Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.”