HOUSTON, Texas - An Agence France-Presse photo capturing an older Vietnamese woman and man eating a little food left in the scorching sun on a freeway overpass across from the Superdome in New Orleans struck a chord among a group of Southern California college students and graduates who took no time to take off for Houston. "How can I hold back tears when I see things like this?" Kim Nguyen, president of the Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California, wrote in an e-mail that she sent - with the photo - to members requesting their help in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The media have been flooded with the powerful images and sounds of devastation. But the Vietnamese faces particularly hit home for the college students and recent graduates whose parents and families had been victims of destruction in Vietnam decades ago.

"It was heart-breaking," said University of California-Los Angeles neural science major Jennifer Vo. "You look at the picture and you know this is what my parents went through."

Viet Ngo, 21, an accounting major at the University of California-Riverside, had the same flashback on his family.

" 'Oh, not again,' I told myself. My dad was once a refugee and now we are seeing Vietnamese becoming refugees the second time," he said. "They lost their homes in Vietnam and now are losing homes in America. It's tragic to experience this twice."

Michael Nguyen, a University of California-Santa Barbara psychology graduate who also is vice president of the student association, contacted Boat People S.O.S., a national Vietnamese refugee and immigrant advocacy group, and learned about the massive relief effort in Houston. He gathered Vo, Ngo and Chris Tran, a UC-Irvine film and media study graduate, and the four drove 12 hours to Houston from Los Angeles two weeks ago.

In Meyerland, Meilun Ouyang had made two rooms ready for the Californians after her daughter, Shalin Pei, a UCLA psychobiology major, called to asked her to accommodate the group.

Pei, 21, who started a one-person door-to-door campaign to collect donations of cash and basic necessities from hotels and businesses, heard about the group's plan through a sorority friend and asked her parents to open their door to the volunteers.

"Hearing my friends tell me about what they have done, and what needs to be done makes me feel sad that I can not take a more active role," Pei told her parents in an e-mail.

Providing a home

Ouyang called it a "no-brainer" for her to provide a home for the volunteers.

"But I didn't know that Shalin doesn't know them personally until they arrived. I thought they were friends," said Ouyang, a musicologist and piano teacher. "I was very moved by this generation and whole-heartedly extended my welcome."

Opening her door to the volunteers was part of her family's effort in pitching in in the wake of the disaster. She and her husband, a university professor, themselves recently returned from Los Angeles, where they attended workshops. They had six pieces of luggage filled with donated goods their daughter collected.

Their older daughter, Nanny Pei, 23, a graduate law student at the University of Houston, has been distributing donated items she received from her friends in the Chicago area to community groups and evacuees.

Once in Houston, the Californian group registered evacuees for government relief, helped them find housing, recruited medical volunteers and sorted and distributed donated goods to Vietnamese church and temple-based shelters.

The group brought $4,200 they raised in Orange County and spent it on food, diapers, baby formula and other basic necessities for the evacuees.

On one occasion, Nguyen and Tran bought 40 bags of rice - each weighing 50 pounds - for hundreds of evacuees sheltered at the Vietnamese Dominican Sisters convent in Meyerland.

Ngo admitted it was somewhat challenging for the male volunteers to have loads of female hygiene products checked out at a Wal-Mart one day when Vo was helping at a makeshift clinic set up at Hong Kong City Mall in Alief for evacuees.

"It was a little embarrassing," Ngo said. "But, hey, people need it and we'll get it."

Eye-opening experience

Although the four stayed in Houston for less than a week, the experience left a deep mark in their psyche, they said.

"It's an eye-opener to see a huge need here," Ngo said. "I remember the earthquake in 1989 in California when I was 5 years old and it was the first time I saw our house wrecked. But that was no comparison to what I've seen in Houston."

Vo, who decided to take the trip to Houston despite concerns of her parents and siblings, said her work in Houston reinforced her sense of ethnic identity.

"I felt a strong cultural connection to the people I was helping," said Vo, who came to America with her family when she was 1 year old.

However, Tran said he would join any group to come to Houston to volunteer for evacuees of any ethnicity.

"I just wanted to help in a situation like this and it didn't matter whom I helped," he said.

As the vice president of the student organization, Nguyen said he felt the responsibility to take the lead. He was involved in a capital campaign to help tsunami victims, but a domestic disaster gave him an opportunity to reach out in a more tangible way, he said.

Witnessing firsthand the plight of the evacuees in Houston, the students said the experience made them realize more about the existence of misery outside their own comfortable life.

Nguyen said he left his heart in Houston and has decided to return to volunteer for a year.

A week later, Ouyang is still savoring the memory of the four young persons she briefly embraced.

"It's unbelievable to see their compassion, understanding, wisdom and ideas that are so fresh, so original," Ouyang said. "Each of them called us to let us know they arrived back safe and sound."

And they thanked Ouyang for the hot meals and hugs, she said.

"They are like our own children," Ouyang said. "We told them they now have a home in Houston."