Expatriates

From the house we built With blood and soil To the road on which The moonlight procession Flies forth on their boat Of shooting stars It is a pity you did not wish To stay here with us The poet had crafted those words so long ago. Flush from the victory of a People's Revolution in Iran that ousted a repressive monarch for a bearded cleric who spouted promises of freedom and quality, Partow Nooriala all too soon came to believe that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had deceived them.

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.

Initial tests indicate that Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, an opposition leader who had claimed he was the target of an assassination plot, died of natural causes, British police said Thursday. Patarkatsishvili, 52, died Tuesday night in his mansion near London less than two months after he said he feared for his life because of his role in a protest movement against Georgia's government.

The fiery dishes spiked with Sichuan peppercorns began arriving on the table, but Tang Xiulan and her friends remained transfixed by a television screen above the restaurant's front door showing images of rescue efforts in their home province. The past week has provided the most they had seen or heard of Sichuan since they immigrated to the United States -- some a decade ago or more. Unlike Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou, the cities of Sichuan are largely unheralded overseas.

A year ago, Sunni Arab fighter Abu Abed led an improbable revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq. As he killed its leaders and burned down hide-outs, he became a symbol of a new group called the Sons of Iraq -- the man who dared to stand up to the extremists in Baghdad when it still ranked as a suicidal act. Today, Abu Abed is chain-smoking cigarettes in Amman, betrayed by his best friend, on the run from a murder investigation in his homeland.

The lights were so bright at the packed concert hall in Shanghai, Gianna Horak could barely see past the second row. "Hello, I am Gianna," the 14 year-old from Pasadena said in Mandarin, a language she started studying in elementary school. "I was born in China and adopted as an infant. My parents loved me as their own. This is my first time back to China and it's a very treasurable moment, it is what I treasure the most: being back in my home country."

EIGHT-year-old Jorge de Cespedes was scared, lonely and heartbroken, but he was making a killing in wholesale. It was 1961, and the place was a sweltering, insect-plagued refugee camp on the edge of the Everglades. For Jorge and his 11-year-old brother, Carlos -- and 14,000 other Cuban children over the next 20 months -- the camp was their first stop in the United States after fleeing Cuba through a secret U.S. funded airlift dubbed Operation Pedro Pan.

It's a story of frail human hopes pitted against harrowing dangers. When West African composer Ze Manel collaborated on an opera about the young and the desperate of Africa seeking better lives in the West, he also was telling his own story -- and that of many African artists. Some, like Manel, who is from Guinea-Bissau, leave because dictatorships and war stifle creative and political life. Others are pushed out because paintings and sculptures are luxuries many Africans can't afford.

\o7The writer is an Iraqi reporter in The Times' Baghdad Bureau. His name is being withheld for his safety. -- \f7baghdad -- "Have you heard from Mohammed-Ali recently?" my friend Sami asked me over the phone. "No, I think he is out of the country," I said. "I have been trying to call him, but his mobile has been out of coverage." "Mohammed-Ali has passed away," Sami blurted out. "He went to Egypt, and he died there of a heart attack. He was buried there as well."

When Daniel Castin told people he was from Haiti, the response was always the same. "Isn't that the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere?" they would ask. So at some point, Castin -- who emigrated to escape poverty at home -- stopped telling people his nationality. "It's like I was drowning and you were describing the water to me," said Castin, who lives in Pasadena. "Give me a break already." Roughly 5,750 Haitian immigrants live in California, according to the 2000 U.S. census.