Talent & Waste

To the thousands of Chinese students and refugees now living in the U.S., the mansion in Manhattan's East 60s called China House is more than a meeting place and a touch of home. For the last 2-c- years, the China Institute in America has also been running a placement bureau, has so far been able to find jobs of various kinds for more than 700 expatriate Chinese. But last week the institute sadly reported that its task has only begun. Of the 6,000-odd refugees, hundreds are aging intellectuals whose plight is desperate and whose talents are going to waste.

Over the years, only a fraction of the older ones have been able to find work in their own fields. Today, 111 U.S. colleges and universities have Chinese teachers, and the Army Language School at Monterey, Calif, employs 76. The engineers and doctors usually get jobs, and so do most of the scientists. But the lawyers, diplomats, economists, executives and government officials are in fields that the institute calls "un-eatables." Too old to start all over again, most eke out a living at menial jobs.

Last week the institute's placement department announced a plan by which the U.S. can make use of at least some of this wasted talent. It hopes to raise enough money to place and support 30 intellectuals a year at small colleges that might otherwise be unable to afford the luxury of a foreign professor. So far, 59 colleges have written in to say they would welcome the idea. Meanwhile, the institute's list remains a roster of tragedy: a onetime embassy charge d'affaires who now works as a clerk in a garment district storehouse, a political scientist whose only U.S. job has been as a cashier in a tenth-rate restaurant, a banker who is now a janitor, and two former ambassadors, one of whom scrapes along as an assistant librarian. The other: "unemployed."

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