CASTOFFS OF WAR : Search for Father Is a Search for Self

FONTANA —  Trang Nguyen would ask about her father, of course. All the Amerasians do, with words or with just a feeling that swells their hearts.

The responses they get in return, iced silence mostly, almost invariably disappoint.

“My mother, my grandmother would tell me, ‘Look in the mirror and you will see your father,’ ” Trang says. Then she smiles very wide.

Her mother and grandmother were right.

The eyes and ears--and is it the nose too?--are his. Both father and daughter are small-boned; in women, they call it petite. And now Trang knows that her father is quiet, sort of shy. Just like her.

“I wait 22 years and now I can call Dad,” Trang says. “I so happy. I feel that I love him the first time I saw him.”

Trang Nguyen is at home in Fontana, finally in a land that feels as if it fits. She has been in the United States since January of last year. It took six years before Vietnam would let her, her mother and her half-sister out.

Once her immigration paperwork was begun, Trang says, she stood out all the more in Vietnam. She wasn’t allowed to continue school. As an Amerasian in Ho Chi Minh City, she was marked.

She is engaged to be married now, to an American man, engineer George Sparks. Her father has told her that he would like to attend the wedding. Trang believes him, with all her heart.

Trang Nguyen’s story, entangled in the larger scheme of war and its aftermath of abandonment, recrimination and guilt, is rare. She searched for her father, a man who left her mother in Saigon before she was even born, and then she found him--on the first try.

“I didn’t want to find him right away,” she says. “I wanted to learn English, to study. I wanted to be something, so he could be proud of me. But then I couldn’t wait.”

George Sparks was the one who suggested that it might be time to look. Trang was nervous, wondering if she could stand rejection, or whether it would be better not to ask questions if the answers could bring pain.

George went to the Yorba Linda public library and flipped through the telephone directory for Boise, Ida., the city where Trang’s mother had remembered that her boyfriend had lived. The year then was 1968.

There were two men with Trang’s father’s name in the Boise book. George dialed the correct number first.

Rarer yet, this man, an Air Force veteran, did not mind being found. In February, he drove out from Boise where he lives with a girlfriend now to see Trang. He has never married, after all these years. Trang is his only child.

Still, even Trang’s reunion was not as simple as all that. Trang’s father, a fireman, cannot quite put his feelings about finding her into words, not with Trang and certainly not with me, when I call him on the phone.

“I just don’t want to talk to anybody about it,” he says. He wonders if I am tape-recording our conversation, which I am not. He sounds annoyed mostly, and shocked.

Other reunions between Amerasians and their American fathers--and there are so few that resettlement workers around the country can recount them by name--are fraught with ambivalence too.

A civil engineer who had worked in Vietnam was reunited with his daughter and asked her to come and live with him and his family in West Los Angeles. The family underwent two years of counseling, and everything seemed fine. Now the engineer and his American wife are getting a divorce.

Last month, a retired Air Force general flew from New York to pick up his Amerasian son in Los Angeles. The son returned to his father’s home, but within two weeks, he had run away.

“It’s understandable,” says Loc Nguyen, who directs the Amerasian program at the United States Catholic Charities office in Los Angeles. “The Amerasians are caught between love and hate.”

Trang Nguyen, like so many other Amerasians, suggests that her search for her father was indistinguishable from a search for herself. She wants nothing more from this man than an acknowledgment of a bond.

And she, too, is a bit uneasy about what that means. When she talks about their meeting, she balls her fist and holds it to her stomach. It means nervous and afraid.

“I wait after he stopped car and he get out and I walked out and hugged him,” she says. “He almost cry. I almost cry. He say he so nervous. But his girlfriend say that he want to come here, that he go faster and faster in the car. . . .

“My mother, all this time, she said he will come and get me. She said not to worry, that he would come right away. She was so sure. So I said, ‘OK, Mom,’ and she was right. Before I met him, I felt like something was missing. I don’t feel that anymore.”

Trang hasn’t been in touch with her father since March, when he sent her some photographs of himself during the war and another in January, 1976.

There is an 8x10 of him and Trang’s mother, Tho Nguyen, taken in a Saigon photo studio two weeks before he left Vietnam. The couple, who lived together for about eight months, had met at the air base where Tho washed the soldiers clothes.

Trang’s mother had her own photographs too, but with the Communist victory in 1975, Trang’s grandmother burned all mementos of the Americans that their family had known.

Americans are risks.

“I was very pleased to see you last month and enjoyed our visit very much,” Trang’s father writes. “I realize it was much too short of time, but later we will be able to see each other longer and maybe under less stressful conditions.”

Then he goes on to talk about the photographs, and observes, “I think we were much younger then!” He ends his note about there. “Love n’ Hugs,” he says, and then he signs his name.

He still cannot call himself Dad.