Avenger

According to procedure, a couple refused entry by the District Director’s Office at the Exclusion Hearing could appeal to the next level up, an Administrative Hearing in front of an Asylum Hearing Officer.

Dexter noted that at the Exclusion Hearing, the INS’s second ground for refusal had been that the Moungs did not qualify under the five necessary grounds for proving persecution: race, nationality, religion, political beliefs and / or social class. He felt he could now show that as a fervent anti-Communist – and he certainly intended to advise Mr Moung to become one immediately – and as head teacher, he qualified on the last two grounds at least.

His task at the hearing on the morrow would be to plead with the Hearing Officer for a relief known as Withholding of Deportation, under Section 243(h) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

In tiny print at the bottom of one of the papers was a note from someone at Refugee Watch that the Asylum Hearing Officer would be a certain Norman Ross. What he learned was interesting.

Dexter showed up at the INS building at 26 Federal Plaza over an hour before the hearing to meet his clients. He was not a big man himself, but the Moungs were smaller, and Mrs Moung was like a tiny doll. She gazed at the world through lenses that seemed to have been cut from the bottoms of shot glass tumblers. His papers told him they were forty-eight and forty-five respectively.

Mr Moung seemed calm and resigned. Because Cal Dexter spoke no French, Refugee Watch had provided a lady interpreter.

Dexter spent the preparation hour going over the original statement, but there was nothing to add or subtract.

The case would be heard not in a real court, but in a large office with imported chairs for the occasion. Five minutes before the hearing, they were shown in.

As he surmised, the representative of the District Director re-presented the arguments used at the Exclusion Hearing to refuse the asylum application. There was nothing to add or subtract. Behind his desk, Mr Ross followed the arguments already before him in the file, then raised an eyebrow at the novice sent down by Honeyman Fleischer.

Behind him, Cal Dexter heard Mr Moung mutter to his wife, ‘We must hope this young man can succeed, or we will be sent back to die.’ But he spoke in his own native language.

Dexter dealt with the DD’s first point: there has been no US diplomatic or consular representation in Phnom Penh since the start of the killing fields. The nearest would have been in Bangkok, Thailand, an impossible target that the Moungs could never have realized. He noted a hint of a smile at the corner of Ross’s mouth as the man from the INS went pink.

His main task was to show that faced with the lethal fanaticism of the Khmer Rouge any proven anti-Communist like his client would have been destined on capture to torture and death. Even the fact of being a head teacher with a college degree would have guaranteed execution.

What he had learned in the night was that Norman Ross had not always been Ross. His father had arrived around the turn of the century as Samuel Rosen, from a shtetl in modern Poland, fleeing the pogroms of the Tsar, then being carried out by the Cossacks.

‘It is very easy, sir, to reject those who come with nothing, seeking not much but the chance of life. It is very easy to say no and walk away. It costs nothing to decree that these two Orientals have no place here and should go back to arrest, torture and the execution wall.

‘But I ask you, supposing our fathers had done that, and their fathers before them, how many, back in the homeland-turned-bloodbath, would have said: “I went to the land of the free, I asked for a chance of life, but they shut their doors and sent me back to die.” How many, Mr Ross? A million? Nearer ten. I ask you, not on a point of law, not as a triumph for clever lawyer semantics, but as a victory for what Shakespeare called the quality of mercy, to decree that in this huge country of ours there is room for one couple who have lost everything but life and ask only for a chance.’

Norman Ross eyed him speculatively for several minutes. Then he tapped his pencil down on his desk like a gavel and pronounced.

‘Deportation withheld. Next case.’

The lady from Refugee Watch excitedly told the Moungs in French what had happened. She and her organization could handle procedures from that point. There would be administration. But no more need for advocacy. The Moungs could now remain in the United States under the protection of the government, and eventually a work permit, asylum and, in due course, naturalization would come through.

Dexter smiled at her and said she could go. Then he turned to Mr Moung and said:

‘Now, let us go to the cafeteria and you can tell me who you really are and what you are doing here.’

He spoke in Mr Moung’s native language. Vietnamese.

At a corner table in the basement café Dexter examined the Cambodian passports and ID documents.

‘These have already been examined by some of the best experts in the West, and pronounced genuine. How did you get them?’

The refugee glanced at his tiny wife.

‘She made them. She is of the Nghi.’

There is a clan in Vietnam called Nghi, which for centuries supplied most of the scholars of the Hue region. Their particular skill, passed down the generations, was for exceptional calligraphy. They created court documents for their emperors.

With the coming of the modern age, and especially when the war against the French began in 1945, their absolute dedication to patience, detail and stunning draughtsmanship meant the Nghi could transmute to some of the finest forgers in the world.

The tiny woman with the bottle-glasses had ruined her eyesight because for the duration of the Vietnam war, she had crouched in an underground workshop creating passes and identifications so perfect that Vietcong agents had passed effortlessly through every South Vietnamese city at will and had never been caught.

Cal Dexter handed the passports back.

‘Like I said upstairs, who are you really, and why are you here?’