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National Geographic : 1979 Nov
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(Continuedfrom page 723) job has to be done, I know, but sometimes I find I just have to walk away." He comes back, however, for there are other camps to visit, more food to be distrib uted, more fans to be handed out to stir up some breezes in the hot, stinking gumbo of air that hangs in the camps. Even Bad Conditions Are Better Chunk Kam Kut could have been a curve baller, the way she snapped her wrist to get the piece of cardboard she used for a fan from one side of her face to the other. At the age of 80 she boarded a small boat in Viet nam with 299 other Chinese and set sail for Hong Kong. Now, sitting on a mat in a 23 story factory building in the New Terri tories, she was smiling, revealing a tooth count of three, all small and brown and set in her lower gum like cloves in a ham. I asked her how she felt, and she replied in Canton ese, "Not bad." Then she started to fan me. "The life in Vietnam, where I came from two months ago, is terrible," she said. "We haven't had one piece of new clothing since the Communists came." More than 10,000 boat people were housed in the factory building on the day I was there. Some were assigned two hundred to a room, and a casual stepping off of mea surements showed a living space of about 11 square feet per refugee. Those in the factory building are allowed to work outside, in some of Hong Kong's 40,000 factories. It is a way of making a little money for the family while waiting for a per manent refuge. The United States, by far, is the leading choice of the boat people. Committed last summer to taking in 14,000 a month, the U. S. is and always has been the most recep tive nation for the homeless Indochinese. "In considering a refugee for settlement in the U. S., we give the highest priority to re uniting families," said the Reverend Rich ard L. Shinn, the representative in Hong Kong for a joint agency composed of nine voluntary resettlement groups. "For those without relatives or a previous U. S. associ ation, processing will take longer." Refugees accepted by the U. S. are spon sored by one of the nine groups. Interviews are conducted by members of Pastor Shinn's 732 staff, and the results are forwarded to the groups for consideration. "Many, many families are being broken up in the flight from Vietnam," Pastor Shinn said. "They leave on different boats and fail to get back together. Someone's always missing. We're in the middle of one of the greatest tragedies of our time." Even with the increased quotas set by the U. S. and other countries, and even if Viet nam does honor its vague agreement to slow the expulsion of its ethnic Chinese, it may well take years for Hong Kong to recover. It's the strain, the terrible strain that has reached the very nerve ends of patience here. It is generally thought in Hong Kong that the world ignored the problem too long. "Imagine what the reaction would have been," a Hong Kong newspaper reporter told me, "if all those people who died at sea were Norwegian, or German, or Dutch. What has happened borders on genocide. As usual, the United States is doing more than any other country, and it may not be fair to say this, but it would have been wonderful if they had moved the Statue of Liberty to San Francisco when this terrible thing began." And Now, a New Future One afternoon last June, a 63-year-old former Vietnamese university professor and I sat on plastic stools in the Sham Shui Po refugee camp run by the U. N. We drank warm soda pop and talked about the triphe and his five daughters would be making the next day. They had been accepted for resi dence in the United States. He wanted to know about New York City because that was where they would be go ing. I told him what I knew, and I suggested that he prepare to eat his Peking duck with plum sauce because that is the way it is often served in the States. He said that would be all right; he'd eat it with horseradish as long as he could eat it as a free man. Not far from where we sat, there were half a dozen boys whacking marbles out of a cir cle scratched in the dirt. One stood out from the others because his hair was blond. I pointed this out to the professor, and he said, yes, that boy was a refugee from Vietnam. I didn't ask where in Vietnam. It was enough to know that it was a place his father had passed through on his way to war. 0 NationalGeographic, November 1979
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