ASIAN : ENTREPRENEURS : An influx of immigrants, many educated here, are bringing jobs and innovation to the U.S. market.

Gerry Liu still winces at the greeting that he received in San Francisco after a trip abroad last winter: At the airport, a U.S. customs agent lectured him about Asian immigrants taking jobs from other Americans.

“I said, ‘Not true--the company that I founded created more jobs for Americans than it took away,’ ” the Taiwan native recalled recently. “It wasn’t a pleasant conversation.”

Liu, president of Knights Technology in the San Francisco Bay Area, is not alone. Little noticed outside Northern California, a growing corps of high-tech entrepreneurs has emerged with roots that reach from America to the Far East. Like Liu, they are immigrants who were drawn to this country for economic opportunity, and they have found it.

In the process, they also have given something back: Their firms--more than 500 in the San Francisco Bay Area--have created thousands of jobs, enhanced the nation’s competitiveness in high technology and spurred innovation. All together, they generate over $1 billion in sales, according to the Asian American Manufacturers Assn. in Menlo Park, Calif.

“We’re getting an actual commitment to build products in this country, and to build them the way they ought to be built,” said Charles H. Nevil, a member of the California State World Trade Commission. “I think it’s a very significant contribution.”

Most of the entrepreneurs are ethnically Chinese, born in mainland China, Taiwan or Hong Kong. But unlike other Asian immigrants who have eked out livings in restaurants, laundries and grocery stores, these have entered America’s mainstream via the classroom.

Many hold advanced degrees in physics, engineering and computer science from U.S. universities. They stayed here to work after graduation, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, and have since launched firms that run the spectrum of modern technology.

“I received the best education in the world,” said Liu, 32, who has a Ph.D. degree in computer science from University of California, Berkeley and whose firm makes advanced equipment used to design semiconductors. “I want to stay here a long time and contribute my talent to the same society where I got it.”

By all accounts, the group is diverse. Some of the entrepreneurs are more at home in American society than others are. Their command of English varies. Some always wanted to run their own companies, while others took the step only after feeling mistreated by Caucasian employers. Their companies vary from fledglings with just a handful of workers to established enterprises such as Everex, a personal computer maker with 1,900 employees.

And many are starting to benefit from their connections in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where booming economies have touched off a wave of U.S.-bound investment money and transpacific business opportunities.

“The one thing they have in common is that they have roots elsewhere,” said Calbert Lai, a spokesman for the AAMA. “It’s a tremendous boon to their businesses.”

Actually, they have more than that in common: They come from families in which scientific pursuits are held in high esteem. And science is a uniquely portable skill for immigrants, because it is a language that they can speak as fluently as native Americans.

“Science is basically numbers and symbols,” said Fred Wong, the Hong Kong-born vice president of Rapro Technology in Fremont, Calif. “It speaks a universal language.

Gradually, in different areas of modern technology, the Asian-American entrepreneurs are making their presence felt.

Southeast of San Francisco Bay in Milpitas, David S. Lee--schooled in China, Taiwan, Argentina and the United States--runs Qume, a maker of computer printers. At Pantronix in San Jose, employees of Chinese-born Stanley Wang build semiconductors used in the space shuttle. Expert Edge in Palo Alto--headed by David Lam, an immigrant from South Vietnam and Hong Kong--constructs devices used in robotics and other factory technologies.

Of the many entrepreneurs, few have strived harder or journeyed farther than Lee, 52, whose early education had more to do with basic survival than advanced science. “We appreciate more about America than many Americans do,” he said in a conference room at Qume, the company that he helped start in 1973.

While growing up in war-torn China in the 1940s, his family was uprooted 13 times. They eventually moved to Taiwan, but the island was painfully close to grim wartime memories: In 1951, the Lees took a 59-day voyage to Argentina. Settling in Buenos Aires, they started a Chinese restaurant and import business where Lee helped translate Spanish for his parents.

His journey wasn’t over: Lee studied engineering at Montana State University and later, while working in the private sector, helped develop a letter-quality computer printer system known as the daisy wheel. When Xerox bought Diablo Systems--a company he co-founded, “I made my first million dollars,” he recalled.

Secret to Success

The corporate world had disappointments, as well. Lee stayed on at Diablo after the sale but was passed over for a newly created executive post. In the following years, he helped found Qume, sold it to ITT for more than $10 million in personal profit and later bought it back from a different owner. Today he serves as Qume’s chief executive.

“For every company there is a secret of making money,” said the executive. “If you find it and protect it, then you will make money.”

Like other Chinese, Lee is conscious of ethnic stereotypes in which Asian-Americans are pegged as hard-working, obedient and loyal, while lacking in the sort of strong leadership traits expected of top-level managers.

“I don’t think they even considered me as a manager,” he said of his superiors at the Xerox subsidiary more than 15 years ago. “Even today,” he added, “some large companies have a problem with Asian-Americans as managers.”

But if the majority culture is not uniformly hospitable to Asian-Americans, many are learning to make strides with the help of each other. In the Bay Area, many of the high-tech entrepreneurs know each other, enjoying a built-in network that translates into new contacts, new business, even new companies.

A typical case: Fred Wong met David Lam several years ago when Wong’s job involved purchasing high-tech equipment from Lam’s firm. Lam later introduced Wong to a Chinese-American executive at IBM who was launching his own enterprise in Silicon Valley.

Today, Wong is a vice president at Rapro Technology in Fremont, a 2-year-old firm that designs and makes equipment to produce advanced integrated circuits. Lam serves on the board. “David and I actually went to the same high school, though we didn’t know it till after we talked about it,” Wong recalled.

Overseas Ties

At the same time, Wong is quick to note, the significance of such personal contacts is not peculiarly Asian and in fact “is no different from any start-up company in Silicon Valley.”

Increasingly, such contacts stretch across the Pacific, where the Asian-American capitalists have family and friends that date back to early school days. Amy F. Chung, a product marketing manager with Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, Calif., makes no secret of her wish to make use one day of Taiwan-U.S. business links in a venture of her own.

“Who you know is very important. The connections you have are very important,” said Chung, 28, the daughter of a former Taiwanese consul general in San Francisco. “As a marketing person, I would just hit myself over the head if I cannot utilize these opportunities.”

For some of the immigrant entrepreneurs, opportunity is knocking in the form of cash. In April, for example, Taiwan’s Bank of Communications--a national industrial development bank--opened its first U.S. office in San Jose.

“In California alone, there’s at least a dozen (non-Japanese) Asian venture capital groups investing in high-tech businesses,” said Robert E. Mast, director of corporate services for Venture Economics Inc., a private research firm in Needham, Mass.

Banks and other financial institutions aren’t the only sources of Asian cash. More and more, entrepreneurs tell stories of rich individuals in Taiwan and Hong Kong buying stakes in fledgling, private enterprises. The amount of such money is unknown, because there is little way to track it. “These are family dollars,” said William E. Claggett, San Jose’s director of economic development.

Through their personal contacts, some of the Asian-American capitalists have special entree to such families. The link has become more important lately, because many U.S. investors have become wary about gambling on high tech.

Got Foreign Funds

“The first instinct is to look to the guy down the street (for financing),” said Lam. But these days, when the guy down the street isn’t interested, some of the Asian-Americans look across the ocean. Thus, one new company making electronics testing equipment turned to the Far East for critically needed financing.

“In an industry that no U.S. venture company would touch with a 10-foot pole, they raised $4.5 million from Taiwan,” said Lam, who started his current firm, Expert Edge, in April with the help of $2.5 million from a Hong Kong family.

Despite such examples, Asian-American entrepreneurs still maintain that it’s ideal to be “color-blind” when making business decisions. They are especially sensitive to any suggestion that they operate in business as an ethnically closed circle.

At Pantronix, for instance, half of the managers are Asian-American; the other half are not, said Stanley Wang, the firm’s president and founder: “We can work as a team--to improve the quality of life.”

Rapro regularly employs local, non-Asian machine shops to produce some of its parts. When Asian-American contractors have asked for some of that work, “we’ve told them we’re satisfied with the (non-Asian) people we’re working with, and if there are any opportunities, we’ll let you know,” Wong recalled.

It’s likely that in the future there will be more opportunities in Asia. Amy Chung tells the story of a friend who recently quit his California research job for a chance to work in a more sophisticated laboratory--back home in Taiwan. “Just 10 years ago you wouldn’t see him go back--because there wasn’t the opportunity for him to do what he wants to do,” she observed.

For now, however, America remains the beacon for some of the Far East’s most able high-tech entrepreneurs, drawn to this country’s universities, business climate and political stability. “We have so much freedom in this country,” said Lee, who remembers climbing walls in Beijing’s Forbidden City when he was a child. “Every time you come back from a foreign country, you say, ‘How lucky we are.’ ”