"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."