Wedding Announcement: Christine Chang and Josh Mateo

choi

Tammy La Gorce, It Was As Though 'We Were in Love in Another Life.' New York Times, Mar 17, 2019 (in the Vows column, of wedding announcements).
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/ ... n-another-life.html

Quote:

(a) "Children of diplomats are usually accustomed to pulling up roots, so jumping rather than easing into a relationship can seem practical.

"This may help explain why Christine Chang packed her bags to go away for a weekend with Josh Mateo before they had gone on a single date.

" 'I was so into Josh that even though he could have been a serial killer, I didn't care,' said Ms Chang, the daughter of Wei-ta Chang 張維達, a deputy director-general of Taiwan's Foreign Ministry 外交部領事事務局主任 [December 2018- ]and the former consul general to Hamburg, Germany [駐漢堡辦事處（full name: 駐德國臺北代表處漢堡辦事處); 2011-?], and Munich. 'I knew we were going to have a great time.'

"She was reasonably sure his record was homicide-free, too, based on his behavior around colleagues and his appreciation for baked goods.

"Ms Chang and Mr Mateo met as office mates at the Barbarian Group in Manhattan two months before their get-to-know-you getaway, in the summer of 2012. Ms Chang, 28 [she was ~21 that year], had recently graduated from Cornell and was working as an intern at the marketing agency. Mr Mateo, 30, was a year into his first job as a designer after graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2011.

(b) "on a Friday afternoon in August, [2012] Mr Mateo asked Ms Chang to spend the weekend with him in Avalon, NJ, at his parents' beach house. To avoid seeming creepy, he said she should ask a mutual friend, a fellow intern, to come along. She did. But the friend declined, citing concerns about feeling like a third wheel because the pair had obvious chemistry.  

"So Ms Chang made the decision to go alone, which, according to her older brother, Jochen Chang, was not out of character.

" 'We became really accustomed to knowing how to be versatile in our childhood,' said Mr Chang, a Chicago financial adviser. 'Christine was born in 1990 in Germany a few months after the Berlin Wall fell * * *

(c) "This mind-set followed her to the cities in which she and her brother grew up, like Taipei, Taiwan; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Washington.

"The family, including Ms Chang's mother, Wei-Chia Hsueh, moved every three years, following Wei-ta Chang's diplomatic work. (Such intervals are typical for diplomats, though the spectrum of countries the Changs might have lived in was not. Because Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy that Beijing considers Chinese territory and because of Beijing's 'one-China' policy, Taiwan has only a few full diplomatic missions abroad.)

My comment"
(a) There is no need to read the rest. This article is interesting to me, not because the love story (which is ordinary) but because it broaches Taiwan's limited diplomacy space (from perspective of children of its diplomat).
(b) Avalon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon
(a legendary island featured in the Arthurian legend; It is traditionally identified as the former island of Glastonbury Tor [which, in England, in fact has never been an island])
(c) What Is the Origin of the Idiom 'Third Wheel'?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-idiom-third-wheel
(Tracy Chou answered on July 7, 2010)
(d)
(i) Joachim (given name)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_(given_name)
(section 2 Other  language forms: Jochen is a form used in Dutch and German)
is pronounced (www.merriam-webster.com): ˈj [like g in orange] ōə kim.
(ii)
(A) In California there is a San Joaquin River
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Joaquin_River
(Spanish pronunciation for the river)

I know some Spanish. I can not explain why in Spanish "joa" is pronounced that way (whether the river pronunciation was Americanized, not purely Spanish -- I do not know). But I know in Spanish qu before i or e is pronounced like k, as in Raquel Welch (born in Chicago as Jo Raquel Tejada, with married name Welch).
(B) Joaquín
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquín
(is the Spanish language version of Joachim)