Nov. 10 - Coincidence!

Coincidences in life always come up unexpectedly. Well, they are so by definition, so I guess my previous sentence was an analytic judgment, according to the most revered, most self-disciplined Immanuel Kant.

I went to a talk today at St. Antony's College. This seminar series was recommended to me by Professor Brian Hatcher, who sent me an email more than two weeks ago saying, "Chao, If you can make it, look for this event...The Chair is a friend of mine. Introduce yourself and say hi for me!" So I went, and both I and Dr Bose, the Chair that day, wondered how Professor Hatcher got to know about this seminar series. This is how mysteriously wonderful this guy named Brian Hatcher is.

And back from the digression. I went to the talk today. The topic today was on the book Prisoner of the State. The lecturer was Dr Zhang Wei 张炜 (Zhang as family name), a quite prominent figure and insider. (Surprisingly I just found out several minutes ago that Dr Zhang is the supervisor of Anna File's master thesis at Cambridge. You're so so lucky, Anna.) Throughout the talk I noticed the guy who sat across from me at the other side of the table. The American face looked very familiar to me. So after the talk I went up and asked his name. As expected, he was indeed a person whom I met more than three years ago in my high school in Shanghai! It was June of 2006, and the Yale accapella singing group took a tour to Asia, visited my high school (like Professor Tom Lutze did back in 1973) and gave a performance. He and I were the two emcees of that day. He studied Chinese at Yale and was going to be a junior. He was the student representative of Yale to welcome President Hu Jintao when Hu visited Yale earlier that year. President Hu Jintao was very impressed with his Chinese language skills so Hu sent him to his own alma mater, Tsinghua University, for his studying abroad. We met each other in June 2006 and never had any contacts ever since. It was such a coincidence and to my great surprise that I met him today. He asked me what have happened to me in the past three years and what brought me here. I started recounting my life and memory began to appear unreal again. It was such a different me back in 2006. Even the appearances--he could not recognize my face today. Later I took out a citizen ID card of the People's Republic of China, which had on it a photo of me when I was young, and he said, oh, that was how you looked like when I met you.

It just reminds me of the summer of 2008, when, in that August, I was going through the customs between Mainland China and Hong Kong. The customs officer looked up and down several times at my face and the picture on my passport, and finally said to me, "Oh, you look thinner back then."