The boat people on our shores

...Tam's mother kneels, in a characteristic VieUmmese position, staring ahead misty-eyed...

...Thoi sings about a boy who has gone to fight...

...Whatever the name of the illness, it is sufficiently debilitating...

...I won't mess with them...

...As the song ends there is more gunfire and then the mother learns about her son's death and the need to bury him...

...For the Indochinese it appears that in addition to hard work and aggressiveness, success will come most easily to those who have banded together...

...With his usual asceticism, six months later Cho has still not had his dinner9 On workdays Cho's brothers are already asleep when he returns home and are off to work by the time he gets up...

...But I will say they're dangerous with their jujitsu and their knives...

...According to~Yip--to use his Mandarin name--"compared to others my escape was easy...

...We could not tell if they were Malay or pirates...

...He spends his days helping his wife babysit for the children of Vietnamese parents who have gone off to work...

...At the airport there he posed as an official of a European zoo, and stole an entire consignment of spider monkeys, which he took back to the location so they could swarm over the raft in the final scene...

...Yip was lured away by California...

...That program--and not another Camelot--is what will really get this country moving again...

...It was revived, briefly, in Kevin White's first campaign for Mayor...

...The brothers are all worried about their two remaining brothers who are drifting in Saigon...

...Next to it is a poster which says,"LOVE MAKES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE...

...That way his wife and child can P'cH~_.R KOVLER, a former aide W Senator Hubert Humphrey and Congressman Sydney Yates of Illinois, reports regularly from W~shington for Commonweal...

...The framers of the Constitution, hostile as they were to purely local political elites, did not contemplate abolishing them entirely, but only casting them in the shadow of a more awesome national government...

...The politics of race began to dominate the city when the tradition of white and black working-class voters supporting the same local candidates came to an end...

...Having lost the habits and manners of local government, citizens next lose their ability to participate in (or even comprehend) national politics...

...I think often about that evening on the job with Cho because I increasingly hear that the boat people are lazy freeloaders...

...I don't know how they do it but they've all got new cars...

...It becomes isolated and defensive, vulnerable to carefully orchestrated pressures and the advice of experts on image-projection...

...He has held three jobs since arrival, the first at a hotel where he did general cleaning, fixing the beds and the like, the second at the Arlington Hyatt House where he was once voted Employee of the Month...

...My daughter, Dao, almost died from diarrhea...

...Moreover, "fully 94 percent of those who sought jobs are employed...

...I told her she should be happy because I am going to America and that one day we will meet there and have a better standard of living9 Then, she thinks I should go...

...It has proved elusive since, at least in local contests...

...Furthermore, those who have been here more than two years are mostly self-supporting...

...Once," says Duc, "my father got mad at me because I stayed out all night and he thinks that I smoke a reefer or drink beer...

...I talk to him a bit about "the big picture" but he dismisses my world view with a shrug...

...We are listening to a tape of Vietnamese popular music...

...Which brings us, at last, full circle...

...On our final day together Yip, his wife and two sisters-inlaw go on an outing--and as if they've picked up the fever of old Berkeley--they go to a protest march...

...Local politics could sorely use such miracles...

...But I don't like these things...

...Your country is so rich," he says, "you may not know how rich it is...

...I am acutely aware of how cramped the room is, but then I remember that 19 of this evening's diners have sat still on rocky boats for days under the hot sun of the South China Sea...

...When he came to the last scene ofAguirre, which occurs as a party split off from Pizarro's 16th-century search for El Dorado emerges from the mouth of the Amazon River, Herzog decided that some kind of wild animal should be let loose on the raft with Aguirre, who is the expedition's only survivor...

...In Vietnam I could not do this...

...Not like the colored with their Cadillacs, mind you...

...to 12:30 A.M...

...I've read that they eat dogs and cats...

...And twenty-year-old Nam, a cook's helper at a Chinese restaurant, works six days per week and is gone by 9:00...

...The second time was in November 1978 during the purge of Chinese citizens...

...It would be nice if there were a Way of taking advantage of this fact, at least as a way of beginning the reconstruction of the city's political order...

...Yip is continuously in a good mood because within the last ten days, fifteen of his closest relatives have joined him...

...He has received two letters from Anh and she appears to be gaining strength...

...Doubtless this poster hangs on the bedroom wall of thousands of Americans and I know that if I had seen it on those walls I would think it was pure hokum...

...Then the 21 of us sat, squatted or kneeled tightly together with no room to move to the side...

...Phuc, 58, was a fisherman of considerable success in Vietnam...

...Still, he works this pace daily from 3:00 P.M...

...According to a recent study by tho Transcentury Foundation, over a third of the Indochinese coming here are under fifteen...

...It is 1:30 a.m...

...he takes it as a personal failure...

...The Vietnamese in this respect are no different," says Jeannie McDaniels of the International Rescue Committee, "the younger ones can learn the language, they're open to newer ideas...

...My interpreter stops to translate for Yip...

...While every person there not making a living from violence is eager to get out, hundreds of Vietnamese of Chinese descent--the Hua--find it to be relatively hospitable: it is within easy walking distance of Chinatown where there are markets, like-miMed people, and relaxed conversations...

...His apartment--which is really one ten-by-twenty foot room with a kitchen, a closet and a bathroom--smells from another apartment's fried chicken...

...The only object which looks out 0f place is a copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging on the wall...

...Even though I can't sleep because people outside are yelling, water is dripping, there are animals five feet away which are rustling in the garbage and Nghiep's mother-in-law snores, the other ten people in this room appear to be in the deepest slumber...

...Hundreds of local Indochinese gather before San Francisco's City Hall to try to bring attention to the plight of the boat people...

...She didn't have boiled water to drink...

...Even if I get married," he adds, "I will stay at home with my parents because they are old...

...If I hadn't known anything about their past or present, I would vouch that the three young men in this small apartment were living the happy-go-lucky lives of fraternity brothers or sailors on leave...

...At a center for the study of Immigration at the University of Maryland, a recent report said that "only 10 to 11 percent are totally dependent on the U.S...

...Yet family life is continuously on their minds...

...THE HUMAN REALITY BEHIND THE STATISTICS The boat people on our shores PETER KOVLER C HO IS A WAITER in a Washington hotel-restaurant...

...The fact is that the boat people must be allowed in because otherwise they will drown or rot in refugee camps, but beyond that, the facts also do not support the fears of our latest Know-Nothings...

...Tocqueville's prophecy has come true...

...The middle-aged Indochinese bike fixer smiles and nods...

...Herzog therefore left the production company treading water in the river while he made his way to Rio de Janeiro or some other major coastal city...

...In national contests, it is still a viable tradition, and in 1972 (to use just one } example) it passed a genuine miracle: working-class ethnic Boston, middle-class liberals, and blacks all united behind the candidacy of George McGovern...

...With accompaniment from the whiney flutes and violins that seem ever present in popular eastern music, Thoi tells how a mother is worried that her boy will not come home...

...The family of Phuc Van Nguyen of Kansas City, Missouri, is an apt illustration...

...And for many, especially the newest immigrants, it is relatively free of the fear that was part of their recent Indochinese lives...

...He suffers now from some kind of 21 December 1979:723lung aliment, once described to me as asthma, another time as emphysema and still another time as tuberculosis...

...Bronzed and muscular, Cho was undoubtedly strikingly handsome in his South Vietnamese uniform...

...That tradition owed much to the character and policies of James Michael Curley, who dominated Boston politics for half a century...

...These people've got new Fords and Chevys...

...Not enthusiastically, to be sure: but united, nonetheless...

...I left," he explained, "because the government wanted to 'recruit' me for irrigation projects, digging ditches and watering the fields...

...Klaus Kinski is another...

...Moving to the.left on the political spectrum are some blacks who believe that the Vietnamese should not be given so much while' 'blacks in this country" are denied "basic human rights...

...When I was in Vietnam," he says, "I thought the future was hopeless and we would never meet...

...A second time we saw a ship with eight people who had dark skins, suntans...

...That half the building's residents are junkies does not bother them...

...But, now, we are together...

...I watch as he bustles furiously from kitchen to table to bar to cashier and then around again...

...The twenty-one-year-old Ha, tall for a Vietnamese at 5'8" (he even played serfiipro basketball in Vietnam), is off by 7:30 to his "survival" hotel job...

...Already in southern California where one-fifth of the Vietnamese live, one can see the signs of prosperity with unity: in Los Angeles there is a Vietnamese deli, a Vietnamese take-out restaurant, a center for old people to learn English and YMCA's which cater to the young...

...As the title of a recent documentary on Herzog, I Am My Films, suggests, Herzog is obsessive about moviemaking...

...The singer, Thoi Trang, performs a popular song about the war...

...Washington, however, became his "final" destination...

...She is in her wedding gown...

...The mattresses are laid up against the wall and a clean white sheet carefully spread on the floor...

...Kinski felt that Herzog dealt with human beings in much the same way as monkeys...

...She is not a good swimmer and she must carry our daughter...

...In Kansas City, however, where two thousand Vietnamese live in relative isolation, such commercial and social services cannot exist...

...I T is axiomatic among long-time American refugee officials that the people who do best in the "new world" are the younger ones...

...Earlier, in San Francisco, as Yip was leaving the demonstration at City Hall, three American folk singers start a rendition of" We Shall Ovecome...

...Phuc is no longer the breadwinner--no longer his family's shepherd...

...On July 26 his father, mother, three of his brothers and three sisters arrived...

...For slyness, an award could go to Sen...

...But Duc still maintains his old allegiances...

...Walter Huddleston of Kentucky who, according to an aide, "does not 21 December 1979:721object to the Indochinese but objects to the lack of a rational approach to the entire question...

...Most of them are Democrats...

...For all practical purposes the torch has been passed to twenty-one-year-old Duc and his seventeen-year-old sister Tam...

...have a little extra firewood or another cup of tea: They are still in an island refugee camp in the South China Sea...

...This partially accounts for the federal assistance, but most importantly it means that assimilation will occur at a dramatically high rate...

...It is Duc who gets up at 5:00 A.M...

...The stereo tape deck is blasting the number one disco song "You Can Ring My Bell9 The living room is a shambles with a guitar on the couch, guitar case wide open on the floor, blankets strewn about, newspapers and magazines lying in disorder on a coffee table, and a shelf with dozens of miniature whiskey bottles...

...M OVING UP AND DOWN the nighttime streets in San Francisco's Tenderloin district are dolled-up, mean-looking homosexuals, pimps, whores, addicts, winos and, most ominously, men whose heavy coats in all likelihood serve to cover a gun or a knife...

...They.are also concerned about their mother and 25-year-old sister who are isolated in My Tho Province in the south: they had tried to escape but the boat owner and the crew were arrested...

...Still idling in a Malaysian camp are two sisters, one brother and one adopted brother--all unlucky because their boat was attacked by pirates...

...She takes English classes religiously and is already planning to go on to a fourth and higher paying job...

...They had a deep appreciation of the value local political leaders had to offer: stability, continuity, sensitivity to local needs, and so forth...

...A typical remark comes from a middle-aged white gardener in Kansas City: "Those people just sit and they don't work and the government gives 'era money...

...As I think of Cho and of my "rational" fellow citizens, I begin to believe that we have fallen into some kind of time warp, somehow back in the late nineteenth century when the entrance of Jews and Catholics was opposed...

...The restoration of local government, then--and that means bringing politics back to local government--will help restore national government as well...

...Tam works a forty-hour week at a sewing machine in a dress factory where no matter how fast she sews her garments, a forewoman will throw more at her...

...Duc, as small as his father but with shoulder length silky black hair and muscular build, works a forty-hour week as a welder...

...But my father wants to work very much...

...It is his third demonstration in eight months and he says that he "enjoys the freedom in America...

...The pace of her work is reminiscent of Chaplin in Hard Times...

...The country cannot be rebuilt from the top down, but only from the bottom up...

...The events in Boston reaffh-m that wisdom, and teach a final lesson...

...He throws up sometimes and other times, like when he is sweeping, he has to stop...

...As Cho says, "When we parted I told Anh she would have to be very independent now...

...One time he told my uncle to get him an application for working at the factory...

...Both have to do with song...

...Shot under impossible conditions in the jungles and rain forests of South America, the film produced a relationship between the director and actor so acrimonious that there were repeated threats of murder which resulted, at one point, in actual violence...

...Cho looks like a human pinball...

...They would not have been pleased to see a purely nat!onal elite (such as the Kennedy entourage) parachute into Boston to offer advice on purely local problems, only to be airlifted out the following morning...

...Cho's wife and daughter are now in one of the better Malaysian camps...

...Phuc provided a good income for his wife and five children...

...The lndochinese are up against a prejudice as old as Know-Nothingism...

...In 1973, Herzog and Kinski made their first film together, Aguirre, the Wrath of God...

...Occasionally there can be a bit of strain between father and son...

...At present with his welfare income of $140 per week, it will be hard to stretch the money to cover two rents...

...Until moving into this urban shanty, they had lived for ten months in Pulau Bidong...

...I just like to put the stereo on in the car and eat hamburgers and fries and just talk with my friends...

...With my interpreter I join them in their first family dinner--composed largely of Chinese take-out food--in over four years...

...Alexis de Tocqueville, noting the importance of local institutions to the growth and survival of American democracy, predicted "strange vicissitudes" for a democratic republic that lost the habit and manners of local government...

...But she was lucky, they were close to the shore...

...Tam herself, in what seems the universal teenage response to popular music, knows the words by heart and sings along...

...The feuds among citizens cannot be stilled until we can still the feuds among neighbors...

...and I am half asleep in the apartment of Van Huu Nghiep, 37, a former bicycle repairman currently unemployed...

...But after four days at sea they have to go back because Commonweal: 722the middle of the fishing boat was cracked...

...In a more subtle and sophisticated way, legislators and various interest groups in Washington try to stop the Indochinese...

...National government finds it increasingly difficult to communicate with citizens over the vast distance between Washington and the local community, and also difficult to persuade citizens to communicate with one another...

...Cho escaped from Vietnam in October of 1976, four months before his only daughter, whom he has still not touched, was born...

...He believes that the lyrics apply to the misfortune of his people...

...It is clear that unlike the preceding generation neither Duc nor Tam will allow themselves to be part of anybody's "Vietnamization" plan...

...But for the moment he is euphoric...

...Considering, first, those refugees whohave come from Vietnam since 1975, their employment rates are already the same as those in the rest of the United States...

...The ballad begins with several seconds of rapid gnnfire and then Ms...

...Of the three brothers, Cho is undoubtedly the most Americanized..Nam, 21, and Ha, 20, have come here only four months ago from the infamous Malaysian refugee camp, Pulau Bidong...

...They "tried to coerce me into being part of their labor force...

...A devout Catholic who had left the North in 1954, he managed, despite little education, to become the captain of his own fishing boat in the South...

...Houston was a nice place, he says, but like 80,000 Other Indochinese in the U.S...

...We spend one afternoon looking at several new apartments, including one place decorated to look like an Asian opium den and then another place with nude male calendars on the wall...

...Eventually the boat arrived in Malaysia and his wife, his daughter and his brother were assigned to Camp Pulau Besar...

...immigration policymakers have been slow to recognize this and the results are overcrowded camps in Southeast Asia as well as death in the South China Sea...

...He now lives with his two brothers in the Washington suburb of Fairfax, Virginia...

...Although at present he will not say it outright, it is rather apparent that Anh is the reason Cho has not yet us~l his free, special award winning dinner for two at the Arlington Hyatt House...

...Yip does not know if his sisters were raped or whether this part of his family was robbed...

...For three nights and two days we were at sea and there were only a few incidents...

...I KEEP RECALLING two moments from my visits with these newest Americans...

...The rest of the song is about grass and trees...

...Such an objection has made Huddleston the enemy of more than one pro-immigration group in Washington9 Another "rational group" are the Zer6 Population Growth advocates who say that they have nothing personal against the Indochinese but that the numbey of legal refugees should be reduced...

...And last spring they managed to get close to Malaysia when their boat tilted over and Anh thought she would die...

...The captain said they were pirates and we were all afraid because of the stories we had heard about robberies, rapes, and sinking of ships...

...That boat followed us for one-half hour but it couldn't catch up...

...But now, in Kansas City, Phuc cannot work and, occasionally, cannot even breathe...

...He was the unquestioned leader of his family...

...We were 65 people in a small freighter, 12 meters long...

...His reward was a $25 free dinner, excluding drinks, at the Hyatt restaurant...

...Once we saw a suspicious boat but they weren't fast enough to chase us...

...One knows that the poster has a powerful meaning...

...We both understood that life was just desperate in Vietnam9 She cried a lot and I had to make her stop crying...

...After 10 months in the camp, a Houston organization sponsored Yip's family and they left Asia on a DCI0...

...After a month in the Peruvian and Brazilian jur.gles Commonweal: 724...

...In a living room that looks like a homemade shrine with a picture of Christ resting on top of the stereo, Phuc tells me how "humiliating" it is to have had to flee Viemam...

...Yip notices but what shocks him are rents of $250 month for one-bedroom apartments in the Tenderloin...

...With the exception of Sunday, they have little family life in the United States...

...II I I Screen II II II II I I I IIII THE BEST OF ENEMIES HERZOG & KINSKI T HERE ARE strangers among us, and Wemer Herzog is one of them...

...It is very rare that a woman in my country can do that...

...In Kansas City, under the watchful eyes of the picture of Jesus, I share Orange Nehis with Tam and her mother...

...He initially arrived in San Francisco--the new Ellis Island--with the clothes on his back, a small suitcase with a dress shirt and pants that friends had given him, and $26...

...He could have stayed with his earlier job as a "cleaning room boy" at the Arlington, Virginia, Hyatt House but the twenty-seven-year-old refugee needs the additional money...

...But in Cho's personal life there has been little time for 9 J. sentlmentahty...

...The family may be accustomed to crowding, but the landlord tells Yip that there are too many people in the apartment...

...I recall--even as I am startled into complete awakeness by a darting rat--that most of the people have only arrived four days ago...

...The estrangement ot / Americans from their national government will not end until Americans once again feel loyal to the governments that are closest to them...

...What is usually forgotten, however, is what Bostonians have in common...

...Try as the older ones do, they usually just have too much invested i'n the old cultures...

...Since then she tried to escape three times and it is not some game, she risks her life for it...

...He has a moment to shake my hand but then he is off, saddled with the additional assignment of delivering room service in the hotel...

...My father gave it to me but I wouldn't fill it out...

...His first impression of the United States was its wealth...

...While Tam's views do not seem to be as carefully considered as Due's, the future is hers...

...America was to be governed by a partnership reaching from the smallest city hall, up through the state governments and into the national administration...

...The first time they were caught and thrown in jail...

...Government...

...In Cho's bedroom there hangs on the wall a portrait of his wife, a gift from a friend who drew it from a photograph...

...As Duc drives to work he says, "I am worried about my father because he is sick in the lungs...

...alld drives with five other Vietnamese to a plant that is forty minutes awaY...

...And on August 3 his wife's parents, her three sisters-in-law and two nieces brought the family to almost total unification...