Dispatches from the Pacific Century

In the dozen years that Frank Viviano covered the continent for the Pacific News Service, Asia ``was a universe in cataclysmic transition, where former Red Guards became Beijing commodities traders and new cities exploded into existence in a matter of months.'' His tales about this expansive era are of mythic proportions. They feature--as do other recent reports on the countries of the ``Pacific Century''--the industrial and business miracles, but always with an eye to their repercussions on the lives of specific human beings. One of the epics he tells concerns members of the primitive Hmong tribe who, escaping from Laos, were scattered across the U.S., eventually buying cars and regrouping in California cities like Fresno and San Jose. Viviano was elsewhere in China when the events at Tiananmen Square occurred, but his report on its impact on the people around him is more illuminating than much of the on-the-spot coverage. He brilliantly recreates the lives of people in Pacific countries who have been touched by the rapid march into the technological age. (May)