Dear Dongshan and Baoyin,

Sorry for being such a tardy correspondent but work is just like crazy with endless odds and ends but shrinking days and hours due to our aging status. But we do need support from old friends and connections. This meeting of ours in January was so wonderful and we were so delighted by the reunion after many years! Thanks for the photos and for (re-)introducing us to your successful young man and his lovely daughter. Please be sure to let us know when you come down to visit them again. We need to meet and chat more often. Lao Zou (Jintai) called the other day mentioning his telephone connection with you, too. Maybe next time you come we can include him and Song Fang for another happy reunion. We do not have too many years to do this anymore!

Thanks for sending my greetings to other old friends who know me, but you really do not have to hide my address. My school address is not to be put in a special security status but it’s only our email systems that often screen out emails from *their* unknown addresses such as the Chinese 123 or 126 or even sina etc. Those emails cannot get in but any yahoo, hotmail or gmail ones from China can still work. Thanks for your thoughtfulness anyway, and the fact that I do not read and write mails often is also true, for which I am deeply apologetic.

Now the Chinese New Year is at the corner, let me also wish all of you and all of our old friends on your end of extension a happy new year!

-- Zhijie and Lao Hu

**Editor's note: Wang Zhijie, graduated from FLD, Nankai University, in 1964, is tenured associate professor at the United States Navy Academy at Annapolis, MD. Her English name is Jenny Wang and email: <najenny@usna.edu>. On January 9, 2013 she and Lao Hu, her husband, visited us in Ellicott City, Baltimore, and invited Baoyin, Donshan, George, and Grace to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. (Thank you, Zhijie and Lao Hu.) The picture below was taken that evening.

From left：Hu Zhonglin, Wang Zhijie, Zhu Baoyin, Gao Donshan,
and Grace , 01/09/2013.