I have stated earlier that my lifetime output of teaching can be presented by the 53 Ph.D. students I supervised from 1961-2007 with Harvard (47) MIT (3) and Tsinghua (3). Of these 53 students, 30 of them are of Chinese ethnicity from various parts of China including Taiwan, Chinese Mainland, and Hongkong. The Chinese tradition for teachers can be summarized by the idiom "Teacher for one day, father figure for life" . A significant number were at my 90th birthday celebration last year   See https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-1447268.html, and

https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-1448015.html 

However, with the crowded schedule of that event, I really did not have much of a chance conversing in one-to-one fashion of each one individually. Thus, it was indeed with great pleasure that my wife and I spent an entire evening of 6 hours in a small party given by three former students and their wives on 3/16/2025 . What is remarkable about the occasion were how much in common we have in a period of nearly four decades knowing and working with each other. Our common grounds are:

·         We all speak the English and Chinese language with ease

·         We all received our graduate education (Ph.D) from the same department at Harvard in the same subject

·         We interacted at least twice weekly in one-to-one basis as advisor-student on research subjects for a period of 3-4 years

·         We are all well established in the US. I am 91 and they are in their 50s-70s

In the 6 hours long dinner party and afterwards, we were able to really converse in DEPTH on a variety of subjects, such as, technology, US-China relationships, life experiences in the US, overcoming obstacles and gaining successes, et al not possible without such extensive common grounds. I learned for example what is SONIC MARKETING, BEING MANAGER OF A BANK WITHIN A BANK, BACK STORIES ABOUT AI DEVELOPEMNT et al. that I did not know before even though I watch a lot of news and talk shows and consider myself well informed. You can say that even living in the cocoon of a retirement care community , I caught up in some sense with the younger generation in these 6 hours – a precious and pleasurable gift.

nges