The Prodigy

Sheng Kai Dong was a budding math whiz. And then the accident happened...

by Doron Taussig

provided by facts charter school LADIES' MAN: Sheng Kai Dong at FACTS Charter School with adoring classmates. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Even a year after the fact, Bill Davidson is surprised by what happened the day he began teaching percentages to his sixth-grade math class. The lesson took place in his decidedly makeshift classroom, on the fifth floor of a converted factory building in Chinatown. Davidson, a thoughtful man with the build of a power forward, had already taught for several years in locales as far-flung as Los Angeles and the Sudan. He knew what to expect from a group of students; with percentages, he figured, he could expect a gradual engagement with the concept.

"So," he said, "what's 7 percent of 200?"

No one spoke.

"Well, it's 14," Davidson said. He went on to ask for 7 percent of 300, 400 and so forth, and the kids followed along, calling out the answers. But Davidson recognized this for the sciolism it was. The students weren't getting the idea; they were just counting by sevens.

He switched it up on them.

"Now," he said, "what would 8 percent of 250 be?"

There was a long silence. Eight percent of 250? How would one even begin to divine this mystery? Davidson looked down at his overhead projector, preparing to reveal his secret, but as he did, a single adolescent voice rose up from the crowd.

"Twenty," it said.

"I got the chills," Davidson recalls. He lifted his head back up to see which student had captured the lesson with such unnatural ease. It was a 12-year-old boy who, just two years prior, had been living in a small village in China. His name was Sheng Kai.

Yong Zhong Dong's lot in life was to own a Chinese takeout restaurant. Panda Garden, on Allegheny Avenue and F in North Philadelphia, is one of those little storefronts that dot the façades of Philadelphia's ghettos, seeming both completely alien and perfectly familiar, the only institutions besides churches with any staying power on their blocks. Yong Zhong, like many takeout owners, went into the business not because he wanted to, but because he could. "Running a Chinese takeout doesn't require a lot of training," says Allan Wong of the Chinese Benevolent Association, a local advocacy group. "You have to know how to cook reasonably well, and be willing to work hard."

For the adults, it was a worse life even than the one they'd had in China, where their Christian congregation, which gathered in unsanctioned "house churches," was regularly subject to harassment from government officials. But there was a difference. Yong Zhong could accept his role as the owner of a crappy restaurant, and dedicate his days — really, his life — to frying shrimp if it meant providing a better opportunity for his children. This, he believed, is what a man does. And to his great pleasure, America was proving to be the land of opportunity for his preteen son.

Sheng Kai had come to the United States in 2004, after his parents had already been here several years. He struggled mightily at first. Not speaking any English, he got left back a grade in the Catholic school he attended. He also didn't really know his mother and father — he'd been raised, in more recent years, by relatives in China. But his fortune began to change in 2005, when he was accepted to the new Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School in Chinatown.

FACTS' Web site talks about "respect[ing] culture and language" — a diplomatic way of saying that it is focused on meeting the needs of immigrant children. There, Sheng Kai saw the familiar vertical arrangement of Chinese lettering on the walls, met children like himself and got help with translations. Before long, he began to flourish. He picked up some English. He wrote essays betraying a high level of emotional maturity. He transformed from cocoon-ish and shy to mischievously flirtatious, an inveterate teaser of his female classmates.

Most of all, he showed what he could do with numbers. Davidson, Sheng Kai's math teacher in both the sixth and seventh grades, says that Sheng Kai was one of the two best students he's ever had — not only driven to succeed in a way few youths are (he always got at least an A), but genuinely curious about math (he delved into workbooks the way some kids submerge themselves in video games).

That Asian students are abnormally talented in math and science is a stereotype; that many Asian immigrant families emphasize these subjects is true. But Sheng Kai stood out even among ambitious peers. The school skipped him through the fifth grade, and it wasn't enough. "In a school of high-achieving math students," Davidson says, "he's a step above everyone who he skipped a grade to join."

Of course, even with his unusual aptitude, it was difficult for Sheng Kai to serve as the vessel for his family's hopes and dreams. In an essay for English class, he expressed exasperation with his parents endlessly asking where he was going to high school and college. (One can imagine them coming home from another joyless day behind thick glass, asking Sheng Kai about his future, like a child asking for his favorite bedtime story.) And there were other challenges. Either because he was becoming an adolescent or an American, Sheng Kai developed a mildly defiant attitude. This was a source of frustration for his father in particular, who wanted his son to see the world — and the Dongs' place in it — the way he saw it.

But these were the inevitable road bumps on the path the Dongs had chosen. In reality, things were going well: The family had come to America planning to work hard and give their son an opportunity to become a doctor, and that son had turned out to be a math prodigy. Yong Zhong became comfortable enough in his American life that he went out and, over his wife's objections, got a driver's license. He planned to use it to take Sheng Kai and Karen out of the neighborhood, to show them happier pieces of their new homeland and, occasionally, to run errands for the restaurant.

He was running such an errand on Sept. 24, two days before Sheng Kai's 13th birthday. Driving his gray Chevy Venture south on Delaware Avenue near Shackamaxon, Yong Zhong saw a Dodge Intrepid heading in the opposite direction. He needed to turn left on Shackamaxon, and thought he could make the turn before crossing the Intrepid's path. He was wrong. He swung the van into the northbound lane just as the Intrepid arrived, and the other driver had to spin his wheel to avoid a collision; the Intrepid ended up jumping onto the curb, missing two telephone poles and crashing into a cyclone fence. Yong Zhong's vehicle was untouched, but he pulled off into a nearby parking lot anyway. He waited for help.

The principal of FACTS is a small, extremely busy woman named Debbie Wei. When she was nearly 40, Wei discovered that her parents had come to the U.S. illegally, and that, to her dismay, her father still felt ashamed about this many years later. Now she is as much immigration activist as educator, working to ease the transitions of her students and their families. When a lunch aide saw Sheng Kai crying in the cafeteria, she brought him to the principal's office.

The story came pouring out:

His father had been in a car accident on Monday. He believed the people in the other car were some kind of policemen, or dignitaries, because his father had been placed under arrest. Yong Zhong had called home from the police station, asking his wife to pick him up, but when she and Sheng Kai got there, they were told to come back the next day. After a sleepless night, they returned to find that Yong Zhong wasn't there anymore. He'd been taken away.

Over the next few days, Wei would learn the whole story: Yong Zhong Dong had, in fact, been in an accident with police officers — the Intrepid he nearly hit carried two city detectives. But that wasn't why he'd been arrested. Rather, when the reporting officers had looked him up, they'd seen an outstanding warrant for his arrest, issued in Atlanta in 2001. Yong Zhong, it turned out, had come to this country in 1999 with the assistance of a "snakehead gang" — a smuggling ring from the Chinese coastal province of Fujian. He'd been apprehended upon entry, then got bailed out by an associate and applied for political asylum on the grounds that, as a Christian, he faced religious persecution in China. Such requests are sometimes met with skepticism; it's a common tactic among snakeheads to feed their clients fabricated asylum claims, and religious persecution (along with China's birth control policies) is one of the more frequent justifications used. Yong Zhong may still have had a decent chance: When his wife came to join him in 2002, her asylum application, made on the same grounds, was approved. But the validity of his claim ended up being irrelevant. The U.S. never got a chance to evaluate it.

Yong Zhong's attorney for his immigration case, whom he may have found through the snakehead or an affiliated group, was a man named Joseph Muto. A few years later, Muto would be labeled a "dishonest lawyer" by New York Newsday, having been disbarred for his relationship with unethical "travel agencies," and for providing negligent counsel to his clients. From Yong Zhong, Muto accepted thousands of dollars of legal fees in exchange for, inexplicably, requesting his case be heard in Atlanta, and not telling his client. Neither Yong Zhong nor Muto showed up for the subsequent asylum hearing, and in 2001, Yong Zhong was ordered deported.

He tried to appeal, using another attorney found through a Fujianese group, but the representation he received was not much better, and the ruling stood. Still, Yong Zhong remained. In his day-to-day life, the deportation order was an abstraction — no one came looking for him; no scarlet "I" materialized on his chest. Most paperwork could be done in his wife's name, including bringing Sheng Kai to the country legally, and even a driver's license could be acquired in Washington state, which doesn't require applicants to have Social Security numbers. This past June, Yong Zhong finally hired a new attorney to reopen his immigration case. But the accident occurred before anything could come of it.

Now, he was awaiting deportation at the immigration detention facility in York, Pa., and while he did, the life he'd worked so hard to build for his family was falling apart.

The restaurant couldn't run without Yong Zhong, and for the first few days after the accident, Sheng Kai stayed home from school, working the cash register and mopping the floors. His mother was unable to abide the irony of her son taking his father's place — Yong Zhong had tolerated the restaurant only to provide for his children — and sent him back to school. But there, he was "useless," in the words of one of his teachers. He still worked in the restaurant at night, and came in exhausted and missing homework. Meanwhile, his home life became a Kafka-esque nightmare. Sheng Kai and his mother had only a superficial understanding of what was happening to Yong Zhong; they certainly didn't understand why police were coming to their house multiple times (immigration came to look for Yong Zhong's passport, and the police from the accident came looking for insurance information, but if they explained themselves, the Dongs didn't follow). They worried that they were in trouble. In class, all Sheng Kai could do was sleep or cry. He kept asking to use the phone, to check in on his mother.

The worst day, says Wei, was the day after Yong Zhong tried to call collect from the prison. Mrs. Dong hadn't been able to figure out how to accept the call, and had accidentally rejected it. She was despondent, and so was Sheng Kai when he came in.

"He was describing how crushed mom was," Wei says. "They just sat and cried. He was just totally unable to function."

The boy seemed to abandon all aspirations, both his own and his parents'. "He just felt like there was no hope, no solutions," said Davidson, the math teacher. "He said he's not going to go to school, he doesn't see a purpose ... his dad won't even be here to see him finish."

Racked with guilt over his minor familial transgressions and flooded with a new, more immediate sense of responsibility, Sheng Kai decided he had to step up, become the man of the house and sacrifice himself for his family. That, after all, is what a man does. But of course, the 13-year-old was unequal to the task, and a few weeks after Yong Zhong was arrested, Mrs. Dong conceded that she couldn't run the restaurant on her own. She sold it to another Chinese couple, for $15,000 (according to the Board of Revision of Taxes, the Dongs' former property is worth $24,500), and told her children they were moving to New York to live with relatives.

When he learned he would be losing his best student, Davidson drafted up a letter to numerous Philadelphia media outlets. It began:

A great American tragedy took place in Philadelphia two weekends ago, but the event didn't make local news. Fender benders rarely do. The ripple effects of a minor auto accident, however, hold great implications for the future of Philadelphia and our country, because we might be losing one of its greatest minds.

He went on to argue that with his family torn asunder, Sheng Kai's talent — he called him a "twelve year-old genius"— could well be squandered. There may be something to this. A recent report (download the pdf) put out by the Urban Institute and the National Council of La Raza looks at the effects of the deportation of illegal immigrant parents on their American children. It found that, though there are approximately 5 million children in the U.S. with at least one undocumented parent, deportation procedures frequently fail to take this reality into account. Immigration and Customs Enforcement often arrests parents without allowing them to arrange for the care of, or even to contact, their children. In the long term, separated families experience financial stress, and children experience "feelings of abandonment and [show] symptoms of emotional trauma, psychological duress, and mental health problems," according to the report.

Thus could a child with Sheng Kai's ability fall off society's radar and end up spending his days frying shrimp.

The week before Sheng Kai's family was scheduled to move to New York, five of his teachers went to his house to visit him. At first, Sheng Kai stayed downstairs in the restaurant, reluctant to sit with his guests, while the teachers sat in the apartment, taking in the cramped quarters, the hanging laundry, the bars on the windows. Eventually, Sheng Kai came upstairs. He cracked a couple of jokes and explained that he didn't have a bedroom anymore. But the teachers noticed what language he was speaking.

Michael T. Regan WE MIGHT BE LOSING ONE OF OUR GREATEST MINDS: Debbie Wei, principal of the FACTS Charter School, along with Bill Davidson, Sheng Kai's math teacher. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"You learn a language because you want to learn it," says Wei, the principal, who used to teach English as a second language. "If it represents fairness, opportunity, if it represents a good life, then you're happy to learn this language."

That day, almost everything Sheng Kai said was in Chinese.

He didn't want to speak English at all.

It's Sheng Kai's last day in school. Actually, it's his last day in Philadelphia. Mrs. Dong had been planning on leaving for New York the day after, but at the last minute, frightened by the repeated visits from police officers, she has decided to drop everything and go. Sheng Kai has come only to say goodbye to principal Wei and his teachers.

They sit in a small conference room on the second floor with a reporter, with whom Sheng Kai declines to speak or make eye contact. He does occasionally help explain questions to his mother as she pleadingly recites her story, saying of her husband, "He is a good Christian." When she begins to cry, some of the faculty members in the room get teary, too.

FACTS has dealt with situations like this before; last year, a parent of one of its students was handled roughly by immigration officers and lost her pregnancy as a result. But usually, the children involved are too young to understand what is happening to their families. Sheng Kai understands. It might be easier for everyone if he didn't.

At this point, Yong Zhong Dong is still in prison in York, where every day, a few of the Latino men around him are rounded up and sent back to their home countries. Yong Zhong worries that he'll be next. The attorney he retained prior to his car accident, a New York lawyer named Wendy Tso, has filed a motion to reopen his case. Over the next few weeks, Yong Zhong will be greeted with the good news, that the prosecution has joined in the motion — meaning it agrees that Yong Zhong's initial counsel was inadequate, and his asylum claim should get a fair hearing — and then the bad news, that the judge, Grace Sease in Atlanta, rejected the motion. It's rare for a motion that both parties agree on to be rejected, and Tso thinks the judge may have made her decision before receiving the government's opinion. She has filed again. But even if her motion is approved, it just means Yong Zhong's case will be heard. He'll still have to convince Judge Sease that his religion, his family's legal presence in the U.S., and the fact that in China he may be subjected to forced sterilization are good enough reasons to let him stay. It could go either way.

Mrs. Dong can't wait here for the decision, however. Sheng Kai's teachers come to the door of the conference room to say goodbye to him. He folds into their semicircle, as if seeking shelter. Davidson puts his hand on the boy's shoulder and smiles ("I didn't want it to get too heavy," he'll say afterward). A few minutes later, Mrs. Dong's phone rings. It's the people who bought the restaurant from her, saying that the police have come to the house again. A pale of fear sweeps over the delicate-looking woman, and she begins to debate whether to even return home and collect her bags before boarding the Chinatown bus.

Ultimately, she decides to stop back at the apartment. By that night, though, she and her children will be in a crowded apartment in Flushing, Queens, sleeping on the floor. A few days later, Sheng Kai will begin attending a new school, where he won't feel very comfortable, and where the tug of the desire to drop out and support his family will likely grow ever stronger.

Before he leaves, Sheng Kai is asked what he would like his teachers to tell his classmates about his absence. He doesn't need to think about it.

Nothing, he says. He just wants to disappear.

(doron@citypaper.net)