Written by Alex

For context, it was my last year at Trinity, and although Covid was in full force, I still managed to get a spot living on campus. It was partly due to a student leadership position. However, with Covid, my initial ministry was cancelled, and I ended up on this team of people trying to focus on remote students.

The leader of this new team had basically said “okay, we’re all in this together. In order to get to know each other better, let’s start all of our meetings with a presentation about our cultures. I’ll go first.” And so he did, with a very lengthy, detailed presentation about his Chinese background. He ended it off by saying that Chinese New Year was coming up soon, how it was such an important time of family reunion, and that the odds were that the various Chinese students on campus would be feeling really down about missing that reunion time. “You know, you could really make someone’s day by just wishing them a Happy Chinese New Year.” And he encouraged us all to think of someone we knew that’d appreciate it.

So, naturally it’s no surprise that I thought of Shirley.

I didn’t really know her, but a lot my friends did, and they always said good things about her. I’d only interacted with her once before, at this Spring Festival event the Chinese club on campus had put on where they’d made a bunch of dumplings. While there, I’d ended up having this long conversation with a mutual friend and Shirley where she told us about how the dumplings were made, about Chinese culture, and so many other things. She was so excited, cheerful, and nice, and it was very clear how important all this was to her.

So going back to this meeting, this memory came back to me. I wished Shirley a Happy Chinese New Year and it seemed that she really did appreciate it. So we started chatting.

Now, fast forward to our first date a few weeks later, where we’d made plans for coffee that eventually turned into lunch instead. There’s this great part about the oh-so-infamous yoga class she was going to that we had to schedule the date around. Apparently, she was just making conversation, but kept saying things like: “Oh by the way, it’s SOOO good. You really have to try it some time. Like it’s so good for you, you’d really enjoy it, and it’s so healthy and such a great way to relax.” Naturally, I wondered if she was dropping a hint, but to this day she still insists that she was just trying to be nice and make conversation. Either way, I somehow had the idea that there’d be nothing better I could do before our first date than to thoroughly embarrass myself in front of her. So I decided to go for it and asked “Is that a suggestion or an invitation?” I’m glad I did, because it was a great way to start what ended up being a really nice first date.

I’m sure I’ve demonstrated by this point that I could go on and on about all our sweet memories. And I would, but the thing is that it’d really just be some of the details about how things started. So even if I shared all the beautiful moments together so far, it would just scratch the surface.