Even though times are tough and New York’s Chinatown is on the verge of dying, there is one place where things appear to be mostly the same as they have always been.

Since Mei Lum started volunteering as a child, Wing on Wo & Co has been run by her family. Brilliant and creative heritage enterprises have withstood generations of economic ups and downs. Mei represents her family’s legacy and New Yorkers and future generations of Chinatown residents.

The 32-year-old fifth-generation owner has bigger plans. Mei revived Wing on Wo’s late-19th-century ambiance. The store was a meeting place, credit union, and informal post office for low-income Chinese employees during the Chinese Exclusion Act.

She wants to run things because she has always wanted to expand the store’s conceptual boundaries. “A business doesn’t have to be so economically driven. There can still be genuine connections, which sustain a community,” she told The Guardian.

Wing on Wo is still primarily run by the original family for over a century. For 30 years, Mei’s father Gary has chatted with clients at the counter. Lorraine, her mother, handles the website and order processing. Her 105-year-old grandmother, Nancy, promotes the store’s hand-painted wine cups, fish-shaped glazed vases, and elegant dinner plates on Instagram.

In 2016, her grandmother intended to sell the family-owned porcelain specialty shop, which was worth close to $10 million. Mei took over the business to preserve it and create a community hub. She was planning to study international relations at Columbia University, but she now wants to run the family business. She wanted the store to be a hub for activists and artists to fight gentrification and displacement.

As a result of the pandemic, Mei decided to focus her efforts on online sales, digital advertising, and social media. To ensure that the business is preserving tradition and shaping the future of Chinatown, she has added several new initiatives, such as youth programs, an artist residency, and a ceramicist fair.

Priscilla Cornejo, better known as Nanay Bebe to the local people (“Nanay” means mother in Filipino), has been selling her magical water to the community since 1980 in the Philippines. She is convinced that her drink’s distinctive flavor is why so many customers seek out her business.

Magic Water, or known to be its local term “Samalamig” is also recognized as a leading refreshing drink in the Philippines. Despite coming from modest means, Nanay Bebe makes it her mission each day to quench the thirst of those hungry for success.

She explained that her drink is not just ordinary cold water. It has clear agar, sugar, mineral water, and tons of ice. When the agar hits the ice, it tends to melt, creating the ‘magic water,’ that will surely quench your thirst. 

Her business may not look like much compared to big companies or restaurants, as she only sells on the street, but it has tremendous growth potential. Nanay Bebe sells her magic water for PHP5 or PHP10 ($0.08 or $0.17) in small plastic bags, cups or some customers even bring their own Aquaflask or tumblers. From what she described, weekly earnings for her business could reach PHP35,000 ($600).

An endless line of curious onlookers from the street awaits to sample Nanay Bebe’s magic water. Many online publications, including those dedicated to food and social news, have featured it. Even today, some people attempt to duplicate Nanay Bebe’s traditional drink formula.

Binance is one of the most valuable cryptocurrency exchanges in the world as of today, and its founder and current CEO is Changpeng Zhao, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, had a net worth of approximately $30 billion, which placed him in 33rd spot on the list of the world’s richest people.

Early on in life, Zhao was born into a family of educators in a rural village in Jiangsu province, China. He claimed that as a child living in rural China, he had to endure food rationing. His family immigrated to Canada in the late 1980s and felt incredibly fortunate to have been able to leave China.

When Zhao and his family moved to Canada, he worked several part-time jobs, including one at McDonald’s. He attempted to earn money at 14 by working at a Chevron gas station and as a volleyball referee.

He studied computer science at McGill University in Montreal, where he developed an interest in technology similar to that of his father, a math prodigy and programmer in his teens.

Zhao began coding when he was only 16 years old and took programming classes in high school before enrolling at McGill University.  After finishing college, Zhao worked at the Tokyo Exchange and then at Bloomberg in the Tradebook department from 2001 to 2005. Zhao left his job in 2005 to become a partner at the Shanghai firm Fusion Systems, which developed software for the financial markets. 

After discovering Bitcoin in 2013 while playing poker, he went all-in on crypto and committed his life to it. He even gave up his home to fund his Bitcoin investment. He persisted, even as the value of bitcoin dropped from $600 to $200 after he bought it.

Being a tech leader at Blockchain, a cryptocurrency wallet provider, and OKCoin, a cryptocurrency marketplace, Zhao decided to create his exchange, combining the efficiency of high-frequency trading platforms he had previously developed with the potential of cryptocurrencies. Thus, he started Binance with a $15 million initial coin offering.

However, getting to the top is more complicated than it seems, especially for Binance. When Binance’s cryptocurrency, BNB, dropped in value below its ICO price, Zhao and his early colleagues were forced to adapt quickly to changing market conditions.

As a result, Zhao initiated the initiative to make Binance a distributed organization with a flexible international staff. He was also instrumental in growing Binance into a user-friendly platform with maximum bandwidth, low fees, and other benefits.

In a relatively short period, Binance’s offering became too attractive to the cryptocurrency community to be held back by persistent difficulties. Six months after its launch, Binance soared to the top of the cryptocurrency exchange rankings, which remains to this day.

He is now widely known by his alias CZ and is widely regarded as the cryptocurrency industry’s most influential and prosperous figure. His majority stake in the cryptocurrency platform is responsible for much of his wealth at around $30.6 billion. Since the exact value of Zhao’s cryptocurrency holdings is unknown, Bloomberg’s blog post reported that it did not factor them into his wealth.