ORLANDO, Fla. — The COVID pandemic has torn a lot of peoples' lives apart. But one Central Florida couple say the chaotic start of the pandemic helped shaped their future.

When Alice Liang’s mom took her on an Antarctic cruise, at no cost to her, Liang quickly connected with Brian Fay — who also got an all-expenses-paid invitation to the same cruise through a friend he met through his military service.

The trip would pay off for both of them when Liang was trying to find something hard to come by on the chartered Buddhist cruise. There was absolutely no meat on the menu.

“She says, ‘Can you smuggle me some meat?’ And that’s literally how we started talking,” Fay said. “That night, I brought her some Kung Pao chicken that was served down in the crew, and we talked and hung out every night after that.”

After the cruise ended, Liang went back to China. Fay went back to Central Florida. But they kept in touch, talking frequently on the phone despite the different in time zones.

“I told everyone about this girl I met on the ship, and everybody thought I was crazy,” Fay said.

Little did they know most of the crazy was yet to come.

When Fay went to China to visit Liang a few months later, the coronavirus pandemic was taking hold in the country.

“[After] two days in China, malls shut down, they canceled all lunar new year activities,” Fay said. “A town of 10 million people, and you see like 10 people walking down the street. Having a daughter, I knew I couldn’t get locked down in China.”

With the country going into lockdown, the couple was faced with a very difficult decision. Liang had to decide whether to leave her home country and leave everyone she knows behind for who knows how long, or stay and risk losing the chance of a future together with Fay.

“Personally I was just going to stay in China because my whole family’s there, and he’s just a boy I just met, you know,” Liang said. “But he was so convincing.”

They had to move quickly.

“I had to sit down with her dad and say that, ‘I know this is scary for everybody, but I want her to be with me,’ ” Fay said.

Getting out of China wasn’t easy. The couple couldn’t fly directly from China to the United States, so they had to find a series of flights — crisscrossing the world — finally landing in Canada before being able to come back to Orlando.

“I thought for sure a whole plane of people coming from China is going to get stopped, and they let us in,” Fay said.

And just in time.

“Literally the second we landed in Toronto, we heard the news America was going to lock down in two days,” Liang said.

“So we made the right decision,” Fay said.

A year later, the couple is now starting a production business in Central Florida. They got married last summer. And with the huge risks they took, comes a reward. The couple are expecting a baby boy in late summer 2021.

“Life is amazing,” Liang said.