Parents Form a China Network : Faxes, Phones Connect Worried Families, Students

The phone call came shortly after midnight, as Rita Holland of Reseda was lying in bed, unable to sleep.

It was her daughter Joanne Nesti--one of 16 Cal State Northridge students who had been traveling in China after completing a semester at Shaanxi Teachers University in Xian about 600 miles southwest of Beijing.

She was with four other CSUN students at a public phone in Shanghai.

“There was a lot of noise in the background, and all the kids kept saying ‘don’t forget to tell her. . . .’ I had to take the names of all the kids she was with,” Holland said. “She kept saying she had to go--there was some reason she had to hang up.”

Nesti told Holland that the five students hoped to take a boat to Bangkok in Thailand, a four-day voyage, because they feared that taking a train through Chinese territory to Hong Kong would be too dangerous.

Parents of other CSUN students in China have not been fortunate enough to talk to their children. The whereabouts of three are uncertain, but university officials said two of the three may be heading west toward Tibet. Eight others are presumed by university officials to be in Beijing, where rival military units have been skirmishing as the country hovers on the brink of civil war.

To cope with the uncertainty, their parents have set up their own information network, passing on reports to each other. Holland fed the information from her daughter’s call into the network, bringing some relief to other families.

Shanghai Becoming Unsafe

Holland said her daughter told her that “Shanghai itself is becoming unsafe to stay in, and that there are a lot of troops coming in. She said to tell everybody that it looks like it will be the next Beijing.”

Holland, a CSUN administrative assistant and mother of five, won’t know for at least four days whether her 26-year-old daughter and companions have arrived safely in Thailand. But she said she at least knows her daughter is heading out of China.

Sue Martin had no such assurances. Martin said she has had no phone contact with her 23-year-old son Mike since the violence in Beijing broke out. But she said she believes that he accompanied his girlfriend to Beijing to straighten out her passport problems.

“It’s been awful. I don’t know who to call or what to do,” she said. “I’m sitting close to home, afraid of missing a call.”

Guy Horton, an exchange student who returned from China recently, said that the eight students who went to Beijing probably were unaware of the turmoil there.

When the semester ended May 25, the university did not warn the students that the situation could turn dangerous, said Horton, a 21-year old junior. And the Chinese news media in Xian provided little information about events in Beijing.

“When you are there, you are in a vacuum,” he said. “It’s not like the United States, where if something happens in Boston you know instantaneously in Los Angeles.”

Vicky Morton, whose husband is one of thirteen CSUN professors the university ordered to cut short academic visits to China, said her husband, who is in Xian, was unaware of the violence in the capital.

“They weren’t getting a lot of news there,” she said. “He didn’t know why they were being asked to come home so quickly.”

Horton said the best sources of information in China are the fax and phone networks set up to send news out of the country.

Horton and Artansia Parker, another returned exchange student, have set up an information network linking the parents of all the CSUN students there. When Holland heard from her daughter, she contacted relatives of her daughter’s four companions.

That eased the stress on Vivian Entous of Sylmar. Her cousin, Danny Entous, a CSUN recreation studies major from Encino, and his parents, Karen and Allan Entous, were separated in China. Danny’s parents visited him in Xian before he began traveling in the country with other CSUN students.

His parents were still touring China when the violence broke out. They did not know where their son was, but did not want to leave Asia until he was safely out of China, Vivian Entous said.

Entous said she and Danny’s two brothers acted as a central message service--prepared to tell Danny where he could find his parents, and telling the parents to sit tight because he had not yet called.

“It was very hard, there was no way for them to communicate,” Entous said. “You hear all this stuff on the news and didn’t know exactly where they were.”

Calling home from Hong Kong, the Entouses learned Wednesday morning through Holland’s message relay to the family network that their son was one of the five CSUN students in Shanghai planning to board a boat to Bangkok.