By Christopher A. Szechenyi,
Boston.com Staff, 11/02/2000

BOSTON - When Echo Tsai arrived in this country from Taiwan 18 years ago, she didn't speak English or even know how to drive. She worked as a waitress in a Japanese restaurant and as a clerk in a 7-Eleven store.

"I didn't have any job skills," she recalls.

So when she was divorced and had to support her three-month old child, Tsai turned to the only person she believed could help - her brother, Pei. "He said to me, 'If you want, I can teach you how to assemble computers,'" Echo says.

She began selling her first computers at flea markets and trade shows, with her brother assembling the machines an hour after a customer walked by their booth. They soon learned that customer support and service was the key to the burgeoning industry.

Today Tsai and her brother run an $80 million a year business, HiQ Computers, with 137 employees and offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and several California cities. After outbidding Dell, HiQ now supplies Boston's public school students and teachers with computers - about 8,000 of them to date.

Echo Tsai is proud her company won the $15 million contract to provide the schools with computers. She built two training centers in Roxbury to help land the contract.

But what's really close to Echo Tsai's heart is a remarkable program that brings computers and technology into Boston's poorer neighborhoods and teaches their residents how to master the machines.

"I'm a firm believer that technology can help the disadvantaged," Tsai says.

With the support of Mayor Thomas Menino and Ed Demore, a Boston businessman, Tsai launched the Technology Goes Home program, a unique community-based enterprise that unites parents and kids in the same classroom.

"It's very important to have families working together," Tsai says.

Now in its second year, the program provides graduates of the 10-week-long course with a free HiQ computer and an Internet connection.

Karen Walker and her son Michael, 14, are among the 27 families who graduated from the program last year. They are living proof of the program's success in conquering the digital divide.

"It gave me more confidence to search the Web," Walker says, looking at her son, "and he turned into a wiz."

During last year's classes, Walker used her computer to generate a resume. Within a couple of months, "I had a lot of job offers," she recalls.

Thanks to the computer class, she landed a job as a receptionist, and her son developed concrete goals.

"I'm going to be a graphic artist and a computer animator," Michael says confidently. "I want to learn more about computers. It's exciting and fun."

Tsai says she is committed to giving away 1,000 computers to graduates of the program. "This is going to be an ongoing program," she says. "This is the only place you see this kind of energy and this kind of collaboration between people.

"I feel very fortunate that something this powerful has happened to my life."