It was a hot August day in Heidelberg, Germany. Mars had not been as close to Earth as it was that summer for thousands of years.

That August had something aggressive about it that made one want to rip apart photos of one's foes or knock down bicycles.

I was in a martial mood myself, being in the throes of my first quarter-life crisis: My master's thesis on Melville's Moby-Dick was going nowhere, and at 25, both my career and dating prospects were looking bleak.

What was all that hype about "losing one's heart in Heidelberg"? Bah, humbug!

Then the call came. It was a new acquaintance of mine, a vivacious brunette from Kazakhstan. She invited me to her birthday picnic next to the Neckar River.

I decided to go; it was a wonderful opportunity to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation.

I greeted my hostess upon arrival and sat down on the grass. The atmosphere was fit for a genre painting; it reminded me of the laid-back barbecue scene in Gone With the Wind. However, I was not a coquette like Scarlett O'Hara, and men were not orbiting around me, handing me spare ribs on party plates.

But what could I expect? After all, I was a bluestocking, an American lit student in size 42 Doc Martens, which badly needed dusting. I was wearing an oversized black sunhat, which looked like a lampshade and hid the panda-rings under my eyes.

As I was sipping cheap Macedonian wine, I conversed with a Russian medical student. I thoughtfully chewed on my baguette. Then I saw him.

My first thought was: What a barbaric way of eating Bratwurst!

And he is not exactly the Student Prince of Old Heidelberg or Yao Ming, either. But his face is creative and kind. My second thought: He looks lonely; perhaps I should go over and talk to him.

But before I could act, the young man came over and introduced himself. He was from Shanghai and had met our hostess while working part-time in a telephone company.

Then he told me about the fan he had inscribed with a Chinese poem and given her as a birthday gift.

He said he also enjoyed Chinese painting (flowers, bees), an art form that requires special paper, patience, and lots of elbowroom.

As for music, he liked listening to Chopin's Nocturnes or singing Bon Jovi's Always during karaoke nights.

And he was a great fan of Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell's bestseller was the only book in English he had ever read from cover to cover. Despite the stalling language (we were using a sort of pidgin English-German), we talked for three whole hours. The sky became freckled with stars and the moon appeared.

To paraphrase Ishmael in Moby-Dick: I felt a melting in me.

No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.

This man with his outlandish Bratwurst-eating habit and inside knowledge of Western culture had redeemed it. Five years later, he is my fianc.

When I asked him why he first came up to me, he simply replied: "I liked your big nose."

(China Daily 09/16/2008 page20)