My friend Mr.Tang

My friend, Tang, will go back to China to spend his three weeks vacation for the first time, after 10 years’ arduous work striving for success in the US. All the best wishes for him and his family!!!

 

I met him at his shoddy apartment in Newark when visiting a friend who was his roommate in the spring of 1998. At that time, he was a Ph.D. student on biology at Rutgers University. We said hello to each other. He was moving some stuff around, nothing else, then we said goodbye in couple minutes. His roommate told me that he was one of those famous youth-class students of China Technology University, a genius who got into college at 15 years old. His GRE score was about 2200 or even higher...

 

Since then, we became acquaintances and met once a while on campus, since our campuses are contiguous to each other. Hearing of his stories from all kinds of friends here and there in this small world, I knew that he made money by gambling on line (at pogo.com); he paid tuition with credit cards due to short of scholarship, when dropping out the Ph.D. program and transferring to Master's program in computer science at NJIT. Around 2000, many Chinese students did same thing because the job market was so good, especially in the computer field. It was easy for the computer science graduates to find ideal jobs with decent salary in some big companies. He was one of them, and very lucky one comparing with others. His position has been very stable and unaffected by the economy recession after 9/11. By now, he has been in a very good shape in the First Union Bank for 5 or 6 years. However, everyone has his own cross to bear. He had no chances to go back to China in the last 10 years. He must have dreamed of home-style food for millions of times...

 

Now, it is his time to step on his homeland with pride, fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations to him!!!