A couple of years ago our son Julian completed his doctorate in physics and went looking for employment. As is fairly normal for academic scientists these days there weren’t many immediate tenure-track openings available, so he looked for a post-doc position.

The one he wound up with was doing research in metamaterials at Zhejiang University in China. (ZJU is considered roughly the third-best college in China, so this wasn’t a bad opportunity.) They had him in Guangzhou briefly, then moved him to the main campus in Hangzhou.

We made an arrangement with him to Skype about once a week, to stay in touch. We also planned to visit Hangzhou — we had visited China back in 2006, when Kiri was working in Shijiazhuang, but we hadn’t gotten to Hangzhou or anything else south of Shanghai. We settled on April 2015 for our visit, with stops in Hong Kong and Guilin before winding up in Hangzhou.

Julian seemed to be doing fine, going by the weekly Skype sessions. And then near the end of 2014 he casually mentioned that he had a new girlfriend.

That may not seem like a big deal, but this was the first time he had ever mentioned any of his girlfriends to us unprompted, so his mother and I figured this one must be fairly serious.

As April neared it sounded more and more serious. By the time we actually headed for China, the trip’s purpose had changed from tourism and seeing how Julian was doing to meeting Cathy, tourism, and seeing where Julian was living.

We met Cathy — her real name was Li Qing, but like most Chinese who learn English she had chosen a western name to use with foreigners — and liked her immediately. And Julian was already talking (when Cathy wasn’t around) about the possibility of marriage.

So it wasn’t a big surprise a few months later when a regular Skype conversation informed us they were engaged.

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