Neighbors??

True story: Today as we rode the subway home from BBC, we noticed a group of people enter the train. Sometimes people catch your attention just by their interactions. Oftentimes we try to offer our seats to elderly people but most of the time, they refuse. I guess they like to treat the foreigner well. Anyway, as I tried to stand up with all my belongings in hand, the lady in front of me actually pushed me back into my seat. Eventually they got a seat; the wife sat next to me, the husband sat next to Mark, another older lady sat further down, and the younger woman, Mindy, (maybe 40s) talked with us. Mindy spoke perfect English so between our broken Chinese and her perfect English, we had a fun conversation. Conversations always begin with “Where are you [we] from?” When we told them SC, the talk turned to Spartanburg. It turned out that the two older people were Mindy’s 85-year-old parents who had lived in Inman, SC with their second daughter and her family. All three of the daughters settled in different parts of the US and now have families – Mindy in San Jose, CA; the middle one in Inman, SC; the oldest one in Warsaw, IN. The middle one and the parents have since moved to Indiana, but we had fun talking about similar geographic areas. We told them our home is only about 30 minutes from Inman.  They told us about their four generations who now live in the US. Mindy and her parents were actually just visiting Beijing. 

This reminds me of the time in 2014 when we ran into Jeremiah, a Riverside High School graduate from Greer.