This case examines the business career of Kuo-Ching Li, who was born in China in 1892, and built a successful minerals trading business called Wah Chang in the United States during the interwar years. He acquired a prominent role in tungsten, the strongest natural metal on earth, and during World War II he played a major role in securing supplies of the strategic mineral from China and Latin America for the United States war effort. The case is set against the background of the era of the Chinese Exclusion Acts between 1882 and 1943 which largely curtailed Chinese immigration to the United States and denied ethnic Chinese citizenship. It explores how Li was able to build his brokerage business in such a setting on the basis of contacts in both China and the United States. It ends with the Communist Revolution in China in 1949 which appeared to threaten his dual identity.

Samuel Colt not only perfected and patented the technology for a gun that could fire multiple times without reloading, but he also developed and applied early principles of mass production more completely than anyone had done before. Until the nineteenth century, weapons manufacture, like most industries, had been the exclusive domain of skilled craftsmen, whose families had typically been in the trade for generations. Colt substituted specialized machines that made parts to exact specifications, which could fit into almost any gun of the same type. This made replacement and repair significantly easier and production more uniform. Other industries and countries would later implement these principles of production from Colt's armory, thereby revolutionizing manufacturing. Also, through his personality, product, and marketing, Colt's guns became intertwined with American identity in a tangle that persists to the present.