(MONEY Magazine) – At age 41, Baichun Xiao has been swept off his feet three times by political convulsions in his native China. The Cultural Revolution sent him to a collective farm. The rise of the Gang of Four nearly put an end to his university aspirations. And in the past three months, Baichun and his family have witnessed the most dramatic and unexpected upheaval yet -- though from a distant remove 7,400 miles from their native Nanjing. This time, he, his wife Liping, 35, and their seven-year-old son are riding out the storm in a safe haven: Philadelphia, the birthplace of American liberty. Baichun Xiao (pronounced bay-shun chow) is among 40,000 Chinese attending U.S. colleges and universities, many of whom have been stranded here in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square violence. ''We want to go back and serve our country,'' says Baichun, who expects to receive a Ph.D. from the Wharton School -- the University of Pennsylvania's elite school of management -- next June. ''But given the fact that the government is killing people, we cannot.'' The Xiaos believe their relatives in China are safe. But because the couple have participated in pro-democracy demonstrations -- including a recent protest at the Chinese embassy in Washington that wound up on TV -- they may have joined the ranks of those who can never go home again. Eager to get on with the struggle to remain here, Baichun is already concerned about finding a job after he graduates. He hopes to land a position ! teaching his specialty of operations research, a mathematical discipline taught at business schools as a way to improve decision-making. ''My English is not the best,'' he says with typical self-deprecation, ''but I love students.'' A bigger problem, however, is that as an emigre from a country where jobs are mandated by the government, he has no idea how to hunt for a faculty post -- or for any other sort of work. Being a newcomer to a capitalist society also makes him uneasy about managing his family's income. It averages $25,000 a year: $13,000 from his two stipends as a research fellow and teaching assistant, and the rest from Liping's job assembling computers at Human Designed Systems, a Philadelphia manufacturer. Despite these modest amounts, the frugal Xiaos have built a $19,000 reserve over the past four years. But Baichun has done nothing more than put the money in banks. He gets substantial interest (9.4%) only on a one-year $8,000 certificate of deposit. Otherwise, he has $7,000 in a savings account, $3,000 in two checking accounts and $1,000 in a money-market bank account, none of them earning more than 5.8%. ''Perhaps I should be making investments,'' he admits, ''but in China I had no chance to study them.'' In fact, he had no chance to study anything for many years. One of seven children, Baichun is the son of an accountant who had the misfortune to work for the Nationalist government that fell to Mao Zedong's Communists in 1949. Since his job had been low level, the elder Xiao managed to continue working, handling accounts at a factory and, later, a school. But in 1966, radical party members began the purge known as the Cultural Revolution. ''My father was a man with what they called 'a historical problem,' '' Baichun recalls, ''and from then on my family was under scrutiny.'' When Baichun finished the Chinese equivalent of high school in 1968, he was dispatched to work on a rural commune in Jiangsu Province. (His parents were later sent to another commune.) ''For three terrible years,'' Baichun recounts, ''I worked in the fields seven days a week for 12-hour stretches. We lived four to a room in a house with no electricity, so we had to read by gaslight and we froze in winter.'' His pay: $15 a year. Still, he recalls, ''the peasants lived in worse conditions, yet they treated us very well because we were educated and could show them better ways to harvest the rice.'' In 1971, as a reward for ''having the proper attitude,'' Baichun was allowed to return to Nanjing and put to work in a body shop fixing buses and trucks for a provincial transportation company. Hating the job, he tried repeatedly to enter the university. ''But my parents' history was held against me,'' he says. Ultimately he made it, through a series of dramatic events that began in 1976, when he put up neighborhood posters criticizing the Gang of Four, a powerful government group led by Mao's widow. As a result, the police investigated Baichun's work unit for counterrevolutiona ry activity. The embarrassed unit leaders vowed revenge against Baichun, and a year later they saw their chance. By then the tides of Chinese politics had shifted again, and the Gang of Four was in disgrace. But when Baichun applied to take the university exam, the leaders tried to discredit him by claiming that he had supported the Gang. Baichun was rescued only when some friends wrote to the new government of Deng Xiaoping citing the poster incident. The letter reached Deng's right-hand man, Hu Yaobang (the moderate whose death this spring set off the present turmoil). Hu ordered a much publicized investigation that cleared Baichun, permitting him to enroll in college in 1978 -- a full decade late. Baichun was teaching a night class in mathematics two years later when he met 24-year-old Liping (pronounced lee-ping). ''She was my star pupil,'' he smiles, ''until I captured her.'' The daughter of a military-school administrator and a soft-drink factory manager, Liping had also been a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Her education had ended after the elementary grades, when she was forced into vocational training to become a nurse. She was working as an acupuncturist when she started dating Baichun. The two married in 1980, against her parents' wishes. ''They told me, 'The Cultural Revolution could come back, and his family's historical problem means you'll be in trouble!' '' she says. At the time, though, the fears seemed alarmist: the country's leadership appeared to be moderate, and after nine years in the countryside, Baichun's parents were back in Nanjing, living in retirement. The Xiaos' son was born in 1982, just before Baichun graduated from the university. A short time later, the government sent him to Belgium's University of Louvain to study for an M.B.A. in econometrics. Liping, who stayed behind in Nanjing, remembers that period as ''financially very difficult. I was making $74 a month and paying a housekeeper $15 to take care of the baby. I was so poor that my parents had to give me money, which shamed me.'' Baichun got his degree in 1984, and on returning to Nanjing, he applied to Wharton's doctoral program, aiming to prepare for a career teaching at the college level. Accepted for the 1985 fall semester, he received funding from the school, except for travel costs. He arrived in the U.S. that August, and his wife and son joined him in March 1986. To Philadelphia's 1,000 Chinese students, Baichun was something of a celebrity because many remembered his struggle to enter Nanjing University. He was asked to become president of the Chinese Students Association. ''It was more work than I wanted,'' says Baichun, ''but they kept reminding me of my responsibility to the group.'' The Xiaos moved into a two-bedroom apartment that they shared with another couple for $250 a month, and Liping began trying to learn English by watching TV. Though both Xiaos had studied the language in China, Baichun alone had ever used it (all his classes in Belgium were in English). When Liping felt proficient, she enrolled in a free job-training program. She put her son in day care, which led to the first step in his Americanization: his Chinese name is Zixuan (pronounced zish-wan), but after his parents heard the day-care staff say it, they thought it sounded too much like ''this one.'' So his father, already a rabid NBA fan, renamed the boy Kevin, after Boston Celtic Kevin McHale. Liping finished her training in 1987 and began her present job assembling computer components for $5.50 an hour. With two paychecks to count on, the Xiaos started scouting the suburbs for a home of their own. Last fall, they moved into a $350-a-month, one-bedroom duplex in Drexel Hill. Luckily for their bank accounts, the only additional furnishings they needed were a bed and couch, which together cost $500. They also steeled themselves for the inevitable commute: having learned to drive in the U.S. (''everyone in China rides bikes,'' says Baichun), they had bought a used 1984 Chevette for $2,600. Kevin attends a nearby Catholic school (''not for religion but for a good education,'' says his father) plus an after-school center, which together cost the Xiaos $1,850 a year. Increasingly comfortable in their new setting, the Xiaos began adopting their neighbors' ways. They took a 10-day camping vacation through Maine and Canada that left them with a taste for lobster. Baichun became a consumer- electronics freak, filling the apartment with an IBM-compatible personal computer, a couple of TVs, a VCR and -- he sheepishly admits -- $1,000 worth of compact disks. Those in the old country were not forgotten: the Xiaos recently sent $1,500 worth of TVs and VCRs to both sets of parents in Nanjing. But this spring, the bloody suppression of the protests in Beijing disrupted the Xiaos' agreeable drift into assimilation. Baichun was not totally surprised by the repression. ''Deng Xiaoping wants China to be powerful, it's true,'' he says. ''But first he wants to keep himself powerful.'' In fact, Baichun and other Chinese students had written their consul general in New York City two years ago demanding the release of political prisoners. ''The consulate didn't like the letter,'' he reports, ''and they may have put our names on the blacklist.'' Nevertheless, the Xiaos joined a group of 350 who drove to Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago ''to meet with the Chinese embassy and show our anger,'' he says. ''They closed the door, and nobody would come out, so we marched in a demonstration that was shown on TV.'' The Xiaos do not believe that their militance threatens their families in China. ''We phone them regularly,'' points out Baichun, ''and they're safe because they're not politically active like me.'' The Xiaos themselves feel secure ''as long as we stay in the U.S.'' To assess their chances of remaining here indefinitely, Baichun sought advice from an immigration lawyer. He was told that their visas could be extended if the Xiaos applied for political asylum, a step they hesitate to take for fear of putting pressure on relatives back home. ''But the situation in China is too terrible,'' Baichun says. ''I believe most students won't go back -- we'll find a way to stay here.''

BOX: Bottom Line

Though the Xiaos' net worth is still quite small, it will probably rise rapidly in the next several years, pushed along by Baichun's increased earning power and an ability to save that allows the couple to put aside a remarkable 16% of their currently modest joint income.

INCOME Baichun Xiao's stipends $13,000 Liping's salary 12,000 Tax refunds 1,054 Interest 630 Total $26,684

OUTGO Food $4,800 Savings 4,200 Rent 4,000 Taxes 2,400 Gifts 2,000 Tuition and after-school care for Kevin 1,850 Car expenses 1,590 Entertainment 1,440 Utilities 1,080 Clothes 1,000 Vacation 700 Miscellaneous 664 Furniture 500 Medical expenses 360 Contributions 100 Total $26,684

ASSETS Bank certificate of deposit $8,000 Bank savings account 7,000 Personal property 5,000 Checking accounts 3,000 Debt receivable from Liping's cousin 3,000 1984 Chevette 1,450 Money-market account 1,000 Total $28,450

LIABILITIES None Total None

NET WORTH $28,450

BOX: The Advice Begin the job hunt with colleagues

-- THE PROBLEMS How to find a job in the U.S. and earn a higher return on savings

-- THE SOLUTIONS 1. Cultivate professional contacts. 2. Invest in high-interest CDs.

At MONEY's invitation, Raymond Harrison, senior vice president of Manchester, a career development consulting firm in Philadelphia, and Neil Kauffman, a fee-only financial planner and partner in Kauffman & Drebing, met with the Xiaos in the couple's apartment. While Liping served platters of steaming homemade dumplings, the advisers made these suggestions: Job hunting. While operations research is an arcane field, its practitioners are in demand both at universities and in the business world, where it is used for tasks ranging from inventory control to mapping marketing strategies. Consequently, Baichun should be able to find work after he gets his Ph.D. next June. Harrison noted, however, that finding academic and corporate jobs requires different strategies. Many academic posts -- Baichun's preference -- are filled before they are ever advertised. So he should start developing a network of contacts who know he is looking for a position. He should ask the scholars whose research he is citing in his Ph.D. thesis whether there are openings at their schools. He should also talk to his department chairman and academic supervisors. And he should attend conferences sponsored by the professional associations. (Wharton provides funds to help cover travel costs.) These not only offer excellent networking opportunities but also often include job fairs. He could expect a starting salary in the high $20,000s. For documentation, he will need a curriculum vitae -- a list of his school and employment history, academic honors, associations and publications. Wharton's career counselors can help him prepare it, but he should have his professors review it. As for the private sector, the advisers said Baichun is most likely to find opportunities at large outfits such as General Electric or Du Pont that have strategic planning or research departments. His starting pay could exceed $50,000. The corporations will want a two-page resume that should emphasize his experience with practical applications of his theoretical work. Unlike the curriculum vitae, which can be done on a word processor, the resume should be professionally prepared; 100 copies will run about $80. Redeploying savings. Instead of keeping $3,000 in two checking accounts, Baichun should close one and reduce the amount in the other to $1,500, enough to cover one month's expenses. He should shrink his $7,000 bank savings account to $3,000 -- sufficient for an emergency reserve -- and close his $1,000 bank money-market account, which is not paying a rate competitive with those of money-market mutual funds. When Kauffman asked about the $3,000 debt receivable listed among the Xiaos' assets, the couple said it was a loan to Liping's cousin, a college student in Australia who has promised to pay it back by year-end. That will boost their investable funds to $9,500. Since their future is so uncertain, the Xiaos should choose very secure and liquid investments. Kauffman recommended that they put the money in three or four bank certificates of deposit with six-month and one-year maturities that are staggered for flexibility. To find banks offering the best yields, they can consult MONEY Scorecard (in this issue, it appears on page 7).

''I'm very excited,'' declared a grateful Baichun as the advice session ended. ''This is the happiest day of my interview with MONEY.'' A few days later, he reported that daily political meetings had kept him from acting on the % advice. ''I'll think it over next week and then call the advisers,'' he says. ''I don't want them to think I didn't appreciate what they told me -- it's just that I've been so busy.''