Unicode Problem

I have a webpage that allows users to post news stories for their department. The site uses AJAX to send the data to the webserver. The problem I'm having is when the user uses some unicode characters like bullets or MS Word quotes, the page comes out weird. Here's the process. 1. The user enters the story and clicks save. 2. The javascript uses the escape function to turn the text into something that can be posted to the server. This function turns spaces into %20, but it turns unicode characters into a longer string like %uXXXX. 3. The javascript then sends the data to the processing page. 4. The PHP processing page receives the data and saves it to the mySQL database server. The problem I see is that any unicode character is saved in it's escaped unicode sequence. For example a bullet is saved into the database as a literal %u2022. What I need to know is what function can I use so that it's either saved as the unicode bullet character or displayed back on the page as the bullet? Thank you