Our Story
When: We met at the famous Hungarian cafe in Morningside Heights, Manhattan in the winter of 2017. Dipendra started our endless discussions with big questions such as “Why do some low-income countries get into a middle-income trap once they start developing?” And then Nga cautiously responded “I think your assumption needs to be qualified. At least in sociology or social sciences we know ...” These discussions have not yet stopped.
What? When two big nerds got together, both tried to impress each other with how much we knew off the top of our heads. We constantly tried to show off our knowledge of the world. Nga proudly claimed that she could speak four languages: Vietnamese, English, German, and Chinese. Dipendra responded: “I am fluent in more than 12 languages such as Python, CSS, Java, Haskell.”
Nga liked to use phrases such as “problematic", “valorize”, and “I disagree” a lot. Therefore, throughout the years that they have been dating, Dipendra often exclaimed that Nga has made his difficult times easier, and the easier times more difficult. The last part of the last sentence was tactically edited out of Dipendra's PhD thesis.
Once a sociologist started dating a natural language processing researcher, she started to ask questions like “Under what conditions does deep learning provide a causal explanation?” Then after a while, the computer scientist started abusing the word “intersectionality”.
How did we fall in love? It has been a gradual process that each recognized that they made each other’s life so much richer, happier, full and meaningful. Dipendra made Nga feel appreciated. And Nga challenges Dipendra on a minute basis.
Why do we want to marry each other? Bigger tax return! 😏 Absolutely. But more than that, we recognize how much we cannot live without each other.
