This is the 3rd in a 5 part series of posts based on an interview with Patti Digh. Read other posts from the interview»

I lived with a Sinhalese family and most of the people in the small village that I lived in didn’t speak English, so I got pretty proficient in speaking Sinhalese. So I think I could probably pick that back up and teach you Sinhalese or Mandarin Chinese, you could take your pick of those two.

I took Chinese at Johns Hopkins when I was in DC. Mandarin Chinese. I knew enough Chinese to be the person chosen when a delegation of college presidents from China came to the United States. And I flew around the country with them. They visited colleges and universities, a different one every day for a month. And I was their tour guide because of my little bit of Chinese.

There was this one fellow—we grew into this extraordinary friendship without language because I didn’t speak enough Chinese to have an in depth conversation with him and he spoke no English. When I look at a photograph from that trip all those years ago, those 30 days, he and I are always together.

He’s a very famous artist in China. My birthday was during this trip and he found that out and literally stayed up all night carving a very special signature stamp for me.

This was decades ago. I lost touch with him. Within in the last couple of months, though, I reconnected with him. I was doing some work at Boeing and there was a guy in the class from China. At a break, I said “You know what, I have thought about this man for decades and I would love to reconnect with him.” By the end of the day, he had emailed me a picture, and he said, “Is this the man?” And it was just this incredible feeling: It was him. An older version of him, but it was him.

He sent me a book of his paintings and I sent him my book. And we’re still in the needing a translator stage, but I’m looking to pick up my Chinese again and be able to speak with him in his language and not expect that he will be able to speak to me in mine.

So, here we are, 30 years later and exchanging our books.

What I find most interesting in all this is that so often we expect friendship relies on language or a shared history and it doesn’t.

Patti Digh blogs at 37 Days. She is the author of Life is a Verb. Follow her on Twitter.

Published Wednesday, July, 1, 2009