O.C. Clergymen Held in Vietnam Return to Southland : Reunion: The two clerics, who said they were not physically harmed during their detention, were confident that they would be freed.

LOS ANGELES —  Hanh Ma was the first of her siblings to see their father emerge from U.S. Customs, and she screamed in excitement. Tuan Phuc Ma and Nhi Van Ho looked up and smiled.

They were home after three weeks of confinement and questioning in Vietnam.

After hugging his family, May said: “I knew they would have to let us go. They had no real reasons to keep us.”

Ma, 55, of Westminster and Ho, 58, of Cypress had traveled to Vietnam as underground Christian evangelists. Both men are pastors. They were detained for proselytizing.

They were not physically harmed during their ordeal, Ho said in Vietnamese. But it was the absence of freedom and the fear of a long incarceration that tortured him.

Government officials told them that they were charged with attending prayer meetings without permission and traveling without their passports, the two clerics said.

Before they boarded the plane in Vietnam, a government official told them that they were being released because their crimes were not serious, and made them promise not to do it again, the pastors said.

Ho and Ma both said they believed they were held for three weeks because local police hoped that interrogation would lead them to other violators of the country’s religious laws. Ho estimated that 20 Vietnamese citizens also were brought in for interrogation.

About 30 relatives and church members went to Los Angeles International Airport with flowers to greet the two men, whom they consider heroes.

Ma’s wife, Ngoc Le Ma, said he has lost weight.

“They only fed him rice and vegetables. His bed was the floor, so he couldn’t sleep,” she said.

Kiem-Xuan Ho, 58, Ho’s wife, said that while she had been worried, she had trusted God to bring her husband back.

“I was so upset, but now I am so happy,” she said.

U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) had arranged for the men to be expedited through Customs at Los Angeles International Airport.

“Having been inconvenienced by the Communist government, we didn’t want them to be inconvenienced by our government as well,” Rohrabacher said in Washington. “It’s very important for them to be reunited with their families as soon as possible.”

A Vietnamese representative to the United Nations said Wednesday that he has not yet been told why the two Vietnamese-American pastors were released but said that U.S. intervention probably had little or nothing to do with it.

Last week, a petition with signatures of more than 40 members of Congress demanding the pastors’ release was delivered to the Permanent Mission of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to the United Nations. The deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Kenneth Quinn, also raised the issue with Vietnamese government officials in a Saturday meeting in Peking.

The Vietnamese government “did not intend to hold them on a long-term basis, that’s all,” said Pham Que, the first secretary of the Permanent Mission. “They probably were held for questioning because they violated the law.”

Foreign missionaries are supposed to ask permission from local police before proselytizing, Pham has said. He also has said that such missionaries are not encouraged.

The men did not ask permission because they knew their request would be denied, according to Vu Van Ho, Ho’s 31-year-old son.

The two Hos, Ma and another Orange County resident, 21-year-old Thanh Tran, went to Ho Chi Minh City in June. They took Bibles, videos and other religious materials and visited several churches in the area. The men took part in revival-style meetings and distributed materials aimed at preaching Christianity.

At a service toward the end of June in Vung Tau, they were warned that there were undercover agents among the participants. So the four tried to leave the beach city in a van, Vu Van Ho said, but police stopped them. The Californians were then interrogated, at one point for 11 hours, and released June 30 after paying fines of $800 for violations of Vietnamese religious law and for traveling without their passports.

But the next day, while the four were at a relative’s home in Ho Chi Minh City, the elder Ho and Ma were ordered to go to the police station for further questioning and were told to return July 2, according to the younger Ho. The relatives who took them to the station came home saying that Vu Van Ho and Tran should leave Vietnam any way they could and the two managed to return to Orange County July 3.

The pastors help run the Vietnamese Christian Church in Santa Ana and the Vietnamese Assembly of God in Long Beach.

Rohrabacher called the release of Ho and Ma “an act of good faith on the part of Vietnam” to facilitate better relations between the two countries. He would have urged stopping U.S. talks with Vietnam if its officials had refused to release the two, he said.

At the airport on Wednesday, Ngoc Le Ma, 55, waited with a bouquet of lilies and one of roses, “to welcome him home.”

Ho’s wife said she had been cooking a Vietnamese noodle dish, bun bo Hue, for his breakfast today.

“I haven’t able to sleep from worry. Last night I was so happy I couldn’t sleep either, so I’m a little tired,” Kiem-Xuan Ma said.

Times staff writer Rose Kim contributed to report.