as her celebrity as an actress and model spread -- she simply denied the rumors. No, she was not a foreigner. She was Korean. Finally, last year, Lee called a news conference and tearfully acknowledged that her father was an American GI. As her fans had long suspected from her 5-foot-9 stature, she was of mixed race.

Janice Gibbons is a financial analyst, but Saturday she was a Vietnamese-food vendor in Garden Grove, hawking sweet corn and barbecued pork on a stick. "The rest of the year I don't really get to be Vietnamese," said Gibbons, 28, who uses her maiden name, Cao, when she plunges back into the Vietnamese community. She emigrated from Vietnam almost 20 years ago, and now lives in San Jose. "This is a chance to connect with my people," she said, "to be around my people."

\o7 The saga of the Vietnamese boat people, one of the most tragic examples of human suffering in the region's recent history, has finally come to an end.\f7 --U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Hanoi, August 1997 * "It's over?" Nguyen Van Y asked, incredulous. "Then what am I doing still here? When the French ship picked us up, we thought three, maybe six months in the Philippines, then the United States. That was nine years ago." The noodle shop on Rizal Avenue was crowded, and "Mr.

After helping refugees and immigrants resettle in Southern California for 21 years, St. Anselm's Cross Cultural Community Center now finds itself at a crossroads. The number of refugees, most of them brought here by the Vietnam War, has steadily declined in past years. At the same time, the needs of St.

Loan Shillinger has no memory of the country of her birth. She can only imagine the place, and does so often: the Buddhist temples, the rolling, verdant hillsides, the village of fishermen where she was born. Above all, she imagines a tranquil country, not the suffering, napalm-ravaged Vietnam of countless movies. The sense of peace is important, because for years Loan Shillinger has lived with the idea that, as an orphan, she came into the world because of war, a "mistake" of war.