My Personal Assistant

We arrived in Hangzhou for the ICCM 2007 a day earlier than most other people. There was a very nice young female graduate student who was responsible for helping us get settled. The first two days she helped me do so many things, everything from helping us with hotel rooms (our room was not ready on the first night, so we had two single rooms) to helping us find a place to eat dinner to helping me buy a SIM card for my mobile phone to helping me figure out whether I was invited to a banguet on the first night and whether I could bring my family with me. It got to the point that anytime I ran into any difficulty at all I would just start looking for her, because I knew she would help me.

So when I ran into Huaidong Cao and Richard Hamilton and discovered that Cao knew her, I told them that she was my "personal assistant". Their reaction was, "hey, I need help, too!" But what was even better was when Cao introduced her to Hamilton. She didn't understand at first but when Cao explained that this was *the* Hamilton, she turned bright red and practically kowtowed in front of him. It reminded me of how teenage girls used to react to a Beatle back in the 60's.