Chi Mokel and Tommaso Wagner met at the dawn of the pandemic five years ago, just as she was starting a new job at the foundation where he worked.
Sydney Chineze Mokel began working at the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston in April 2020. Since she couldn’t meet her co-workers in person because of the pandemic, she asked a dozen of them for virtual coffee dates.
Tommaso Elijah Wagner was the only one who booked a full hour.
“What are we going to talk about for that long?” she said she had wondered.
As it turned out, they found quite a bit to discuss, including the fact that both had studied Mandarin before college, and continued as undergraduates. At the foundation, she was working as a foundation relations coordinator; he was a program assistant.
The two, both 28, didn’t actually meet face to face until Halloween, when they were invited by a co-worker to attend the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where masks were mandatory and distancing was recommended.
Their collaboration on a staff initiative during Black History Month in February 2021 had them discussing Black joy and Afrofuturism and meeting in person at Kung Fu Tea, near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., to exchange books. (She lent him “I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey,” by Langston Hughes; he lent her “The Fifth Season” by N.K. Jemisin.)
At their third book swap, in April, they met at the Loring Greenough House in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. Mr. Wagner brought homemade iced tea, while Ms. Mokel brought cookies she had baked.
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