"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.