Journey to Freedom Put on Hold at Motel : Asylum: Dissident stowed away on ship to escape Chinese communism. But for the past two months he has been held in virtual solitary confinement at a Long Beach inn.

Chinese dissident Me Gya fled his native country after the 1989 Tian An Men Square crackdown, traveling 700 miles to the Chinese frontier, crawling past armed guards at the border, swimming to Hong Kong and finally stowing away on a container ship for 18 days in search of asylum in the United States.

Instead of freedom, however, Me has found himself trapped in an obscure purgatory.

For the past two months, he has been kept in Room 351 of the downtown Long Beach Travelodge, under the watch of private guards, while he awaits the conclusion of his asylum appeal. He has been in virtual solitary confinement, supplied three meals a day, maid service and all the television he can endure.

“It is my bad luck to come here,” he said, bursting with boredom. “My mother and father still don’t know what has happened to me.”

The vast majority of illegal immigrants detained by the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service are kept in federal facilities. But Me’s predicament results from a decades-old law that requires stowaways to be detained in private facilities--in most cases motels--by the shipping company that unwittingly transports them.

Which form of detention is worse is debatable. But there is no arguing that these motel prisoners, scattered in port cities around the country, endure one of the strangest forms of lockup devised--comfortable, yet mind-numbing.

In Me’s case, he also is being charged by the shipping company for his upkeep--he figures about $400 a day for lodging, food and the guards. After two months, his tab is now pushing $25,000.

“Put me in prison,” said Me, who has kept himself busy by reading his two Chinese books and looking at the parking lot below. “I can’t do this every day, just watch TV and read. It’s not fair to make me continue here.”

The number of stowaways each year is minuscule in the grand scope of illegal immigration--usually just a few hundred cases.

Last year, the INS apprehended 341 stowaways around the nation, most of whom were returned to their home countries.

At the Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor, the busiest in the country, 150 were reported last year, most of them banana-boat stowaways from Ecuador, Panama and Colombia, who were quickly returned to their countries.

But a small group--perhaps a dozen or so a year in Los Angeles--decide to apply for political asylum and must be detained on shore during the hearing process. A handful of those end up staying in motels for a long period of time because their asylum requests are denied and they decide to wait for the completion of their appeals. “If we get five people a year, that’s a lot,” said James Lesley, a supervising INS inspector in Los Angeles.

Unlike other illegal immigrants who cross the land border into the United States, ship stowaways are technically considered not to have entered the country and can be detained indefinitely with no right to post bond and be released.

The shipping companies are responsible for detaining the stowaways under the theory that it is their responsibility to ensure the security of their vessels.

Last year, Bulgarians were the biggest motel group. Lesley said he believed that a few Bulgarians are still stuck in San Pedro awaiting the completion of their cases.

“Jacuzzi, swimming pool, room service,” he said. “It was a nice hotel.”

The number of stowaways has fluctuated over the years, affected by such disparate factors as the rise of jet travel, the development of container shipping and increasing automation of modern vessels.

But throughout, it has remained one of the hardest and riskiest ways to travel.

Over the years, Lesley has pulled sick, cold and starved stowaways from a variety of vessels--mainly refrigerated banana boats. “Almost dead, but no dead ones,” he said.

That’s not always the case. In a particularly grisly incident last year, six stowaways from the Dominican Republic suffocated in a sealed freight container bound for Palm Beach, Fla. Two men survived the journey by breathing through a crack while their compatriots screamed and died around them.

With the ease, safety and low cost of modern air travel, stowing away aboard a freighter has become a route pursued by only the most desperate illegal immigrant.

For Me, the Chinese dissident, it was only after finding himself homeless and unemployed on the streets of Hong Kong with few prospects for the future that he decided to risk the journey.

Me had been a lecturer in electrical engineering at Yuzhou University in Chongqing, a city of 4 million in central China. As the pro-democracy demonstration began spreading through the country in 1989, Me became a leader on his campus, organizing marches, giving speeches, and at one point representing his school in a meeting with the mayor of Chongqing.

After the military crackdown in Tian An Men Square, Me returned to his native village and hid for several months. In August, he decided to flee the country, leaving his wife behind.

He traveled by train to Canton province with just the clothes he was wearing, a radio and a canteen of water.

Eluding armed guards at the border, he swam the last leg into British territory and was immediately apprehended. Me was placed in a dormitory while Hong Kong officials searched for a country willing to take him as a refugee.

His temporary stay turned into a two-year ordeal. After a year in the dormitory, the government could find no takers and Me was forced to find his own way in Hong Kong, where he was granted refugee status, given a three-month stipend and put out in the street.

For the next year, Me bounced from job to job, in part, he claimed, because communist agents threatened his employers. Finally, homeless and with little money, he stowed away on the Oriental Faith, a ship bound for the United States.

As he huddled among the shipping containers, he thought to himself: “My first step is accomplished.”

On the second day, Me turned himself over to the captain of the ship and was locked in a room for the remainder of the journey.

As the ship entered Los Angeles Harbor after 18 days at sea, he rejoiced. “I felt, I had succeeded,” he said. “I didn’t know there was so much more to come.”

During his first few days in the Travelodge, Me was happy and surprised at how well he was being treated.

But after receiving notice that his application for political asylum was rejected, Me realized that his temporary quarters had now become a prison. “Who could have known it would turn into two months here,” he said.

Each morning, he is taken to the office of the company that supplies his guards, where he sits and watches television until 4 p.m.

He returns to his room in the evening and watches more television until he falls asleep under the watch of a guard.

He has become angrier and more desperate with each week. He rails against the system that has put him so tantalizingly close to freedom and yet, at the same time, so distant.

Because he only speaks Chinese, he has no one to talk to except himself, and has only the murkiest idea of why he has been detained for so long while other dissidents have been granted asylum.

He has written a long letter to President Bush asking for release or if nothing else, detention in a federal facility to keep his motel tab from growing any larger.

Me’s appeals could stretch for another four months--a prospect he finds almost inconceivable. But he added that he will stay in his room until his appeals are exhausted.

“I can’t return,” he said. “I’ve been through so much, spent so much money, suffered so much, I will not return.”