At 14, Evgeniya (pronounced yev-GAY-neeya) Kim had already captured her age group’s national title, played with the Uzbek national tennis team and traveled all over Asia and Europe for international tournaments.

The talented teenager, who first picked up a racket at 7 years old, was accustomed to winning big. She would go months without dropping a single set and was known for her devastating serve and relentless crash-the-net mentality.

But while she was hitting the prime of her developmental tennis years, Evgeniya says being an ethnic minority meant relentless discrimination. Her grandparents had been part of the 1937 forced migration of 200,000 Koreans from the western Soviet Union, as ordered by Josef Stalin who believed the ethnic group might serve as spies for the Japanese. Most of the transplants settled in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where it was not uncommon to be harassed.

“They’d call me names and make racial remarks, and if I ever talked back, they’d throw stones at me or spit on me,” Evgeniya says, recalling her dreaded daily walk to a segregated school for Koreans in Uzbekistan. “In the winter, I’d have to dodge snowballs, ones with rocks slipped inside them.”

Her father, Viktor, eager to give his wife and three daughters a better life, hired an American immigration lawyer to help move the family to the United States.

Five days before Christmas in 2002, the Kim family arrived at JFK airport in New York City. Viktor was shocked when authorities forced his family into a windowless cell after handcuffing him and his wife, Galina, in front of their three daughters. He learned that he was carrying fraudulent immigration papers courtesy of a scam artist. Liana Schuster had posed as an attorney and successfully swindled the family’s life savings of $10,000. (Shuster, having defrauded multiple people, later pleaded guilty to forgery and fraud.)

“It was completely shocking,” recalls Evgeniya, who speaks with a slight Russian accent. “For my dad, it was a lifelong dream to come to the States. He worked so hard back in Uzbekistan, and finally we had this opportunity to come. My dad is always in control of situations, but that was the first time I saw my dad lost and confused. He brought his children with him to a different country, and here he is being handcuffed.”

The Kims’ request for political asylum was denied, and they were transported to a federal immigration shelter in Leesport, Pa. Refusing to give up, Viktor hired an attorney who successfully pushed for a judge to hear the case. After seven months behind bars and under the close watch of armed guards, asylum was granted and the Kims were freed.

Adjusting to American life required a lot from Evgeniya in particular.

“I really had to grow up a lot,” she says. “As the eldest child and the only one who could speak English, I had to deal with a lot of stuff: immigration papers, looking for an apartment, looking for a job, paying bills, basically taking care of everything.”