A letter to the editor and a message in a bottle led to 40 years together

Stephen MacLennan isn’t quite sure why he decided to write a letter to the editor of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune in 1983, declaring his love for his girlfriend, Mai, and his intention to propose to her.

It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, he said, recalling the newspaper’s prompt for residents to write about what America meant to them for a special Fourth of July page. Stephen couldn’t resist writing about how grateful he was for the U.S. policy of accepting refugees, which is how Mai and her family came to this country from Vietnam.

“On this Fourth of July, perhaps the year’s most representative day of her future, I wish for her all the happiness in the world,” he wrote. “In fact, I would like to make this day even more representative of her future happiness, and mine as well. Today I shall ask my friend to be my best friend for life, to take my hand, and be my wife.”

The newspaper printed his letter that July 4, spurring him to action and leading to more than 40 years of marriage before Mai MacLennan succumbed to cancer on Christmas Eve.

Faced with his first Valentine’s Day without Mai, Stephen reminisced about their adventures together and shared his tale of a lifetime with his great love.

“She just exuded peace,” he said.

Born Mai Phuong Ta in Saigon in 1959, she and her family lived through the Vietnam War where her father, a pharmacist, provided medicine for the South Vietnamese Army.

He was sent to a re-education camp after the war, and the family escaped Vietnam in 1979 by pretending to be Chinese, leaving in a boat with other refugees and eventually finding their way to an oil derrick in the Pacific Ocean where they were taken in.

After a year at a refugee camp in Malaysia, Mai’s family settled in Minnesota. Mai, her brother and her father studied at the University of Minnesota.

She was fiercely focused, logical and rational, good qualities for her career as an electrical engineer. Stephen MacLennan was more given to romanticism.

Mai apparently didn’t think much of Stephen the first time she saw him. He was smitten at a glance.

“She said, ‘Well, after we talked and I found out that you were an electrical engineering major too, my thought was I could take this guy,’” Stephen said. “This guy’s going down.”

He had rushed to class, where he sat in the front row just as it started. He didn’t notice the woman sitting next to him until he turned, finding “a vision,” as he described her.

Stephen said he wracked his brain for a sure-fire line that would garner her attention: “So, did you start the homework?”

“She looked me up, she looked me down, and kind of with a little bit of a sneer, said, ‘Well, I had a little bit of trouble with section eight, problem 42b,’” Stephen said.

They started dating soon after. After more than a year and a few discussions about marriage, Stephen got the idea to write the fated letter to the editor.

He found it that Fourth of July, under the headline “A foreign friend for life.” Stephen knew Mai’s family didn’t get the paper, but he realized his family and friends would soon see his declaration.

“I didn’t even really plan any proposal, other than I bought a ring,” he said.

He came up with a literary-inspired method by writing out a quick note on paper, burning the edges and stuffing it inside a bottle. Stephen hid the bottle in the bushes on the south end of Lake Como, where he took Mai that afternoon.

Stephen got her to pick up the bottle by suggesting they help collect trash in the area, though Mai didn’t initially check inside. They walked along the trail, Stephen awkwardly wondering when she would look inside while Mai wondered where she could find a garbage can.

He tried to be slick, telling her sometimes people stranded on desert islands write rescue notes and put them in bottles.

“Mai was ever practical,” Stephen said. “She scans Lake Como and says, ‘There are no islands here.’”

She finally fished the note out of the neck of the bottle after some prompting; then she said yes.

With some “hugs and kisses and happiness,” they told Mai’s parents first, then went to his parents' house, where Stephen took a call from a Star and Tribune reporter wondering how the proposal went.

The paper published an article on Stephen and Mai the next day.

“It was a very nice way to propose, and I’m happy,” Mai said at the time. “And I knew that he would do it in a different way.”

They married in 1984, but within a year Mai was diagnosed with leukemia. She nearly died but managed to beat her cancer into remission.

It took a toll on her body. And the side effects from her cancer treatment meant the MacLennans could never have children.

They resolved to be homebodies who lived for each other.

“We decided not to be corporate climbers,” he said.

The pair worked as electrical engineers for more than 30 years; Stephen taught high school math for the last five years of his career to give something back. Mai became a successful semiconductor chip engineer; her work helped lead to many of the electronic devices we use today, according to her family.

Though they liked to stay home — Stephen enjoys reading and tennis, Mai loved playing piano and cooking — they visited more than 20 countries. They wanted to experience new things, never knowing when their time together would end.

“It really should have ended back in 1985,” Stephen said. “But you get a string of miracles that keep happening. … You start to expect them.”

On a trip to Virginia in 2022, Mai suddenly fell ill. Back in Minnesota, doctors found cancer in her kidney. Though she fought once again, always seeking aggressive treatments to give her the best chance at life, the cancer spread throughout her body in 2024.

The MacLennans moved to Rochester to be closer to Mayo Clinic, where she received treatment for the last year of her life. They held onto hope until that December. Doctors sent her home to live in hospice care.

Mai spent five days at home before she passed, but Stephen got COVID and had to stay away. On her last day, they were together. She told him she loved him and thanked him for taking care of her.

Stephen has had a difficult time since Mai’s passing. She’ll be buried in the MacLennan family plot in Minneapolis later this year, but Stephen will stay in Rochester, near a support network of new friends. Plus, he feels Mai’s presence most strongly in the home where he felt she had one of her best years.

But he’s still discovering new things about the woman he loved.

On Wednesday, during an interview, Stephen rummaged through a box of letters he knew Mai kept at her bedside to show pieces of writing he had given her. He pulled out a card here, a poem there, a postcard he’d sent her from a work trip years ago.

Hidden underneath the letters she’d saved was a surprise: the proposal note he’d stashed in a bottle on July 4th all those years ago: “My dearest Mai, will you marry me?”

“I didn’t know she’d kept it,” he said, choking back tears with his hand to his face.

Later, he came to a realization.

“I guess she was sentimental after all.”