Lost and Found

My sophomore year of college, 11 years ago, I took a Chinese language class. My teacher was named Zhang Laoshi (or Teacher Zhang) and she was from China. It was an amazing year and I learned a lot, and I fell in love with China.

Zhang Laoshi returned to China after one year, and although I wrote to her at the address she had given us, I never heard from her. I don't know if I wrote the characters wrong or if the mail got lost. Either way, this was a woman who had wanted us to keep in touch with her and I was upset that it didn't work. I swore that if I ever made it to China I would try to find her.

Last year, I packed my bags, unfortunately throwing her business card in my suitcase. The lost suitcase. Of all the things I lost in my bag, that was the one that upset me the most.

Last spring I decided to clean out my email, deleting hundreds of messages. In the process, I ran across one that I had forwarded myself from an old acct. (The old acct is seldom used, and the email service decided to do me a "favor' and delete all my old emails, including this one.) In the email was Zhang Laoshi's snail mail address at her university. I had tried looking up her university here in China on the internet, but I kept getting a listing far up north and west.

It turns out she's been in Guangzhou (one hour by train) this entire time.

So I asked a friend for help. Our original plan was for a friend of hers in Guangzhou to go to the university to try to find Zhang Laoshi. We thought we might get better results if someone showed up in person. But the friend was pregnant, and soon it was the end of the school year, and it just never came together.

This fall I decided to try again. I asked Tamara casually if her friend had made it up to the university. Tamara said we could just try to call ourselves and see what happens. We agreed to do it Tuesday morning, figuring no one would be in meetings.

This morning, I'm not quite sure how it happened, but we decided to try. It took 3 phone calls: one to the university, one to the foreign languages dept, and then one to her home. I guess everyone thought it was such a great story that they were more than willing to help out.

After more than ten years, I heard Zhang Laoshi's voice.

She's retired and happy and though she can't quite picture my face, she's already invited my to Guangzhou. She said she's going to look at some photos we took at the end of the year (ten years ago) to remember who I am. She asked how my Chinese was. I laughed and told her I'm still trying.

It took a little over ten years, but now I'm China and back in contact with the woman who inspired me to come to China. I still can't believe it.

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