Amerasians

Saturday's Shrine All-Star football game at the Rose Bowl includes players from all over California, but none has traveled as far as Tuan Van Le. Le's journey started 12 years ago in Vietnam, when he left his mother and escaped with his aunt six days before the fall of Saigon. They came to America, settling in Northern California. They had to start from scratch, especially Le, who spoke no English.

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.

Tired of seeing their children bullied or put in classes for the learning-impaired, Japanese mothers of children fathered by U.S. servicemen on Okinawa have taken their children's education into their own hands.

The war was still raging that day 15 years ago when Vietnamese nuns heard the cries of a baby boy stuffed in a garbage can and took him inside their orphanage to raise. Today, Nguyen Thanh Binh, the son of a black American who went home and a Vietnamese mother who abandoned him, shares the plight of thousands of Amerasian youths languishing in the decay of Vietnam, desperately trying to get out and find their fathers. "My circumstances are miserable," says Lam Anh Hong, 18, whose mother gave her away to a relative.

With the passage of the Amerasian Homecoming Act a year ago, Rep. Robert J. Mrazek (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Tom Ridge (R-Pa.), the bill's co-sponsors, stated that these half-American, half-Vietnamese youth "will have the opportunity to become (American) citizens and realize the dream that millions of others have pursued . . . ." Arrival in America should not be equated with the realization of that dream. Amerasians carry their own "dreams" about life in America.

After a decade of hesitation, Tommy's South Korean mother has decided to write to his American father to ask for help. She just doesn't know how to phrase it. Worn, haggard and suffering from arthritis, Kim Jong-bun digs out photos, a Social Security number and carefully folded letters: memorabilia of her amorous year with an American serviceman, an encounter that trapped her and their Amerasian son in limbo in a society that prizes racial purity.

The Amerasian Program at St. Anselm's Cross Cultural Community Center will hold a fund-raiser Friday to benefit children who were born to American fathers and Vietnamese mothers during the Vietnam War. The program offers services to children who grew up fatherless in a patrilineal society in Vietnam, where they often became victims of cultural shame and social harassment.

Wearing a white smock and plastic gloves to protect her hands, Oanh Vo squeezed a bottle of hair color on a customer's hair. At another booth in the salon, her husband, Thach Bui, with a pair of scissors in his right hand, a comb in the other, practiced by giving a doll a precision cut. Their dream is to open a beauty salon and become financially independent in this, their adopted country.

John Rogers found the daughter he lost in 1973 asleep on the floor of a hut in Vung Tau on the coast of Vietnam south of Ho Chi Ming City. He had no doubt that she was the child he had named Gloria Jean shortly before leaving Vietnam for home. There are not many black Asian girls. Since finding his only child last year, the Honolulu travel agent has dedicated his life to helping Amerasians, the offspring of Vietnamese women and American servicemen born during the Vietnam War.

Vietnam has agreed in principle to an airlift to the United States of thousands of Amerasians who were fathered by Americans during the Vietnam War and left to lives of poverty and discrimination, two U.S. congressmen said Wednesday. Reps. Robert J. Mrazek (D-N.Y.) and Thomas J. Ridge (R-Pa.) said the agreement reached in Ho Chi Minh City this week "will result in a massive airlift of all Amerasian children from Vietnam," perhaps within two years.