Paean to Miss Liberty Turns Into a Pain in the Neck

--An 11-year-old Vietnamese girl in Honolulu won a car in a Statue of Liberty essay contest but accepting could cost her family its relief benefits. Hue Cao’s mother--her father died in Vietnam--has put off signing ownership papers for the car because a social worker warned the family that accepting it would make them ineligible to continue receiving welfare. “It just seems strange that Hue’s essay would say America helps the homeless and hopeless and the family comes back and gets this bomb dropped on them,” Paulette Moore, the girl’s teacher, said. The sixth-grader’s essay, “What the Statue of Liberty Means to Me,” was chosen as the best among 2,000 entries submitted from students in grades 3 through 12 in a statewide contest in Hawaii sponsored by the Aloha Liberty Foundation. Hue earned a new Nissan Sentra sedan and a trip for herself and her teacher to New York City for the July Fourth Statue of Liberty centennial celebration. Chapman Lam, spokesman for the state Department of Social Services and Housing, said federal regulations limit welfare families to having a car worth $1,500. Moore said efforts were being made to see if something could be done to allow the family, which fled from Vietnam in a small fishing boat in 1979, to keep the car. “This family has a deep love for America,” Moore said.

--Ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov hasn’t found the time to get himself sworn in as a U.S. citizen, but he’ll do it in style with 500 other people during Statue of Liberty Weekend festivities on Ellis Island. Baryshnikov, 37, who defected from the Soviet Union in 1974, will take the oath of allegiance prior to dancing to composer George Gershwin’s music on July 3 in the weekend’s opening show, which President Reagan is expected to attend.

--Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft, the first woman to reach the North Pole, returned to the school in Minneapolis where she teaches physical education and found she couldn’t answer all the children’s questions. “It’s great,” she said. The students wondered what it was like to be the only female member of the expedition that reached the North Pole unassisted last May 2, in a re-creation of Robert E. Peary’s 1909 trip. “It would have been nicer if there were more women on the trip, but there weren’t,” Bancroft said. “There were 49 male dogs too, so everybody was boys. Sometimes it was a little bit lonely.”