If you lean in close, conspiratorially, Sonia Ho may just let slip a secret she keeps about her son David. She will speak in a hush, as if to elude some spy's eavesdropping from behind the potted palm. But she badly wants to divulge her information. Thus, slightly abashed but nonetheless proud, she will confide, "He's kind of a genius, you know. I'm not supposed to say that, but it's true."

Mothers are allowed to say these things. But one doesn't have to be David Da-i Ho's mother to be aware of his brilliance. He lays forth clearly and succinctly some of the boldest yet most cogent hypotheses in the epic campaign against HIV; at the same time, he operates nimbly through the budgetary and political pitfalls of the enterprise. And though he is monumentally tranquil in demeanor, he has been known to fling the occasional hot one-liner against naysayers—once, "It's the virus, stupid!" to those who insist HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

Moved Permanently

Genius, however, is a word that originally referred to a guardian spirit. Ho cuts too slight a figure to qualify as a force of nature, but his spirit is startling: a fierce competitiveness that is manifested as a subtle calm, a passionate transcendence. It is evident in his gestures. His fine-fingered hands do not punch out arguments; rather they escort logic through tangles of confusion, gently prodding reason his way. Perhaps Sonia Ho is right to be hushed, for her son's genius emanates from the depths of his family's experiences, and it is not quite Asian to make a display of one's legacies. But she is also right to be proud, for this is America, and her son is an extraordinary American success story.

TIME's 1996 Man of the Year was born in Taichung, Taiwan, on Nov. 3, 1952. At birth, he was given the name Da-i, two Chinese ideograms that literally mean "Great One," a Taoist term of vast cosmological consequence. It is a name reflecting great expectations. Taichung, however, was a quiet town in the Taiwan boondocks, and the Ho family lived in a modest four-room house with a backyard ditch that served as a toilet and from which farmers collected fertilizer for their fields. To forge a better life for his family, Ho's father took ship in 1956, traveling 18 days on a freighter to America. For nine years, Da-i would know his father only through letters and parcel post.

For Da-i and his younger brother, the years of waiting were filled with long school days that included, after a quick stop at home for dinner, a 20-minute bike ride to a cram school for extra tutoring. As they rode home in the dark through the empty countryside, the eerie sounds of frogs and crickets would sometimes scare the brothers into frenzied pedaling. Street stickball was a welcome interruption. And whenever he could, Da-i would sneak off to the neighborhood store to leaf through comic books.

When his father sent for the family, a seriousness came over Da-i. The 12-year-old packed his own bags and stayed awake throughout the flight to watch over his mother and his younger brother. They were traveling to a land they did not know and whose language they did not speak. It would be a place where they would receive new names and new identities. Their father, a devout Christian who now called himself Paul, had picked the boys' American names from the Bible. Thus it came to pass that Ho Da-i became David Ho and his younger brother became Phillip. For a few more years, Phillip would refer to David by the Chinese honorific for "older brother"; becoming American would take time.

The family initially settled in a black neighborhood of central Los Angeles, not far from the University of Southern California, where Paul Ho pursued a master's degree in engineering. A translator for U.S. troops in China during World War II, he instructed his wife that their sons were to stick to Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese and not learn English until they got to America for a better chance of speaking it without an accent. As Sonia Ho recalls in careful but imperfect English, "When we first come to U.S., we don't know any words. David would come home from school and say, 'I don't know what they talking about.' I'd say, 'Oh, what are we going to do?'" Says David: "We hadn't even learned the ABC's. I remember being laughed at by classmates who thought I was dumb."

A diffident David did two things: he became an introvert and stuck close to the family, and he focused on school and achievement. Says Phillip, now a dentist: "He knew what it was he had to do." Sonia recalls, "If he got even one question wrong, he'd be very upset with himself." It was A's in everything, math, science—and English. Six months after starting school, David settled into the language, thanks to an English-as-a-second-language program and the miracle of TV. "We watched The Three Stooges," Phillip says. "We picked up a few phrases here and there and some mannerisms." When their parents' third son was born, Phillip and David got to choose the name. They skipped the Bible and picked Sidney, after a character in a Jerry Lewis comedy.

Medicine was David's second choice as a career. After high school, he attended M.I.T. and Caltech as a physics major. He never let up on himself, at work or play. Though short, he was an intense basketball player. At Caltech, he took up chess. Characteristically, the first time he entered a tournament, he won.

Ho soon realized that the most glittering prizes in science weren't in physics. Molecular biology was the cutting edge, gene splicing the hot technology. Medical research, says Ho, was much more "tangible." And so he made his way to Harvard Medical School. Soon enough, medicine provided the turning point of his career. His mother recalls, "He told me he saw a lot of young people die. He say that must be some disease, so he want to keep researching to find out why." Ho had met up with HIV.

As he pursued medicine and then the virus, Ho's introversion faded. "It took many years to reverse itself," Ho says. At the same time, his brothers say, he grew less temperamental and developed his legendary tranquillity. When colleagues threw a tantrum, Ho gently offered advice from Chinese philosophers. One of his favorites is the Taoist sage Lao-tzu, who said, "The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world."

The equanimity deepened as Ho carved out time for his family. Even at school, he acted as a second father to his brother Sidney, writing constantly with advice and encouragement. Says Sidney, who now works for David as operations manager at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center: "He would take a late flight and get in past midnight, but he would always come to my room and wake me up for a brotherly chat." Ho became a father himself. He and his wife Susan Kuo, an artist, have three children: Kathryn, 18, Jonathan, 15, and Jaclyn, 10. Now and then, Ho sneaks away from his busy schedule to surprise his kids at school. This fall, after his picture appeared in TIME, he was invited to explain AIDS to Jaclyn's fourth-grade class.

As a child, Ho had his math tables drilled into him in Mandarin, and to this day he does his calculations in Chinese. "But," he says, "I wouldn't even have the vocabulary to give a scientific talk in Chinese." He plays down the importance of being Chinese to his success—but that is a very Chinese thing to do. Instead, he cites immigrant drive: "People get to this new world, and they want to carve out their place in it. The result is dedication and a higher level of work ethic." He adds, "You always retain a bit of an underdog mentality." And if they work assiduously and lie low long enough, even underdogs will have their day.

— Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Alice Park/New York and Donald Shapiro/Taichung

COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1996

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