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One day four years ago, Bill Nelson logged on to ChineseLoveLinks.com for the first time.
Within seconds, a gaggle of boxes popped up on his computer screen, all of them with faces of women from China — all of them wanting to talk to him.
One woman waved. That's all she did.
Another got right to the point. She wanted to marry, move to the United States, start an export business.
Another had a sister who had married an American and moved here. She wanted that, too.
They were pushy, intense, sad.
"Like a salmon run," Bill, now 53, would say later.
Then among the boxes he found a woman with a confidently direct gaze and a quirky sense of humor. Her name was Mei Hong. She was from Inner Mongolia and lived in southern China. She worked as an export supervisor at a French sporting goods company. Her English was pretty good.
"You here to meet someone seriously," she asked, "or you playing around?"
• • •
Bill, a divorced salesman of online learning systems, had tried online dating in America.
His last date had been a disaster. A woman whipped out a notebook at dinner and marked him as her 67th date. "Okay, tell me your name again?" she said.
He was done.
A few days later on the phone, he told his brother, who had a teaching job in China, about his dating escapades.
"You need to meet a woman from China," his brother said, explaining that many of them liked Western men and had strong family values.
• • •
Bill and Mei started talking once a week, then twice a week, then every day, then twice a day . . . and then one day they got up to 39 e-mails.
About six months into it, Bill got a webcam and Mei at last got to see him, as she says, "in real."
He mailed her gifts. A black sweater, white boots, dolphin earrings, Maybelline mascara. He sent her Motrin for her cramps.
In November 2009, he went to visit her for the first time in Shanghai.
He was anxious. It was hard to trust someone who lived 17 hours away by plane.
What if he didn't like what he saw? What if she didn't like what she saw? What if she wasn't who she said she was? He was in love with someone he'd never met in person. Was that possible?
They sat down at Starbucks in the airport. There were no surprises, and it felt comfortable.
Back home in St. Petersburg, he looked into what it would take to get her here. "That's when I knew I was in trouble," he said.
• • •
He proposed by FedEx. The ring, delicate and simple, arrived on Valentine's Day 2010 at her workplace with a note. Her co-workers squealed as she read it.
Will You Marry Me?
Now that he loved her, he didn't want to live without her.
But he discovered that the United States grants only 50 percent of all fiance visas from China. If Mei wanted to secure one, they would have to prove they weren't marrying just to get her to the country.
Bill had told Mei he would move to China if her visa wasn't approved. But just to make sure they did everything right, he hired a company to help him put together the application.
The 2-inch-thick stack included his tax returns and plane tickets, her birth certificate and medical reports, and their photos, e-mails and logs from Skype and Instant Messenger.
In May, the U.S. Embassy in China called Mei, now 33, for an interview.
The officials asked if she was a member of the Communist Party.
She shook her head.
They asked what she had in common with Bill.
She said they both like to travel, watch movies, cook and read books.
They asked her about the first time she met Bill.
She showed a photo of them in an observation tower overlooking Shanghai. That was the day she tripped and went down on her knees and he grabbed her, and she looked up into his eyes and saw concern, and that's when she knew he really cared.
The official smiled and handed her a pink slip of paper: They'd been approved.
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