200 PROTEST TREATMENT OF VIETNAMESE REFUGEES

Nancy Ngan, a McLean nurse who left Vietnam 16 years ago, says she understands why the world has tired of taking Vietnamese refugees.

"The situation is a little like the war in Vietnam," Ngan explained, as she stood among a group of demonstrators in Lafayette Park yesterday. "It goes on and on. The countries of first asylum get fatigued."

But that does not diminish her frustration over the predicament of her two nephews who, she said, have been living in a Hong Kong refugee camp since last summer. Nor does it lessen her concern, she added, over thousands of other Vietnamese refugees who are unable to leave refugee camps in Southeast Asia.

Ngan and about 200 other Vietnamese emigres living in the Washington area gathered in the park across from the White House yesterday afternoon to call attention to the refugee issue. "We're trying to remind everyone," Ngan said. "It is easy to forget."

The occasion was World Vietnamese Refugees Day, called by Vietnamese groups in the United States, France, Australia and Canada on the 14th anniversary of the fall of Saigon to Vietnamese communists, according to sponsors of the demonstration. The Washington rally, which included speeches by Vietnamese community leaders and messages of support from several members of Congress, was planned to coincide with rallies in other major cities, they said.

Ba Van Le, chairman of the Washington Metropolitan Area League of Vietnamese Associations, said the demonstration was designed to seek improvements in the treatment of Vietnamese refugees and to protest efforts by Southeast Asian governments to discourage "boat people" from fleeing Vietnam.

Since the communist takeover in 1975, hundreds of thousands of refugees have gained asylum, but in recent years some countries in the region have adopted stricter measures to keep them out. In Hong Kong, authorities have sorted out refugees fleeing political persecution from so-called economic refugees, who are not allowed to resettle.

Ngan, a nurse at the National Institutes of Health, said she is baffled by the distinction.

Her nephews, 28 and 30, arrived in Hong Kong last July and were immediately labeled economic refugees. As a result, she said, they have not been allowed to resettle in Hong Kong or to join her family in the United States.

Ngan said her nephews, both engineers, left Vietnam in a boat and endured a 20-day passage to Hong Kong because "they want freedom, not because they could not find a job."

Ngan herself arrived in the United States as a 21-year-old nursing student at the University of Colorado. She moved to Washington and, after Saigon fell, helped 40 of her relatives resettle in the area. She started a Vietnamese restaurant to provide work for those who could not speak English. Today, Ngan said, her relatives are computer programmers, doctors, teachers and shop owners.

"They are all working. That was how everybody was brought up to be," Ngan said. She said she would help her nephews find work, if they are allowed to resettle in the United States. "We are saying to the rest of the world, 'Let us sponsor all the Vietnamese in the camps."

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