From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

TIME is a magazine of lines -- not only headlines but also bylines, story lines and hairlines (those on us, which sometimes recede, and those in the magazine, which separate the columns). The magazine's great lineman is Trang Ba Chuong, who every week helps supervise the delicate work of assembling on the page all its elements. The job takes great patience and an attention to detail, but some of us haven't realized how he has applied these same virtues over the past 10 years to the enormous job of getting his family out of Saigon. Two weeks ago, eight of his relatives, including his 78-year-old father and 67-year-old mother, landed in New York City to begin a new life in the U.S. They joined another eight relatives who had arrived six months before -- a total of 16.

Trang's journey to this country began in chaos. He was hired as a part-time telex operator in the Saigon bureau in 1971, and volunteered to stay behind with correspondent Bill Stewart after most of his colleagues were evacuated. Saigon fell apart quickly, and so did Stewart's plans for getting himself and Trang out of town. Despite a curfew and checkpoints manned by nervous soldiers, he and Trang trekked across the city in a yellow mini Moke to retrieve Trang's wife and two-year-old daughter. "It was the dumbest thing any of us had ever done in Vietnam," Stewart says. Stewart returned from this successful mission only to learn that he could not bring any Vietnamese out with him.

Trang made his own way to the U.S. and landed a job as a mailroom clerk at Time Inc. Today, at 43, he is a supervisor of production at TIME.

Trang became an American citizen in 1981, and began the bureaucratic process of bringing his relatives here from Saigon. It took forms on the American side, and it took more forms on the Vietnamese side. But the family finally arrived. "The fact that my parents wanted to leave their country after spending their whole lives there because they wanted to be with me really moved me," says Trang. And another thing: Trang's eight-year-old son, who was born here and speaks only English, has announced that he wants to learn Vietnamese. "So he can talk to his grandparents," says Trang.