A Vietnamese folk legend says in ancient times, the sea dragon Lac Long Quan married the mountain fairy Au Co and she gave birth to 100 children. Half of the children went with their mother back to the mountains, and half stayed to live off the sea.

From these 100 children came the Vietnamese people.

The 50 children who stayed with their father became fishermen. Thus those who make their living off the sea have an honored status in Vietnamese society.

The sea rose and took away much from the Vietnamese community along the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina. In response, a collective of fishermen called the An Giang Fisheries Association from the Mekong Delta in Vietnam gathered $15,000 and gave it to the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi to distribute among their brethren here, reported the Thanh Nien Daily, one of Vietnam's largest newspapers.

Though it was a small amount compared to the devastation - for the 10,000 or so Vietnamese in South Mississippi, the hurricane ruined their principal occupations of shrimping and hospitality as well as their neighborhoods - it was a huge gesture from one of the world's poorest and last communist countries.

"The concern is that one of our own is suffering, starving in a foreign land," said Tuyet A.N. Tran, a community advocate and founder of New York-based viettouch.com, a Vietnamese cultural Web site. "Many in the Vietnamese diaspora have relatives in Vietnam still."

The Vietnamese community spread throughout America also was eager to help after the storm, said Huy Vu Bui, president of the National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies. The perception in the community here and abroad was that not enough was being done for a group of people who largely did not speak English and kept to their own.

That perception led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the Vietnamese government, American businesspeople and community organizations.

Interviews with dozens of Vietnamese living in South Mississippi did not reveal the same sense of abandonment by government that many in the outside community felt.

"They didn't do much for anyone," said Thuy Tran, 25, a manicurist in Gulfport who grew up in Pass Christian.

She said she did not feel the Vietnamese were ignored any much worse than anyone else and many Vietnamese spoken to in the last month agreed.

According to many of the interviewees, Vietnamese translators appeared in South Mississippi a little more than a month after the storm for agencies such agencies as FEMA and the Red Cross, while the Coast Guard had translators almost immediately after the storm to help in rescuing the many Vietnamese stranded on fishing boats.

The Rev. Dong Phan of the Biloxi Vietnamese Martyrs Church said finding comfort in community has been crucial since the storm. More than 70 percent of Vietnamese in South Mississippi are Catholic, and his church, one of several Vietnamese Catholic churches in South Mississippi, has been a cradle of the local community, providing spiritual guidance and a place to gather every day since the storm.

"There has been a lot of suffering," said Phan, a former chaplain in the South Vietnamese Army. He said he has been eager to get people together to help in the healing.

Just up the road from Phan's church at the Van Duc Buddhist Temple, the monks Thien Tri and Minh Nguyen have been trying to provide a sense of normalcy for their constituents.

The monks estimate only 30 percent of the local community is Buddhist, but said 80 percent in Vietnam are Buddhist. The monks hold daily meditation sessions and are especially able to empathize with their community - they rode out the storm in their temple's attic.

Nguyen said every monk is allowed four possessions: three sets of robes and one bowl.< Everything else must be donated by followers because Buddhist monks vow a life of poverty by tradition. Nguyen said all he has left now are the robes on his back.

The sense of loss is overwhelming in the Vietnamese community and it goes well beyond material possessions.

Thuy Tran's parents lost everything to the storm. Her father, Thin Tran, 58, was a shrimper who stayed on his boat in hopes of saving it but barely escaped with his life. Now, like the hundreds of older Vietnamese shrimpers who know nothing other than shrimping and cannot afford a new boat because of a lack of insurance and an already-dismal shrimping season, Thin Tran does not know what he can do.

Thuy Tran lost her old job at the Wal-Mart in Waveland and now lives in her overcrowded apartment with several homeless relatives, like most Vietnamese in South Mississippi.

The sudden loss of housing and jobs - a vast majority of Vietnamese either worked in the seafood industry or in a casino-related job - has sent at least 25 percent of their population elsewhere in America looking for work, said several Vietnamese interviewed.

Hai Tran, no relation to Thuy, was a welder in Mobile who lived with his three children, his wife, his parents, his brother and his sister on Division Street in Biloxi before the storm. His house was leveled by the flood water and he now lives with just his mother, wife and kids because his father and siblings have gone from New York to California in search of jobs.

"I lost everything I got," Hai Tran said, adding he is grateful to have a FEMA trailer to live in. "I don't have money to rebuild my house. I applied for an SBA loan. I stay here for my family."

South Mississippi's pleasant climate and ties to the sea are what keep many Vietnamese here. While the sea took so much away, many said there is much that it can give back and that is their hope for the future.