China town: Just Like Any Other Ghetto

"Most people think of Chinatown as a place to go to eat. They have no understanding of the way people live there." Charlotte Chen, a junior at Harvard, belongs to a small group of students here that have found more to do in Chinatown than eat at inexpensive restaurants.

Traditionally the Chinese community in this country has kept to itself, shouldering its burdens without appealing to the outside for aid. A history of discrimination at the hands of the American government has taught the Chinese not to expect help from that source. Because so many Chinese Americans have risen to professional positions and a comfortable standard of living, most Americans are unaware of the seriousness of the problems confronting their country's Chinatowns. As Douglas Lee '76 puts it, "When you see an Asian, you usually figure he's a doctor or a laundryman. People tend to notice only the doctor; they never see the laundryman."

Until recently the Chinese community could take care of itself. Before 1949, many Chinese hoped merely to save enough money to go home, and afterwards, local benevolent associations handled most immigrants' problems. But when Congress abolished the national origins quota in 1965, a deluge of immigrants from Hong Kong soared to a level which now exceeds the communities' capacity to deal with them, but the Chinese still remain one of the least heard or noticed American minorities.

The post-1965 influx of immigrants jammed the already crowded and inadequate housing and schools in Boston's Chinatown, one of the most densely populated areas of the city. Health care falls far below the needs of the people living there. For example, the tuberculosis rate is three times as great, and the infant mortality rate 2.5 times as great, as those of the entire metropolitan area. Many Chinese arrived unskilled, and most of those who had training couldn't use it to find a job because they lacked facility in English. Eighty-five percent of the adult population in Chinatown speaks little of no English. The jobs in local restaurants and businesses that absorbed past immigrants have become saturated, and the garment industry where many Chinese women found unskilled jobs is declining.

Without knowledge of English, the immigrant is trapped in Chinatown. As Lee says, "It's like a ghetto. People grow up and spend their entire lives in Chinatown. They are naturally afraid to go outside without any knowledge of English."

Big-qu Chin, now a graduate student at the Harvard School of Education, emigrated from Hong Kong with her family when she was nine. She has worked in volunteer projects in Chinatown for over five years. "Language is the biggest barrier," she says. "Without English you can't solve the other problems." Four years ago she helped found an adult education program. "We started with two or three Saturday afternoon classes in English. Some of the students had been here 20 or 30 years and this was their first opportunity to learn the language." Weeknight classes were added, along with a child care program to free mothers to attend Saturday afternoon classes, and the curriculum has expanded to include Mandarin Chinese, driver's education, and a citizenship course to prepare the students for naturalization.

'The students work all day in factories and come right to class for two hours before they go home," Chin says. "Some want to learn English so badly, they try to come every night during the week and again on Saturday for four more hours."

Chin devotes all of her time away from her academic work to projects in Chinatown. "Supposedly graduate students are supposed to devote every hour of their non-sleeping, non-eating time to their work," she says. "Fortunately the School of Education is flexible enough so there is room for people like me to take advantage of the real world and academic training at the same time. If the school is training educators for society, who will hopefully hold key positions and effect changes, then students will have to get real world experience. This combination of community action and academic training that I have had will make me a better educator in the future."

Charlotte Chen, who is president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Chinese Students Association, teaches Mandarin in the Saturday program. Her students are mostly second-generation Chinese who already know English. They want to learn the official Chinese dialect because of their interest in keeping their culture and heritage alive in this country. But Chen--who has always attended English-language schools, though she grew up in Taiwan--acts as more than a teacher. "It's a mutual thing," she says. "I never think of helping anyone. It's more than that. I work with high school girls, and we share the growing experience. They are very special friends."

"This has been an awakening experience for me," she continues. "Through my work down there I have remembered that I am Chinese. But the rewards aren't obvious. You can't change things in two or three years. I've worked here for three years now, and i see the same problems as when i first came here. Often you never see the benefits of your work."

Big-qu Chin also does more with her students than teach them English. "I don't serve just as an English teacher, but as a social worker and interpreter as well," she says. "They bring mail for me to translate. Even if they just go to a doctor, for example, they need an interpreter."

This year Chen coordinated China Night, an event that Big-qu Chin initiated three years ago. Students from colleges all over the Boston area, along with one or two big-name stars from Hong Kong, present an evening of Chinese culture and entertainment. The money from the ticket sales goes to 11 different volunteer organizations in Chinatown that perform social services for the community.

Chen is also helping set up a bilingual "hotline" wh'ct will aim at the problems of Chinese teenagers. In the last two years, the Chinese community has seen its first rise in juvenile delinquency. The Chinese have traditionally valued education--many immigrants came here expressly for better educational opportunities. Traditions within families arise when children, handicapped by their lack of English, fail to live up academically to their parents' expectations.

The children of Chinatown are caught between two cultures. The older members of the community are conservative and tradition-minded. Those who were willing to be assimilated moved to the suburbs, leaving behind those with less money and those less willing to sacrifice traditional values.

During the last year Lee spends about 12 hours a week in Chinatown working at an after-school day care program with 15 to 20 children, referred there because of emotional problems similar to those described by Chin. "The kids that grow up in that environment get either really tough, or beat down," Lee says. "Some were really active and loud; others didn't talk at all. There were two kids there that didn't say anything since I had been there, which was a year. There was a third guy like that, but we got him to say something after six months.

"It was amazing. Most of the kids weren't even six yet. We were getting kids that were just unbelievable. One girl had gone through a house fire, her father had been killed in an accident, she herself had been in an automobile accident, and she hadn't even gone to school yet. She was a mess. I think we managed to salvage one boy. He was 85 pounds and not yet six. He would just tear around the place and knock people over, but he was a fundamentally honest person. He was starting to come around.

"We tried to bring out the quiet kids with group activities. The other ones we tried to give as much individual attention as we could. But the place was like a madhouse. I'd go in there and all the kids were running around. I would try to work individually with some, but after a couple of minutes someone would get knocked on the head or something and I'd have to stop;"

He shakes his head. "I didn't realize at the time that these were special kids," he says. "I thought they were all like this. But to a certain degree they are." The efforts of John Wong, a senior in Eliot House, are directed at youths who have the same basic problems, but exhibit them in less extreme ways. Involved in a kaleidoscope of projects, from drafting community redevelopment proposals to serving on the board of directors of a local health clinic, Wong spends most of his time in Chinatown with teenagers. When he is not working at a tutoring program run out of a neighborhood church, he takes groups of teenagers out of the city on camping trips. For the last two summers he has arranged for college students to receive work study grants in order to work in community organizations in Chinatown. But he has only been warning up for this summer.

Wong, who has served for three years on the board of directors of Action for Boston Community Development, Boston's antipoverty agency, has pushed through that organization a proposal for a summer school for 50 to 60 teenagers that he will direct.

"The kids in Chinatown are disadvantaged educationally and recreationally," he says. "The public schools don't help them much with their language handicap, so they can't keep up academically. Chinatown is adjacent to the Combat Zone, and the Mass Turnpike runs right through the middle of it. They have little open space left for recreation."

Along with a staff of nine full-time workers and seven or more volunteers, Wong will teach basic subjects directed toward college preparation, and some other subjects the students request that they can't take in their high schools. The recreational end of the program will include athletics, field trips, and camping expeditions. Some time each week will go to community projects: "We'll get 50 brooms and sweep the streets," Wong says. "It builds the kids' spirit, and helps the community at the same time."

Wong isn't too sure how much good he's done for the kids in his tutoring program. "I don't know what I've given them," he says, "but I've gotten a lot from it. Just from playing with them, wrestling with them, talking about God, our goals and responsibilities, I've found out more about myself than I could've learned with my nose in a book."

Last week Wong had not started his schoolwork for this semester, and had over 100 pages of papers to write by the end of the term. But he is convinced that what he has learned from working with the children is just as valuable as his formal education. "Harvard is not a place to develop a social consciousness," he says. "After four years here and some more at grad school, you can't go out and help people. It develops with time spent working with people.

"I never consciously decided to become involved. It's a really natural thing now; priorities don't even come into the question, he says. "I never consider throwing it out and studying. I remember helping this old couple, driving them to the hospital, and translating for them. It would get me in the pit of my stomach when I'd walk up the stairs to their apartment and the paint would come off in my hands. It is a very emotional experience for me. The anguish involved, the frustrations, the anger--the thrills." In contrast to Wong, whose efforts have covered the spectrum of social problems in Chinatown, Janet Moy '75 has concentrated her work on the health problems of the community. Last month she was elected to the executive board of the Boston Community Health Center. Moy, who will go to Tufts Medical School next year to be able to work in the Chinese community, began working on the staff of the center two years ago. The community has no other medical facility for the Chinese-speaking residents who can't obtain health care anywhere else without an interpreter.

Operating out of a store-front, and without the funds to keep a doctor on duty all the time, the center mainly refers patients elsewhere and uses the nearby Tufts-New England Medical Center for treatment of emergency cases.

Two weeks ago Moy directed the center's annual Multi-Disease Screening. She lined up volunteers, including doctors and college students, to work for three days administering general physical exams. "The program has two purposes," she says. "One is publicity--getting people aware that the center exists. The other is to find diseases that they didn't know they had. In a poor community the attitude is 'If you feel fine, you are fine.'"

Moy's early experiences with interpreting for her foreign-born parents have led her to medicine. 'They were going to this crummy doctor and I had to translate for them," she explains. "It made me really angry. If they had any kind of health education they wouldn't have used him. I'm going to work in Chinatown when I finish med school. Since I'm bilingual, if I worked elsewhere I would feel as though I would be wasting one of my talents when it is needed."

When she first came to work in Chinatown, May was leery about the reception waiting for her. "There's a rift between the kids that grew up in the suburbs and the ones that grew up in Chinatown," she says. "I'm considered Western to them. And it's hard to be a college student there. The community naturally feels exploited by students that come in and use them for projects and term papers, and then leave. You have to prove you're committed. For that reason I won't take on any responsibilities unless I'm positive I can handle them."

Moy admits that some of her work didn't appeal to her. "Once I had to take care of a very old-woman," she recalls. "It made home visits to a tiny one-room apartment. I felt awful the whole time. It's hard to deal with old women. They treat you like a daughter and demand so much emotionally."

Most of the people who work in Chinatown experience such an emotional demand--nearly all of them are Chinese simply because volunteers need to know Chinese, although there are programs that use only English. Having the same ethnic background works to draw people in. As Doug Lee puts it, "I saw a need in Chinatown and identified with it, because the people who are suffering are like me."

Each of the students deeply involved in Chinatown echoes John Wong's concern about ignoring his academic work. But each seems trapped there, as deeply as the non-English speaking immigrants. As Lee describes it, "Once you get in it's hard to get out. Most people just haven't made the plunge yet. But I think if more people went down there and worked for a couple of days they probably wouldn't be able to leave. It just gets inside you."