1986—Hospitality
Boqi&Huiqi
The most successful of our foreign-student matchups from the International Office at Harvard was surely with the delightful Wang Boqi and his wife Yin Huiqi, newly arrived from China for graduate work in astronomy. They came in August and stayed a week with us at Timbaloo, Project-48-style, while hunting for housing. When they found an apartment in the Union Square neighborhood of Somerville, we helped them move in. This much, I seem to have remembered accurately.
We had exchanged the occasional Christmas card over the intervening years, but we hadn’t really kept in touch at all well. Last week (March, 2013), though, I found a picture that we thought was Boqi and Huiqi, and so I chased them down through the Harvard Alumni website and e-mailed them a copy.

To my consternation, Boqi replied that he could see a similarity, but that these handsome young folks were not they! He attached another photo (below) of the two of them from their time at Harvard (he had completed his MA in 1988 and his PhD the next year). 		N001620wBoquHuiqi
D0003ew I could still be persuaded that the two images show the same people, but I have to yield to Boqi’s authority on the subject. The height disparities are almost convincing.

We still can’t figure out who the folks in the upper photo can have been, if not they. However this mystery gets resolved, we look forward to dropping in on the Wangs in Short Hills, New Jersey, at the end of June, when we’re visiting our Ralstons in neighboring Springfield.

When we picked them up at Logan Airport, Justin gravitated immediately to Huiqi. Speaking very little English, she was shy and, doubtless, apprehensive in this new setting. Justin’s bashfulness was just part of his eight-year-old personality. I can’t say how it happened, but as we waited for their luggage, and afterward, they had an arm around each other. It’s a sweet memory.
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