A TALE OF TWO STUDENTS

On March 19, in a parking lot at San Gabriel High School, a group of Latino students beat up two Chinese brothers, kicking and punching them until they were bruised.

One week later at the same school, four Vietnamese students, one wielding a large garbage can, attacked a white student and jumped another coming to his rescue. In both fights, racial epithets were used.

Overt racial tensions may draw attention at a school that is 42% Asian, 44% Latino and 13% white.

But the majority of the school’s 3,036 students--who come from Alhambra, San Gabriel and Rosemead--never become embroiled in schoolyard violence. For most, a more telling fact of high school life is the de facto segregation that occurs daily both inside and outside the classroom.

There are Spanish-language math classes for Latinos. There is a social club for Vietnamese, with meetings in their native language. At lunchtime, Chinese teen-agers converse in Mandarin at one

table, while at the next table, other Asians speak fluent English. After school, a pickup football game pits a team of Mexican students against students from Central and South America.

Interactions between the groups, especially for foreign-born students, are relatively rare.

San Gabriel school officials have tried a number of methods to break up ethnic cliques. With help from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a New York-based human-relations organization, the school has held annual retreats for students, parents and teachers to explore ethnic issues. But this year, the session was canceled because of a lack of funding, said Stephen Kornfeld, one of two deans of students at San Gabriel High School.

For a firsthand look at the daily realities of student life in the ethnic mishmash that is San Gabriel High School, The Times followed two students around campus--one Vietnamese-

American and one Mexican-American--who have lived in the United States less than a year and speak minimal English.

Van Quan and Eduardo Garcia may never cross paths, but they share a common experience.

They both struggle to understand and to be understood. Sometimes, they feel lost when teachers rattle off sentences in English, and find solace in a teaching assistant who can speak their language.

In classes without foreign language assistants, they rely heavily on classmates for translation, even if the classmates speak only a little English themselves.

Here, through their eyes, is a look at a day in the school lives of Van Quan and Eduardo Garcia.

It was a bumpy 30-minute bus ride to San Gabriel High School. Seated side by side, two teen-agers were gabbing about everything from boys to makeup to the upcoming prom.

“He said what ?” one of them shrieked, making it easy to eavesdrop without even trying.

But to 16-year-old Van Quan, seated quietly behind them, the conversation was a blur of strange sounds, punctuated every so often by a few familiar words.

“I can hardly speak to anyone,” the pretty, doe-eyed teen-ager said in Vietnamese through an interpreter. “When people ask me a question I reply, but I don’t know how to start.”

A year ago, Van and her family left Ho Chi Minh City for the United States. Like many leaving Vietnam, they spent six months in a Philippines refugee camp while their immigration papers were processed. Now they live in a rented house in Rosemead; her parents are unemployed.

When Van enrolled in San Gabriel High last fall, school officials placed her in a remedial English as a Second Language program. The program, which takes up half the school day, is for students who need to develop better learning and language skills before moving on to mainstream ESL classes.

At 7:30 on a recent morning, the bus arrived at the campus, a cluster of mustard-colored buildings not far from the San Gabriel Mission.

Clutching her blue book bag, Van slowly made her way through throngs of teen-agers waiting for friends to arrive by bus, car or bicycle. A slim, long-haired girl hurried toward Van.

“Hi!” It was Van Do, 17, one of Van’s classmates who had come on another bus.

“Hi!” Van Quan chirped, her face brightening.

These were the only English words the girls exchanged. Immediately, they switched to Vietnamese, talking rapidly and laughing.

They headed toward the “orientation center”--a brown portable building that houses the district’s remedial ESL program. It is where they and 13 other students spend the first three 55-minute periods.

Inside, the room was abuzz. The tones and inflections of several languages could be heard as 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds from Guatemala to Mexico to China to Vietnam spoke in their native tongues. Meanwhile, teacher Barbara Dalton explained the day’s lessons in English to one of her assistants.

The students were divided among three tables: all the Asians sat at one, while the other two were occupied by Spanish-speaking students. The class is intentionally segregated this way, Dalton explained, to make it easier for her teaching assistants to translate.

The 8 o’clock bell rang, and Dalton stepped to the front of the class.

“California is a state. Can anyone name another state?” she asked. There was a low murmur as the students whispered among themselves, trying to figure out what their teacher was saying.

“Good morning!” a Vietnamese boy responded loudly. His classmates roared, knowing that was the wrong answer.

But Dalton smiled and played along: “Yes, the state of Good Morning is a beautiful state!”

“Banana!” the boy continued, encouraged. But this time, Dalton shook her head. Van looked confused. She turned to Kim Tran, a teaching assistant who speaks Vietnamese. Tran translated the question, and Van’s face lit up.

“Wa-shing-ton,” she said carefully. Dalton nodded her head, and wrote it on the blackboard.

The others joined in: “Texas?” “Canada?” “Ohio?” “Rosemead?” Dalton wrote only the correct answers on the board.

Shortly after 9 o’clock, it was break time. Most of the teens, including Van, went outside to a ramp on the sunlit side of the building. They automatically separated into two groups--Spanish-speaking and Asian.

Van Quan quietly hummed a tune, then began to softly sing. The song was “Getting To Know You,” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The King and I,” which Van learned in her chorus class.

“What does it mean?” she said in Vietnamese to Kim Hong, a school official who was serving as a translator.

Hong began to explain, but soon was interrupted by two Latino students who were making loud, nonsensical noises and laughing as they mimicked his Vietnamese.

Knowing they were making fun of Hong, Van Quan turned her head away.

“It’s ridiculous,” she muttered in Vietnamese. “Their pronunciation isn’t correct.” But Hong told her not to be offended; he said it is natural for them to imitate the sounds of a foreign language. Vietnamese teen-agers sound just as silly, he said, when they try to repeat Spanish or English slang terms they hear all the time.

At lunchtime, after lining up for a tray of fried chicken, chocolate milk and an orange, Van found a spot at her regular table in the cafeteria, squeezing in between two girlfriends.

The lunch room was divided into distinct ethnic and language groups. Van’s was composed of Vietnamese girls who, like herself, had been in the United States for only a short time--six months, a year, two years at the most. Only Vietnamese was spoken at their table.

Van easily identified the other groups in the cafeteria--a table where Chinese from Taiwan congregated, another for Cantonese-speaking Chinese, one for Spanish-speaking students, another for English-speaking Latinos.

“It’s certainly natural for the kids new to this country to stick with each other,” said Stephen Kornfeld, one of two deans of students at the school. But, he added, “what leads to prejudice, tension between groups and the continuation of stereotypes is the lack of awareness and real contact, the ignorance of who they are as human beings.”

About four years ago, school officials began a program in which about 35 students spent the lunch hour with teen-agers from different ethnic groups. The idea was “lovely,” Kornfeld said, but after a year “it just kind of pooped out. That tends to happen with all these programs. They start to peter out.”

Van said she was unaware of a March 19 fight between two Chinese brothers and a larger group of Latino students. She said that although she feels tension between her friends and other ethnic groups, she doesn’t think the campus is dangerous.

On this particular day, Van and her friends reminisced about the food they missed: Vietnamese pomegranates, tropical fruits that do not grow in the United States, authentic noodle dishes.

“The Vietnamese restaurants (in the United States) don’t do it right,” one girl complained. “They use too much meat. Too much beef and pork. They want to make it taste good for the Americans.”

The girls at the table seemed acutely aware of the doings of other Vietnamese students.

Thanh Tran, 18, told her friends about an incident in class that morning. The teacher had asked a new student if he was Vietnamese. He retorted sarcastically: “No, I am Viet Cong.” Thanh thought the comment was insensitive because many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam died at the hands of the Viet Cong.

“It was only a joke,” she reasoned, “but he shouldn’t say that.” Her lunch companions nodded in agreement.

The afternoon brought Consumer Bingo, an English as a Second Language class version of the popular pastime.

Teacher Maria Vairo spoke slowly, enunciating each word as she explained the game. Instead of numbers, each letter called out would be followed by an economic term: “B-Transaction.” “I-Mass production.”

The game was a end-of-the-school year diversion compared to heavier work doled out earlier, Van said. At the beginning of the year, students had to read long passages in English for homework, and answer a list of complicated questions.

Van would spend several hours each night with her English-Vietnamese dictionary, looking up each individual word and writing the Vietnamese translation on the back of her homework sheet. Often, this painstaking process--which kept Van up past midnight--was an exercise in frustration.

“Sometimes I couldn’t make sense out of the whole thing,” she said in Vietnamese. “We didn’t know how to answer. We wouldn’t speak out in class. The teacher saw we were lost and gave us easier assignments.”

Now that the students are working at a slower pace, Van said, “I’m more relaxed. I’m learning more this way.”