Chinese

The documents Chan Share clutched as he left China were forged. It was 1939 and Asians were not allowed to immigrate to the United States. So, like many others, Share claimed he was a "paper son" and had a California-born relative whose records were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Kyle Rothstein stands out in a sea of Chinese faces not because he is an American teenager with curly red hair and clear blue eyes, but because he speaks Chinese. Fluent Chinese. The visual and verbal double take is the handiwork of his father, Jay Rothstein, a prescient American businessman who put Kyle in a bilingual English-Mandarin school in San Francisco when he was 5. The elder Rothstein had read that if you don't learn to speak a foreign language by that age, you never really get it.

A team of 16 young Chinese acrobats began its U.S. tour with two nights at a homeless shelter. A circus promoter from Wisconsin failed to meet the performers when they arrived Monday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. Instead, he called Bill Thompson of the Union Gospel Mission shelter. The promoter, who gave only the name Gary, said he had run out of money and needed someone to pick up the acrobats, ages 13 to 20.

The "Made in Italy" label conjures images of little old men and women in aprons and spectacles, stooped over wooden tables, cutting leather and sewing by hand in workshops that dot the hills of Tuscany. It certainly doesn't make you picture Chinese immigrants toiling long hours in ramshackle, poorly illuminated sheds, and then sleeping in small rooms behind thin plywood right there in the factories.

As the Olympic flame continues its tumultuous journey around the world, the lives of two young Chinese women whose brief gestures during the torch relay were captured on video have emerged center stage in the black-and-white world of Chinese public opinion. One is Jin Jing, a one-legged former fencer in a wheelchair who, with her tiny body, defended the torch from pro-Tibet protesters trying to snatch it from her on the streets of Paris.

A federal appeals court said Monday that the U.S. military improperly labeled a Chinese Muslim held at Guantanamo Bay an "enemy combatant" and it ordered that he be released, transferred or granted a new hearing. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington marks the first time a federal court has weighed in on the issue of a Guantanamo detainee's classification and granted him the opportunity to try to secure his release through civilian courts.

WIMBLEDON, England -- As an exhilarating and surprising Wimbledon semifinalist, Zheng Jie will win at least 187,500 British pounds, which on Tuesday came to almost $374,000 -- about 20% of her $1.815 million in career earnings. Hailing from Chengdu, Sichuan province, China, the epicenter of the May 12 earthquake, she plans on giving an undetermined percentage of her winnings to earthquake relief. "Yeah, it's hard for me because in China, sometimes it's a different pressure," she said.

Ethiopian rebels stormed a Chinese-run oil exploration field near the Somalian border at dawn Tuesday, killing 74 people and destroying the facility. Chinese officials said nine Chinese oil workers and 65 Ethiopians died and seven Chinese were taken away by the rebels. It wasn't known whether the rebels suffered any casualties.

Chinese slave laborers forced to work in Japan during World War II lost their bid for compensation when Japan's Supreme Court overturned a landmark ruling that had ordered a Japanese company to pay them. In 2004, the Hiroshima High Court ordered Nishimatsu Construction Co. to pay a total of $230,000 to five Chinese. Nishimatsu argued that the statute of limitations had expired.

There were the Cantonese-speaking bakers on the corner, the Vietnamese-Chinese herbalist a few storefronts to the west and a mainland Chinese restaurant next door that made a pork stew named after Mao Tse-tung.