Love Punctures Bamboo Curtain After Spy Flap Flops

--After a 2 1/2-year separation and an international flap about spying, Lisa Wichser, 31, and Yi Xigong, 33, were reunited in San Francisco last week and were married two days later. The couple met while Wichser was teaching in China, and “I still don’t know why he was arrested,” Wichser said. “He didn’t do anything. But three years ago was a tense time between the U.S. and China. It was a matter of bad timing and bad luck. . . . But now relations are improved and we are both dedicated to them improving even more.” Their relationship began in September, 1980, and they applied for a marriage license 15 months later. In May, 1982, they were arrested. Wichser was expelled amid allegations that Yi, an economist, had given her classified information. She said the data was merely statistical, but Yi was imprisoned in a labor camp. They had not spoken with each other since then until last Christmas Eve, when Yi called to say he was being released. “We just sent each other mental messages,” she said. “We both knew we would be waiting for each other. He never doubted it, and I never doubted it.”

--Singer-songwriter Billy Joel and model Christie Brinkley were married aboard a yacht that took them on a wedding cruise along New York’s Hudson and East rivers. Among the 175 guests were Paul Simon and the Stray Cats band. Joel’s hits include “Uptown Girl,” which he wrote for Brinkley.

--Clinton Clifford Howard Jr. says he can no longer eat cookies, and he wants Sunbeam Cookies Inc. of Abilene, Tex., to compensate him. Howard, a prison inmate in New Orleans, contends that he bit into a rock in a box of Sunbeam’s cookies. He seeks $25,000 for tooth damage and asks the court to order Sunbeam to include a box of cookies as punitive damages “for mental anguish of fear of eating cookies.”

--The owners of a 98-year-old house in St. Paul, Minn., say there is a ghost roaming the halls of their house, where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived while writing “This Side of Paradise.” “I suppose some may think it’s the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” said Jeanne Larson, who bought the stone row house with Dewey Johnson about a year ago. “But I think it’s the butler. We just laugh it off.” The couple say they have heard footsteps in empty halls and creakings in the bathroom. Larson said she suspects the butler because most of the incidents have taken place on the second floor near the back of the house, where the servants lived. Fitzgerald, who lived in the house in 1919 and 1920, is believed to have spent most of his time writing in a third-floor study near the front.