When He Gang was accepted to study geography at the prestigious Peking University, he was working in construction. His father, a small farmer in Hunan province, had died two years earlier. So He Gang had to lend a hand to support the family. Originally, he did not know much about geography as a subject, says He Gang, now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology and Society at Stony Brook University in New York. But he could not just pass up a place at one of the best universities in China.