A Chinese Conundrum : Dissidents: As their visas expire, students who criticized Beijing for the Tian An Men crackdown face a return to uncertain retaliation or permanent exile.

Youqi Wang drags deeply on his cigarette, stares up at the speckled ceiling of his Caltech student apartment and contemplates spending two years in a Chinese jail.

Two years he could handle. That would be 730 days crammed with 25 others into a tiny cell where the New York-based human rights group Asia Watch says political prisoners are brutally beaten and tortured with electric cattle prods.

“If that would be the end of it, I’d go back,” muses the 32-year-old doctoral candidate in biochemistry, who is active in the pro-democracy movement here in the United States.

The problem is, no one knows exactly what retribution the Chinese government will exact once the Chinese students, especially those who have openly criticized the communist regime, return home.

Nine months have passed since Chinese troops opened fire on students at Tian An Men Square, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of civilians. The media, which once beamed the crackdown into American living rooms, have moved on to fresher stories unfolding in Managua, Johannesburg and Vilnius.

But for Youqi Wang, his 33-year-old wife, Hua Chuan, and 40,000 other Chinese students living in the United States, the drama is just beginning.

Many will soon graduate or complete their fellowships. Their student visas will expire. And they will plunge into a murky political limbo from which there is no clear way out.

“If I go home, there’s no doubt that I’ll be put in jail,” Wang says. “But because I cannot exactly predict what will happen when I go back to China, I feel fear.”

It is a balmy Saturday evening and in a grassy courtyard below, a group of American students are drinking beer and barbecuing hamburgers. Upstairs in the sparsely decorated apartment shared by Wang and Chuan, the talk is more somber.

Although President Bush has promised that no Chinese students will be sent back against their will, some Chinese students aren’t so sure.

Wang’s passport expired in January and he says he is too afraid to visit the Chinese embassy to apply for renewal. Chuan’s J-1 student visa will expire in November, when she finishes 18 months of post-doctoral research in chemistry.

“We’re talking about people whose visas are running out,” says Duke Austin, a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington. Austin adds that the students are protected, at least until June 5, by an executive order signed by Bush that directs immigration officials not to deport them.

For now, life for the Pasadena couple juxtaposes the sublime and the mundane.

As she explains how lofty democratic principles should be implemented inChina, Chuan hooks her toes under the living room couch and does sit-ups. Wang sprawls in a chair and drinks green tea.

They have cleaned their apartment only once in the past six months, they confess sheepishly, although it looks clean enough. They sent out no greeting cards this holiday season. Last year,they saw one movie.

They spend their waking hours working, studying or attending political meetings. On their Pasadena living room wall is a sign that says, “Support Democracy in China.” Proudly, they show a visitor a button reproducing the famous photo of a Chinese student who single-handedly held back a row of Red Army tanks during the spring demonstrations.

Wang’s biggest fear is that, after spending 48 straight hours in the chemistry lab, he will fall asleep while driving his 1984 Dodge Colt home from UC Santa Barbara, where his professor has transferred.

Chuan’s is that she will never again see the grandmother who starved herself so she could eat. Now in her last years, Chuan’s grandmother doesn’t understand why her granddaughter can’t return home to take care of her.

In 1989, Chuan almost did return, but friends in China called her collect to prevent it. “They warned me not to go back, they said I’d be in big trouble, that the government knew what I had been doing,” she says.

In their willingness to speak out against the Chinese government, Wang and Chuan part company with many of their colleagues at Caltech, who declined to be interviewed because they feared government reprisal for themselves and their families back home.

The couple’s strategy seems to be that if they are vocal enough, the government will abandon them as hopeless counter-revolutionaries.

“That government will destroy the whole Chinese nation,” Wang says. “We want eventually to go back to China. We think society needs us. But we . . . feel no loyalty” to the communist government.

They believe their activities are monitored by Chinese authorities. Although the Chinese Embassy has denied harassing or threatening students, their telephone rings with late-night, anonymous calls. They suspect their calls home to China are heard by eavesdroppers.

But they resist applying for political asylum because it is the last, most desperate card they can play.

“By Chinese tradition, if you apply for political asylum, you will be considered an enemy of the people and the nation,” Wang says.

Both started out as idealistic young communists.

Chuan’s parents were in the Red Army. When her parents were exiled to the countryside for being “rightists,” the 8-year-old girl told her father solemnly, “Daddy, if you did something wrong, just tell the Communist Party and they’ll forgive you,” Chuan recalls.

Revelation came slowly. “I started asking why people don’t love each other, why the government encouraged people to spy on each other. After the Cultural Revolution we knew there was something wrong with this society.”

Wang, who loved to tinker with electricity as a child, says his epiphany came when the government banished him to a textile factory after high school despite his request to work in electronics.

The two met at Fudan University in Shanghai in 1978, where Chuan’s father had forbidden her to get involved in politics, international relations or history. So she majored in chemistry. Wang was her adviser.

For a long time, they observed the communist ban on student dating.

“It’s considered even worse than stealing,” Chuan says.

“We were such good students,” Wang adds. “We were not brave enough to date.”

Eventually, they succumbed to love and in 1984, got married--secretly.

“We had an underground marriage,” Wang jokes. “We have a lot of experience with underground activities.”

They came to the United States separately, to different universities, about five years ago. In six years of marriage, they calculate they have spent 1 1/2 years together.

On this night, they are headed to a political meeting that may last until 5 a.m. They decline to say more for fear of disrupting the delicate network they have helped build in the last year. But they say they keep close contact with pro-democracy students still in China.

The two were reborn as political radicals on June 4, the day the Chinese troops opened fire in Tian An Men Square. During the crackdown, their apartment became a command post for pro-democracy activities, sending up to 100 faxes daily and using computer bulletin boards to link Chinese students worldwide.

They are the cream of the Chinese intelligentsia, these students who toil over thick tomes of chemistry, political science and physics; work late hours under flickering, fluorescent lab lights and flit like slender ghosts across the leafy walkways and stately halls of Caltech, MIT, Harvard and other prestigious institutes.

Most are in their 30s and belong to the “Class of ‘77,” signifying the first year the Chinese government reopened the nation’s universities after a bloody, 10-year rampage against intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution.

Almost all the student leaders came from the Class of ‘77, and most have the brightest minds, since they had to beat out 1,000 other applicants for each coveted spot. Theirs was a generation denied an intellectual legacy, and today, they are determined to reclaim it.

“We didn’t go from high school to university,” explains Hua Chuan. “We spent up to 10 years in factories and in the countryside. We went through the Cultural Revolution. We knew what society was all about.”

Back in China, Wang and Chuan held modern, Western views that sometimes put them at odds with traditional culture. But here, however comfortably they wear their sweat pants and Levis, they carry their Chinese-ness around with them, always conscious of being strangers in a strange land.

“It’s a much happier life here in the United States. But although we stay in the U.S. for a long time, we still feel like guests,” Wang says.

And they ache for the evocative memories of their homeland. For Wang, it is the vistas of China, the serene and breathtaking mountains, the weeklong hikes to remote temples abandoned after the communists kicked out the monks.

But the nostalgia is shot through with guilt. Several professors at Fudan vouched for Wang’s return from the United States, seeing him off with explicit orders: Do not get involved in political activity.

Today, apprehension gnaws at him. Without their help, he could never have come here. Now, they may be suffering for his actions.

Still, he feels compelled to stand up for what he thinks is right. “You’ve got to have some people fight for a better future,” he says. “If everyone keeps quiet, then nothing changes.”