New to the Parish: ‘He was really shy. I thought that was really endearing’

Susanna Wickes and Tom Wang: arrived from China, July 2015

Susanna Wickes could feel her heart pounding as she collected her belongings and made her way to the checkout to pay for coffee. As she handed over the money, she slipped a piece of paper into the palm of Tom Wang’s hand. On it she had written her QQ number: the equivalent in China of a WhatsApp number.

She could see Wang’s friend Chen staring open-mouthed as Wang unfolded the slip of paper. Petrified about how he would respond, she turned and ran out the door. A few hours later a message appeared on her phone asking her on a date.

Wickes had been searching for excuses to visit Joker Coffee shop in Baotou, a city in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in northern China, ever since she first spotted Wang serving coffee to customers three weeks previously.

The English-language teacher from Edinburgh had moved to China a few months before and only spoke basic Mandarin.

“He was really shy and awkward, and I thought that was really endearing,” says Wickes. “I said to my friend Carly, ‘I think I want to marry that guy’. I was kind of joking but also not joking.”

On her first visit to the coffee shop, Wang had given Wickes a bowl of strawberries with her coffee. The next time she stopped by the shop he had given her more strawberries (his uncle ran a strawberry farm), and on the third occasion he had given her the slice of cake he had bought for his breakfast the following morning.

“I often do really stupid, impulsive things,” says Wickes. “But I thought, How many more times am I going to have to come back before he gives me his number? Let’s just get it over with.” Within a week the couple had been on a date and Wickes had already met Wang’s grandmother. Nine months later they were engaged.

The couple communicated through English, but Wickes was determined to learn her future husband’s native language. Before going to China she had spent two years learning Hindi in New Delhi and was not fazed by the prospect of learning another language.

“I didn’t speak any Chinese at that point, just whatever I’d picked up in my first six months there. But once we got together and realised we were kind of serious, I started to study really hard and taught myself the characters. I’d never bothered learning the reading and writing before.”

Diamond ring and 99 roses

Even though the couple had already arranged to get married, Wang wanted to orchestrate the full “romantic proposal”, which involved turning up at Wickes’s apartment one morning with 99 roses and a diamond ring.

In line with Chinese custom, they signed their marriage certificate a few months before the wedding, travelling to Beijing to organise the paperwork needed for a foreigner to marry a Chinese national.

“On November 30th, 2013, we went to the civil affairs bureau and got our marriage certificates. They’re really cute: little red books. We got one each.”

Wickes introduced her parents to Wang through web chat before they got engaged, but they didn’t meet their son-in-law in person until after the wedding. Wickes’s family didn’t travel to Baotou for their daughter’s traditional Chinese wedding in July 2014 but were able to celebrate the union on a canal boat when the newlyweds visited Scotland later that summer.

Back in China, Wang’s family welcomed his Scottish wife with open arms. “I think that’s the main thing his family liked. He had married a foreigner so he was going to go live in a foreign country and then the whole family could come and visit.”

The thought of taking a break from life in Baotou had begun creeping through Wickes’s mind. She was tired of teaching English at the university and was eager to find a new challenge. “It would be very easy to stay there, have an easy life and keep making money, but I think I would regret that later on. I wanted to push myself a bit further.”

She began researching master’s degrees in applied linguistics and finally settled on Trinity College Dublin. Wang, who had left China for the first time on the couple’s trip to Edinburgh in 2014, was eager to travel and see the world. “I wanted to try living in a different place,” he says. “If I didn’t, I was worried I might end up staying in Inner Mongolia forever.”

In July 2015 they packed up their belongings and travelled halfway across the world to begin a new life in Dublin.

Wickes, who had never been to Ireland, said her first impression of the country was that it was just like Scotland. Wang says Irish people remind him of friends and family in Inner Mongolia.

‘They love partying’

“We drew quite a few similarities between the Inner Mongolian people and the Celts,” says Wickes. “They love drinking, they love partying, they love eating loads of carbs and meat.”

“Even the scenery is similar,” says Wang. “In Inner Mongolia the famous scene is the green grassland with sheep. Just like here: green grass with sheep.”

The couple realise how lucky they are to have an apartment in Trinity Hall student accommodation in Rathmines. “I was worried,” says Wickes. “I’d heard about how difficult it is to find a rented place here and I thought, I’m a student, he doesn’t have a work permit yet, he’s not European, the landlords are probably not going to look favourably upon us.”

Wang has applied for his resident’s card and hopes to work as a chef when the permit arrives. He misses China “a wee bit” but is excited about living in a “small city” beside the sea.

“I feel I’ve settled into Dublin really quickly and we really like it,” says Wickes. “It all depends on if Tom gets a job he enjoys and, when I graduate, if I can get work, but I think it’s possible we’ll stay.”

• We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past five years. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com