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John still remembers the first moment he saw Yanying, 11 years ago now.

To fill the gap left by his late wife of 57 years, the widower enrolled in a language school.

Yanying, 26 at the time, was his Mandarin teacher.

"When she walked out, I got such a surprise because I expected some middle-aged or older person, and here's this beautiful young girl," John Levin, a doctor specialising in anti-ageing medicine, told Mamamia .

The then-83-year-old student came as an equal shock to Yanying.

"I wasn't expecting a doctor in his senior years wanting to take on Chinese," said Dr Yanying Lu, a

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