Love stories: Their love spoke beyond words
If you told Marv Hunt that he was going to fall head over heels in love with someone who didn’t speak English, he would have thought you were crazy. Words have always been important to him.
Being able to have an intellectual exchange and share thoughts with a mate rank on the top of his list. Besides, at 50-something, he was not looking for love.
But unbeknown to him, fate had made other arrangement.
As a restaurant consultant, in 2002 he went to Shengyang, China, to inspect a Chinese restaurant chain interested in American-style management. On the second day he was there, he noticed a pretty woman sitting across the table at lunch.
Was it love at first sight?
“Second, really,” Marv said, laughing. “I noticed she was very pretty.”
And that was it. Unable to utter one word in Chinese and reserved by nature, he was not about to do anything. But he noticed the woman at subsequent banquets. As it tuned out, Zhang Miao was a friend of the organizer of the joint venture. As a radio host, she was at those social functions as a guest looking for coverage for her show.
“I noticed when my jokes were translated, she would light up and laugh. Her eyes would sparkle. She illuminated the whole room,” Marv said, sitting next to his wife of three years. “She is beautiful.”
Something beyond words was happening to him, despite his belief in the importance of words.
“I wasn’t looking for love either, at that time.” Miao said. As a radio show host who ran her own program – interviews, editing and hosting – she was happy where she was and never dreamed of coming to America. “But this hairy American seems so gentle and nice. His look conveys something that I have no words for,” she said. “And we never utter one word to each other the whole time he was there. We just looked at each other.”
At the end of 12 days, as Marv was boarding the train to Beijing, he was seized by impulse. Looking at Miao in the crowd, he gestured wildly to his head, then pointed to his eyes and held his hand over his heart. Two Chinese teenage girls witnessed this public expression of passion and screamed with delight. Miao beamed.
After he returned to Spokane, Marv asked through an interpreter for permission to e-mail Miao. Thus began a two-year courtship and intense exchange over cyberspace, via translator, of course. Marv would write in English. Miao would take the e-mail to her friend to translate into Chinese. And vice versa. Frequently a friend of Marv’s in New York would serve as an interpreter during telephone calls.
Perhaps tired of being in the love triangle of teleconferencing, the New York interpreter finally balked to Marv: “If you are that serious, why don’t you get her here on a fiancée visa?”
The visa was supposed to be a six-month process. But a year later, nothing happened. Finally, Marv wrote his congressman, George Nethercutt, who fired off a letter to the American consulate. It turned out all the paperwork was lost in the bureaucratic shuffle.
When a response came, 18 months later, Miao’s visa was denied based on the couple’s language barrier and the lack of intention on Marv’s part. Marv boarded a plane to Beijing. Miao, armed with a three-page bilingual list of essentials like “Are you hungry? Do you have to use the restroom?” greeted him at the airport with a videographer, and the couple set out to chronicle their time together to prove to U.S. bureaucrats of their love.
Miao, who had been learning English then, pulled off a five-minute conversation in English with the consulate official in the second interview, and in August 2004, she arrived in Spokane. On Sept. 22 they were married. Miao has been teaching Chinese here since.
And the restaurant deal Marv went for initially? It never happened.