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A young man, Dennis, sits on the front porch in a floorlength white robe, with blond hair flowing past his shoulders. "Why are you wearing a dress?" I ask. "I'm a witch," he answers. "In fact, you're just in time to see one of my ceremonies. Come on upstairs." I follow. "Don't worry, I'm not a black witch, I'm a white witch. Most of us are. Our powers diminish when we use them selfishly." We come into a room draped with silk cloths. A dozen people—housewives, girls, young men—are sitting in a circle on the floor. Lying in the middle is a blonde, Leslie, around 20. Dennis joins the circle, all 13 witches join hands, and Dennis chants, "Spring equinox, golden son of the mountains, illumine the land!" The blonde, whose name is Leslie, says, "Little things are going wrong, and I know it can't be just bad luck." "Leslie's karma has been messed up," Dennis explains. "We have to locate the spirit." The whole group slides closer to Leslie, and all place hands on her body. "Where do you feel it?" he asks. "In my stomach and thighs," says Leslie. "Oh, boy!" says Dennis. "I want you to just breathe in and out, really hard." Everybody presses down on Leslie. "You're hurting my stomach," she groans. Finally the spirit is out; the group brushes it away with ostrich plumes. "All you have to do now is live, Leslie," says Dennis. She limps downstairs, and he smiles: "It works every time."
Cut to: Chinatown in San Francisco
Steep, narrow streets, wrinkled old Chinese selling vegetables, white matrons walking with their arms full of laundry, families of tourists admiring the shops and looking for a Chinese restaurant. People smile, stop and talk on the street; it is predictably peaceful. But in Portsmouth Square, 200 people mill around a rostrum. On the platform are an army bugler, a line of speakers and a big sign that says:
MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR OUR COMPATRIOTS MASSACRED BY THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS.
A dozen red flags are waving in the air. A young Chinese woman grabs my arm. "The Red Guard," she says, and leads me away. "This is not a good place to be. I knew there would be trouble. All of Chinatown is divided." Divided? "Yes." We walk up the hill toward Grant Avenue. A young Chinese with long hair, George Woo, joins us. The year before, he helped start a radical youth movement called Wah Ching in Chinatown.
"Chinatown is a whore!" he yells. "The Gray Line tours are pimps, and the tourists are customers. This is the only ghetto in the world with tours. Most Chinese live in miserable apartments. The average Chinese over 25 has had 1.7 years of education. We won't take it any more. Now, for the first time, we demonstrate. And we sue the city."
Cut to: Laguna Hills Retirement Village
They come from all over the country to Ross Cortese's Leisure World, where they can play tennis and golf and sit by the pool all year round: 7,000 homes, everything they could ever need, and it's all walled in.