To Satisfy Your Curiosity

26th September 2017
Qingjin Xu
Linyan and Lele play Kung Fu in front of Bruce Lee statue

Linyan and Lele play Kung Fu in front of Bruce Lee statue.

My daughter Lele is very happy today, since it is her seven-year-old birthday! She jumped to my bed in the morning, and yelled to me: here it comes! The great day!

Lele planed to organize a birthday party for herself, and had started to send invitation letters to her friends from a week before. 

It would be her 1st birthday party. Yes it is! In the past six years, we missed chances to have even one formal party for her. I feel sorry about that. Lele was born in Japan, when I was working at KEK (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Tsukuba, Japan) on the superconducting magnet R&D for HL-LHC project, and my wife Linyan was moving back to China from Japan at that time. Linyan got PhD degree at NIBB (National Institute for Basic Biology, Okazaki, Japan) in 2007. After 3 years work at NIBB as a postdoctoral researcher, she decided to move back to a university in China where she got her bachelor and master degrees. The university provided her a very good position and platform to conduct her research. Lele moved back together with Linyan when she was 5 months old. However, I continued my work alone at KEK and CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland) for the next 3 years, to complete the ongoing tasks.  After that, I followed them and moved back to China in spring 2014. 

Dr. Qingjin Xu

The good news from then on: my family were in the same country finally, and the bad news: we were still in different cities in China, and the distance between the two cities is similar with the distance between China and Japan. Most of Lele’s childhood was spent with mother or father only, not both of us, and both of us were quite busy with own careers. So, Lele has never had a formal birthday party before.

Like most of the People in the world, Lele is very curious about the things not yet experienced or understood. It explains why she is so excited about her 1st birthday party. And so do we! We sacrificed Lele’s childhood to conduct our own research work, just because of the same reason: to experience something new or make something understood. 

Fortunately, Linyan is moving again now to the city where we are living. We expect that Lele will have an exciting birthday party today, and everyone’s curiosity can be satisfied in future without any sacrifices.