Yong Zhao eats Aamti Bhaat!

It is a common trend of the Chinese people living in United States to acquire more user friendly american names. For instance, Ching Wantung will be called as Peter Or Wenyan Shi will be called as Martha. Bernard was one such guy whose real name was Yong Zhao (now don't ask me how to pronounce that!).  He travelled to Vancouver in Canada and then to Denver as a consultant for my company. Yong Zhao was a very simple and helpful person. He used to stay a little farther than us from the office. Neverthless, he would walk down to the bus stop a few hundred meters away in the dreading cold when the temperature was below -10 degrees celcius! Perhaps, it was still warmer than Canada :-)

We used to pity him and give a lift many a times to drop him home. He never expected us to do that however and carried on all alone. Though a professional consultant in US, Bernard would be eager to help us even during non-working hours or weekends. On one such weekend in the November of 2006, we were trying to fix something on a sloppy project. My room-mate Naveen required his help and asked me if we can get him at our place that evening. It was snowing heavily and Bernard agreed to come by. He arrived and worked for couple of hours to fix the problems we had.

It was almost 8 in the evening and I was preparing rice and indian curry for our dinner. We hardly could sneak out of the house for the super store due to the snow. We first prepared Knorr's Sweet Corn soup and served it to Bernard wondering if he would like the indian taste of the soup. And to our surprise, he liked it a lot. It was late, so we requested him to stay for dinner as well. He was ok to have the curry-rice without any meat in it :-)

We all sat together on the floor for dinner as usual and Bernard had a nice dinner of amti-bhaat with us. He enjoyed it too on a cold night! It was really satisfying for us to see him eating our food. It is very difficult to forget this incident! Where will Bernard be today? In US, Canada or back to China? Will he remember eating the indian curry rice with his indian colleagues?...