In summer 2006, I went on a two-week trip to Taiwan and China with a group of engineering students. It was a perspective-expanding experience for me, not only because I saw another country but because I had the opportunity to connect with people whose interests were so different from mine. One of those people was Adam Loero, who, sadly, passed away this week. When I heard the news, I thought of the nicest day I had in China–when I toured Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai with Adam and another student on the trip, Tony. I wrote about that day and about Adam in an essay called “The Most Important Thing in the World”:
Eventually, I joined up with Tony and Adam, two mechanical engineering students who were as besot with Yuyuan as I was. I was grateful to have someone to exclaim to over the throngs of fat koi, orange and black and white and yellow, the meandering paths on artificial miniature mountains made of imported lake rock, the poet’s desk in a pagoda open on all sides to the garden, the languorous wisteria vines, the three large stones that appeared to me like three old men fishing at the edge of the green water. We walked on rocks worn smooth and shiny by five hundred years of visitors’ footsteps and drank Chinese beer in a cool, dark pagoda. The day before, we had found an English-language bookstore, and Adam had bought a Chinese phrasebook. (I had lost mine on the plane to Shanghai, and was disillusioned with it, anyway, since my earnest–and somewhat desperate–attempts to ask in Mandarin where I could find a bathroom had been met with silent disdain.) As we rode back to our hotel in one of the ubiquitous Shanghai taxis (light green this time), Adam made what conversation he could with the driver, consulting his book to ask the driver’s name, to tell the driver–probably unnecessarily–that we were Americans, to comment on the weather, and he was elated to at last talk to someone in China in their own language–to say more than ni hao and xie xie.
That’s what I remember about Adam, a young man I knew very briefly–that he was so excited to talk to someone, to connect with him. Adam’s death has saddened me and reminded me how important it is to see and treat other people as people, and how valuable someone who does that is.
