Blog leads to strangers on my doorstep

A few days ago, I was cleaning the mess left by our yellow kitten and my wife was preparing lunch. Everything appeared peaceful, harmonious and logical. There was no sign suggesting that it would be a day to challenge our imaginations.

The doorbell rang. I thought the online bookstore had finally made the delivery. But I opened the door and found two strangers: a middle-aged Western man dressed like a pilot and a Chinese young lady as lovely as a doll.

Clearly, they weren't making a delivery. The lady broke the silence: "We came from Amsterdam. We've sent you a postcard."

I remembered the strange postcard I got a month ago. Someone would arrive in Beijing and visit my home. It was signed by two strangers. Now, the strangers were at my door.

Confucius said: "Isn't it a happy thing to receive friends from afar?" So I ignored the questions in my mind and invited my guests inside. My wife launched the "emergency lunch plan" and doubled the lunch into a super-simplified version of the "Hu-A Private Meal" famous among our circles.

In a bilingual chat that spanned the East and the West, I got the answers to my questions. But wherever the question marks fell, rows of exclamation marks replaced them. They danced and trampled on my nerves.

The pilot-looking man was a professor of multimedia art with the Amsterdam University; his wife was a PhD in charge of a cultural heritage project with the national museum of Holland. In daily life or in work, I certainly didn't have any dealings with them.

One day three years ago, the young lady was clicking, in the style of the Brownian motion, on blog links when she chanced upon my blog. Since then, she has become a veteran diver at the website. From Amsterdam, she learned about every detail of our humble lives.

As time went by, the couple has regarded me and my wife as their old friends whom they don't need to make any contact with. When they decided to visit Beijing, they listed our home as their primary destination. But how could they possibly find us without any "information interaction" with us? The answer they gave made me marvel again at the wonder of life and coincidence.

Based on hints from my articles, they found the community where we live. The scenery, people and other bits of information enabled them to locate the very building we live in.

As they despaired for having no clues to the specific number of our door, they noticed a bill from the telephone company, which was left downstairs by mistake and it had my name on it.

I have gotten used to the constant inquiry calls from express couriers who know our exact address but never fail to get lost in our community. The great couple reminds me of one popular sports game: cross-country orienteering.

But when I tried to record this moving story, my wife became worried. "Hold on, don't you think that when people read your article, there will soon be a game called Finding Hu Xudong at His Door? Will there be a group of people holding the compass and timer, wandering the city and murmuring: 'Where on earth does this Hu Xudong live'?"

(China Daily 08/21/2007 page20)