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Radio show offers glimpse of professors’ love story

February 18th, 2009
by VJ News

Traveling thousands of miles, transcending cultural boundaries, reuniting after a long separation — Eric Hayot and Chunyuan Di’s love story is one of persistence, and the Chicago Public Radio was intrigued.

The romance between Hayot, an associate professor of comparative literature and director of Asian Studies, and Di, a lecturer in Chinese, was featured on Sunday night’s the radio station broadcast of This American Life.

The tale was broadcast in State College through WPSU-FM. The broadcast can be heard at the WPSU Web site in the This American Life archives.

Hayot and Di spoke about the great lengths that Hayot took to find Di in Beijing after years of separation and how they struggled through distance and cultural barriers.

Sarah Koenig, a producer for This American Life, said she was at a party with her husband Ben Schreier, Penn State assistant professor of English and Jewish studies, when she first heard about Hayot and Di’s romance.

“[The story] stayed with me,” she said.

Hayot originally told Koenig about his second date with Di when he found himself accidentally eating a whole bird’s head, Koenig said.

By the time February rolled around, Koenig said everyone was interested in the anecdote and the full story of their relationship for This American Life’s Valentine’s Day-themed broadcast.

Hayot said he traveled to China in 1995 as a graduate student studying Chinese. On a whim he decided to take a Peking Opera class, which led to a full-costumed singing performance with a live orchestra, he said.

It was at a rehearsal that he first saw Di, who was in the orchestra, he said.

“I saw her across the room and was really taken by her,” he said. “It was this really intense feeling.”

Because Hayot was leaving China in three weeks, the two only had time for a few dates and lost touch when Hayot returned to the United States, he said.

However, two years later in 1997, Hayot returned to Beijing for a year while working on his dissertation, he said. He gave himself three days to find Di in Beijing, but it only took about four hours.

“She was a person I had a very strong emotional relationship with, however brief,” he said. “I wanted to find out if there was something real there.”

Di said she was surprised to hear from Hayot after two years.

“I was happy to hear his voice,” she said. “He couldn’t clearly explain why he was in China or for how long, so we agreed to meet the next day.”

The two began a relationship during Hayot’s second stay in China. They had been dating about a year when Di visited the United States with Hayot on a fiancé visa, he said.

The visa gave Di and Hayot 90 days to marry before Di would have to return to China, possibly barring her from returning to the U.S. in the future, Hayot said.

“It was a crazy pressure to get married that didn’t correspond with the course of our relationship,” he said. ” It was like ‘I guess we’re gonna do this, see what happens.’ ”

Di, who was 23 at the time, said she was very hesitant to get married because it was so sudden.

“I certainly wasn’t thinking that quick, that soon,” she said, “but at the time — if we didn’t get married — there would be no story of us at all,” she said.

The two eventually moved from their home in Los Angeles to teach at Penn State. They have a young daughter named Lola.

[via collegian]

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