Mr. Liu is a hothead, with the quickest temper I've seen in China. We once sat down in a restaurant, which a barker had coaxed us into. We were led upstairs, where a middle-aged waitress was taking our order. She talked a lot (I don't know what she was saying), but within a few minutes, Mr. Liu stood bold upright and said to me, "We're leaving here." He stormed out, and outside I kept asking him what she said. "She wasn't being nice to us," was all I could get out of him. He refused to talk more about it.
He also got quite pissed off at me once because he thought I'd overpaid a vendor for a trinket (I paid a few bucks for something). He was beside himself. His face was red, and he almost couldn't speak. "From now on, don't buy ANYTHING without me!" Then he punched me in the arm, half playfully, half seething. A day later, taking his advice, I was trying to buy something the equivalent of 40 cents and asked for his help. The vendor refused to drop the price. Mr. Liu spun on his heels and said, "Let's go." As we raced away, he said in a most un-Chinese way, "Fuck that!" (Perhaps he's a Quentin Tarantino fan.)
I also got his dander up a few times by discussing the Chinese and Japanese military. Normally if a Chinese person doesn't like what I'm saying, they will demur in some way and the subject is dropped. Not Mr. Liu.
He's also awesomely loyal, thoughtful and, at times, funny. Yesterday I told him I wanted to get him a gift for all his help, and I asked him if he'd seen anything in the shopping street near our hotel in Suzhou. So we went to Starbucks and I bought him a man-sized sipping cup! Yes, Starbucks holds a lot of cachet for him, even though he doesn't drink much coffee because it bothers his stomach. But there's no Starbucks in Anhui Province, home of USTC, so he'll be big man on campus carrying that cup around.
Well, you've heard about the man, now you can have a look: