YORK, Pa. -- They sit hunched over desks in a steamy room inside a county jail, 11 Chinese men experiencing the rhythm and beauty of a new language.
Line by tortuous line, they recite from a poem called "Success."
It's loyalty when duty calls,
It's courage when disaster falls.
The teacher, a patient woman with a soft voice, asks, "What does disaster mean?"
The men look hard at the paper in front of them. But there is only silence, until an American minister named Bob Brenneman roars: "Disaster. It's like landing in New York Harbor on a sandbar. That's disaster."
Suddenly, the room is filled with the sweet sound of laughter.
This is life inside the York County Jail, a year after the tramp steamer Golden Venture ran aground off New York, dumping into a dark, cold sea its human cargo of scared, broken people from China.
Of the 300 who took the plunge into the murky water June 6, 1993, and swam the last miles of a four-month journey to America, nearly half are now being held as detainees in York. They are learning English. They are finding bits of humor. And they are struggling, 144 men caught in the web of an immigration system they do not understand.
But the men are no longer strangers in a strange land. In a conserva tive central Pennsylvania community, a support group has rallied around them. Attorneys have represented them. And many of those who are paid to guard them now call these men their friends.
"They came over here for freedom and to get jobs," said D. W. Billet, a corrections officer who has served at York 16 years. "They didn't come here for a handout or a free ride. They should stay in this country."
The detainees still have no clear view of America. Their only glimpse of the country comes out of tiny windows, behind razor wire, across the street from a tire plant.
They are housed in the east block of the county jail, living two to a cell, separated from the rest of the general inmate population.
"We always have hope," said one of the detainees, who wishes now only to be identified by an American name he has chosen.
Call him Charlie. He is a 27-year-old construction worker from Fujian province, who, like most of the others, sought to come to America to make a better living and to flee what he considers an oppressive regime.
He survived the harrowing journey from China, his family promising to pay smugglers $30,000. He is now unable to forget those months in the hold of the ship, subsisting on rations of rice and peanuts, terrorized by a crew of enforcers, and nearly traumatized by the hours spent navigating the Cape of Good Hope, buffeted by raging seas that nearly capsized the ship.
"I have dreams of that," he said. "And I wake up in a sweat. But we are in God's hands, now."
A by-the-book warden
The man in York to whom the detainees must answer is a by-the-book warden named Thomas H. Hogan. A 27-year veteran of the county jail, he took over operation of the prison when his predecessor suffered a heart attack -- on the very day the Chinese landed in New York.
With almost no notice and only a handful of local volunteers who knew how to speak Mandarin Chinese, Mr. Hogan arranged for 110 of the detainees to be transferred to the jail. The rest of the York detainees have arrived in spurts as the asylum hearings drag on.
"If you're wearing a blue prison uniform, you're an inmate," he said. "I don't care if you're guilty or innocent. It's business. You can't start treating people differently."
Don't be fooled by the tough talk. By all accounts, Mr. Hogan has treated the detainees with respect and compassion. He said he understands the psychological burden weighing on the men, whose mood can change quickly with just the hint of a rumor.
"The Chinese are in a box," he said. "They know something will happen, but they don't know what it is. They have no time frame."
But the longer the immigration process takes, the more money there is to be made by York County. According to Mr. Hogan, it costs about $28 a day to house each detainee, but the jail has a contract with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to collect $45 a day per detainee.
"This year alone, the county will make $2 million," he said.
But the money does not come trouble-free. There have been problems both great and small.
Such as the time guards noticed some of the detainees picking at the grass. It turned out that the Chinese were eating dandelions. So the warden, who wanted no greenery inside the cells, had to issue a "no grazing policy."
Officials also had to teach the detainees to use American tea bags.
"They kept tearing the bags open," said Ron Bupp, the prison chaplain. "They would get the (tea grounds) out and smoke them. They had never seen tea bags before."
There was also one escape attempt when a detainee attempted to flee from a local hospital. But the man, dressed in long underwear and with no command of English and no sense of direction, didn't get very far on the streets of downtown York.
And then there was a fight over a jar of glue, a prized possession: It is the essential ingredient for the wondrous art the men have created from nothing more than magazines, plastic foam cups and toilet paper.
Picture statues as seen in a Franklin Mint catalog -- but made of papier-mache -- and you have some idea of what this artwork looks like. With precision and patience, the men cut the magazines into 1-inch strips, fold the slivers into triangles and then painstakingly connect each piece.
They have turned the prison cells into studios. Fish, lions and dragons, tall towers and tiny fences are neatly arranged on tables, under beds, even atop wash sinks.
There are eagles, too, for eagles soar.
And there is color. Shades of pink and green and black, inked on the objects slowly and surely by men who have all the time in the world.
"I can't keep count of all those I've made," said Zheng Kai Qu, 38, a laborer. "But I am running out of glue."
Cases drag on
Mostly, though, the men are running out of patience. They have difficulty understanding the asylum process. Overall, there are some 224 Chinese being held in four jails around the country. Forty nine have been released from detention. Another five were never captured. Ten drowned before they landed in New York.
The cases could drag on for months, perhaps even years.
"I've seen asylum cases take, conservatively, 10 years to solve," said Duke Austin, senior spokesman for the INS. "The government has put up a lot of money to detain these people," he said. "The one thing you have to appreciate is that if it is your policy to let everyone go upon arrival, you send a signal to others that if you get here, even if you arrive illegally, you can stay here. Would that not encourage other people to follow? Clearly, it would."
But those who remain in detention still cling to a hope of remaining in America.
"I do not understand why I am still here," said a man who identifies himself as Ming Chen, 23, an electrician. "I miss my family. I collect all the letters they send me. I have 80 letters."
And he has pictures, which he keeps tacked on the wall. "I came here for a job," he said. "I came looking for freedom. I will not give up."
Neither will the activists on the outside. They are a hardy band, maybe 50 strong in York. There are the man who owns a bookstore, a teacher, a minister, some lawyers and housewives. They gather each Sunday near sundown under a maple tree outside the prison to pray for the release of the detainees.
Supporters take on INS
But they realize more than prayer is needed. So they have mounted a ferocious legal fight with the INS, trying to pry the detainees free.
"We weren't going to roll over for the INS," said Jeff Lobach, president of the York County Bar Association.
Mr. Lobach is proudly conservative, displaying in his den a picture of his oldest son standing alongside former President George Bush. When Mr. Lobach took over as head of the local bar, he urged in a speech that pro bono work, or free legal service, be increased in the area. Little did he know that more than 100 illegal immigrants would need help.
And he never could have imagined growing so attached to one client, a 25-year-old student named Wang Li Bin. Unlike many of the men of the Golden Venture, Mr. Wang was a political dissident, a pro-democracy student leader who had been living underground in the years before he hopped the tramp steamer. Mr. Lobach took his client's case to court and won, gaining Mr. Wang political asylum.
They call him Alan now. He has a job at a local book plant. He lives less than a mile from the prison with Jeff and Cindy Lobach and their three children.
Each Sunday, Mr. Wang joins the vigil in front of the jail, praying for the release of his friends.
"No one thought they would be in prison for so long," he said. "Since we left China, we thought, every day, we would be free."
But freedom remains elusive for the men of the Golden Venture. Four months on a boat, 12 months in a jail, they have yet to truly come ashore.