Pictures: Amalia Osborne
When Jenny Suo and her partner Michael attend the Childish Gambino concert in January next year, it’ll be a romantic trip down memory lane. The couple met at the rapper’s New Zealand gig six years ago.
The star TVNZ reporter spotted 1.96m-tall Michael above the crowd and the pair gravitated to one another for a chat. However, then there was a moment of self-doubt when Jenny realised she liked him.
Jenny, 34, recalls, “We were in this music festival with our friends, it was summer, and we were in our twenties. I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if he’s quite cool?’ Because I’m really not that cool. Turns out we’re actually both nerds!”
With a mutual love of tramping and birdwatching, the couple have since bonded over many trips to the South Island, staying in basic huts and surviving the freezing temperatures with only a few creature comforts.
“We’ve learnt that taking a little bit of whiskey is a good idea,” laughs Michael, 33. “But taking it in the original bottle is not!”
Jenny recalls a particularly memorable tramping trip when Michael, determined to impress his new girlfriend, spent more than two hours stirring a home-made, three-cheese risotto on the hut stove.
“It took so long!” she laughs. “Everyone else had eaten their dehydrated packet food and gone to bed, and Michael was still there, stirring this rice! We had dinner at 10pm, but it was so delicious. It was exactly what we needed after a big walk.”
There have been many romantic gestures since, despite the fact that Jenny was convinced Michael wasn’t interested in the early days due to his lack of texting. At the time, he was working as a doctor at Whangārei Hospital and she was a 1News reporter.
“We definitely liked each other,” insists Michael, who was impressed by Jenny’s intelligence and drive. The helicopter pics she’d send him from work trips covering kauri dieback and many other environmental issues helped too. “It was just the long-distance thing.
“But over time, it was too good to break off. We realised we had a lot in common, including the nerdy stuff. Despite the distance, we ended up making it work.”
Their busy jobs meant they didn’t get to see each other much, but a couple of times a month, Jenny would finish her late-news shift, then fuel herself with coffee and make the 2.5-hour drive north to spend the weekend with Michael. Fortunately, things got much easier in 2021, when he finally made the move to Auckland.
Chatting away at our photoshoot, the couple are clearly completely at ease in their relationship and enjoy winding each other up. Jenny ribs Michael for his “messy” tendencies in the kitchen, while he gives his partner grief when she confesses she can’t remember the year they moved in together. But when they speak seriously about one another, it’s clear they are on the same page.
“Michael is one of the kindest and most considerate people I know,” says Jenny.
Adds Michael, “And Jenny is very smart, driven and loyal. Although there’s a slight chip on my shoulder that Jenny is very witty and quick. I always thought I’d be the funny one!”
Michael also made a positive impression on Jenny’s family by learning Mandarin phrases so he could converse with her grandparents at their regular family dinners.
“Yeah, how’s that going, Michael?” Jenny laughs, poking fun at his sporadic stints on the language-learning app Duolingo.
“It’s so hard, but continuing with Mandarin is definitely something I aspire to do,” he says. “Because when it comes to the point of us having a family, we’d like to have bilingual kids.”
That’s not on the cards just yet, the couple insist – in the meantime, there are more adventures to be had. The day after our shoot, the pair are off to Japan on holiday, adding to their already long list of trips that they’ve taken abroad.
They’re also navigating a busy period in each of their careers. Jenny’s covering Hayley Holt’s maternity leave reading sport and filling in on TVNZ 1’s Breakfast. Her current schedule means rising as early as 3am. But if there’s anyone who understands the gruelling nature of shift work, it’s Michael. He has done his share of overnighters during his time in the hospital.
Michael is now taking a six-month hiatus from work before he starts surgical training. Although his first year will be spent at Middlemore in South Auckland, there’s a possibility of being transferred elsewhere in New Zealand. That could mean some tough decisions are on the horizon.
“We’re both very committed to each other and to making it work,” says Jenny, who acknowledges the media industry is somewhat more volatile than medicine in terms of job stability.
“I really appreciate that about him. We make decisions together and he has always recognised that my career is really important to me.”
She adds that the fact they’ve successfully done long-distance before means she’s confident they could do it again if his secondment ends up being much further afield.
“I’ve always been a planner and have always been really organised,” she says. “But the past couple of years, I’ve had to really take a step back from that and just be OK with not knowing what will happen. I think Michael has been the reason why I’ve been able to do that. Despite the instability of the future, I feel the most stable in my life with him.
“It’s so hard to know what’s going to happen around the corner at this point for us. So many things are in the air. But one thing that I do know is that we’ll do it together and that is so comforting.”
Nodding, Michael agrees, “Jenny has shown her support over a period of uncertainty of work, and figuring out where we are going both as individuals and together. That’s what has strengthened our relationship more than anything – Jenny consistently being there and being a sounding board for all the change that is happening.
“Jenny is very passionate and also very good at what she does. We acknowledge both of us will have to make compromises and sacrifices at various points along the way. But we’re both keen to enable each other to keep doing what we’re passionate about the best we can and we’ll figure out how as they come.”
For now, the couple is house-hunting and looking to the future, wherever it takes them.
Jenny beams, “Michael’s heard me say this many times, but if I could, I would happily get married this afternoon! However, it’s the getting-married process that I find a little bit overwhelming… But it’s certainly something we want together.”
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