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The young, illegal immigrant is hardly the poster child of the anti-immigrant lobby. "If they try to send me back, I'll kill myself," vows Luan Ying Wang, who fled China not for economic opportunity nor even for the usual political reasons.

Luan Ying Wang escaped because she had one too many children. Government officials, upholding China's one-child policy, labeled her an "excess birth guerrilla" and already had ordered her to undergo more than one forced abortion. Since her escape, she has been languishing in jail as a political hot potato in the United States.

Wang could not pay the exorbitant fine that Chinese officials demanded in payment for the crime of having two children. In desperation, she left her children with relatives and fled, booking passage on a freighter run by "snakeheads," members of smuggling rings who charge as much as $30,000--most of it required once they have arrived in the United States--to transport Chinese emigrants clandestinely to other countries.

The Golden Venture, the rusting ship where Wang wound up, left carrying 282 Chinese nationals. Like Wang, most were fleeing harsh population control policies. Tong Wai Zhang, for example, had been expelled from government service when he and his wife refused to abort her second child. After the birth, officials ordered the Tongs to pay a $4,000 fine. When Tong told authorities he did not have the money, he learned that he and his wife would be sent to a labor camp for three years. They then decided he should flee.

Golden Venture passenger Guo Zhen Hue, also targeted by the government because his wife had two children, says, "After the birth of our first child, my wife was required to use birth control, to report to a health center monthly, and to submit to a physical exam to check whether or not she was using birth control and whether or not she was pregnant."

Wang, Tong, Guo, and others endured a perilous four-month, 17,000-mile trip replete with storms, seasickness, starvation conditions, and near shipwrecks. They arrived in June 1993 off the coast of Long Island, where they were promptly arrested and jailed by U.S. officials.

DETENTION CONTINUES: Almost three years later, more than half of the passengers remain behind bars, caught in a complex web of U.S. laws, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) maneuvering, and political bickering. According to Wang's attorney, Paula Harris, the stay has not been pleasant. Wang must wear a paper gown and disposable diapers. She sleeps on a five-by-seven-foot mat in a room that is otherwise equipped only with a toilet.

During George Bush's presidency, they would have been granted asylum. Then, U.S. law considered repressive population control grounds for asylum. Now, Verne Jervis, spokesperson at the U.S. ins, says that under current policy, "normal application by China of its family-planning program is not in and of itself persecution on account of political opinion."

Today, Golden Venture passengers, as well as those seized from other ships, await determination of their fate in prisons around the country.

Last year, the INS moved 21 of the Chinese women detainees to prisons outside Bakersfield, California, in preparation for deportation. Twenty women, including Wang, began a 50-day hunger strike in November to protest the action. Jeffrey Lobach, an attorney from York County, Pennsylvania, representing detainees on a pro bono basis, says any who return to China could suffer the same fate as five who have already gone back: fines and possible imprisonment.

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March 4 1996, Vol. 40, No. 3