Word: huan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Huan Song arrived in a Chicago suburb two years ago unable to speak much English, but possessed of as much grit as a 14-year-old can muster. The child of divorced middle-class parents in China, she had been sent by her father to live with an aunt and uncle. "I could have had a comfortable life in China, but my father thought I'd have a better future and a more exciting life in the U.S. He made a great sacrifice to let me come here to have a good future...
After just one semester at Glenbard East High School, Huan wanted out of English as a second language classes. She knew they became a way of life for many foreign-born students. Her guidance counselor and teachers warned that she might fail, but the tenacious Huan proved them wrong. Now a senior, she maintains perfect grades in honors classes, competes in debates, is on the math team and serves as vice president of the school choir. "I don't want to sound pompous," she says in her accented but perfect English, "but I just had to fight...
Along the way, Huan found some cherished mentors at school and at church. They helped guide her, particularly when she faced a personal tragedy. Last fall she was eagerly awaiting her father's first visit to the U.S. when he died in a freak accident. Huan's father was a sound engineer by profession, and he and his daughter shared a passion for music. After his death, however, music filled her with pain. "Music is such an intimate thing," says Huan. "The memories it brought up made me sad. So I thought I had to get away from music...
Competition for openings in Asia's top research centers is keen. The Ph.D. he received from Indiana University wasn't good enough, jokes Huan Chang, now at Taiwan's Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences. "I had to go to Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow to get myself coated in a layer of gold." There is a frontier spirit in these fast-growing intellectual boom-towns that attracts job seekers with a taste for adventure. Calcutta-born Uttam Surana, an ambitious young biologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, turned down an offer from Germany's venerable...
Shortly before dusk on April 23, three young agents from the U.S. Customs Service were about to hit the jackpot of their careers. Sitting in a car outside a warehouse in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, the men were looking for Huan ("Danny") Teng, 38, a Taiwanese believed to be one of America's kingpins of drug paraphernalia. They never found Teng, but what they discovered inside the building left them breathless. It was a vast, dungeon- like factory filled with machines for injecting, cooling and grinding plastic. Three Chinese workers in ragged garb glanced at their visitors just once...