Tao Wang
Who expected that we started off as language partners just to become byelingual friends
We first talked on italki when it was still a community-based language learning website. He was learning basic Vietnamese and I was reviewing some spoken Chinese for the upcoming trip. (Things turned out we mostly used the lingua franca, English, later.) The topic, after self-introduction, was history and religion lol. And that is now still our main topic, plus politics. I usually don't talk about politics with someone who shares a different viewpoint; and this man, luckily, has almost 100% match with me in terms of politics xD
Talking a little bit about this friend, I'd usually regard him as a 'hubot' as he'd probably has reached beyond a 'human-being', and another fact that he happens to reply instantly whenever I need his help. I don't know a single detail about him, like where he is from, or even how he looks, except his name romanized in English. He sometimes called me his mental sister for our common ideas but I'd prefer calling him uncle because that's hard to believe he's just around 10 years older while the older sister who is 9 years older than me always acts like a kid.
Despite being friends for quite a few years, we don't usually talk. There'd be exactly three reasons for our conversations: firstly, lunar new year; secondly, an emerging topic and a long discussion that follows; and thirdly, me exposing a problem. We talk so infrequently that he once told me: “I remembered you spoke Northern (Mandarin) accent last time”. Yeah, that 'last time' was probably before I went to Taiwan and got influenced by the accent there.
Even though we don't talk much, each of the chats was so meaningful to me. That's hard to find someone with such a similar opinion on basically almost every topic, a person who I feel safe with and can trust to speak out. Tao often told me I was very couraging when he was learning Vietnamese. Not sure what I helped him actually, but I owed him lots of lessons about life and even something bigger, the operation of this world.
-Phuong 🐯