When I arrived at Davis in the August of 1971, I did not expect to stay there for 13 years which is longer than anywhere I lived before coming to America. After I obtained my PhD degree in 1978, I was kept by my professor to stay to continue my research on nuclear fusion, more precisely laser fusion, which was envisaged for the future as abundant clean energy source. As the feasibility to achieve its goal was less obvious, the research money became less. In 1984, I found a job and moved away, and finally settled down at Piedmont in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I was accepted in Physics Department in UC Davis with financial aids. I finished my master degree in 1973 and had been looking for financial aids to continue my graduate study and was so lucky that I got it from a professor in the Department of Applied Science (DAS) after I took his plasma dynamics courses.
At that time, the science professors were more respected, unbridled enthusiasm for science and aspirations of their students regardless where they came from. DAS was located in a small space on the second floor of Walker Hall which was originally built in 1928 for the Design Department. For people below professor ranks could only had office in the trailers behind the building (see below pictures). We worked days and nights and I could always park my car at the back.
It turns out DAS was created in 1963 by Edward Teller who is known colloquially as “the father of the hydrogen bomb” to strengthen the links between the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC campuses. Nuclear fusion is a peaceful use of the explosion of hydrogen bomb.
Because of this, we received funding from the Department of Energy and were provided the use of the state of the arts supercomputers via the Livermore timesharing system. To avoid the peak time, I always stayed late at nights to run my programs. Sometimes I had to drive on a hilly countryside route to Livermore, which is about 80 miles away, to pick up my computer outputs. DAS provided a lot of computer learning at the time Computer Science was not quite popular yet.
In the spring of 1977, my wife and I went to Livermore to attend the dedication of the newly completed Hertz Hall, as it became known as “Teller Tech” and located just outside the fence of the Lab, by the post-vice president Nelson Rockefeller. Because of Livermore’s weapon research, there were many protestors outside. I did not visit the Livermore that much due to my foreign student status.
I later found out that the Atomic Energy Commission was worried about allowing DAS to use its facilities if foreign students would be enrolled. To meet this objection Teller agreed to limit the number of foreign students. DAS was discontinued in 2011. Now the Walker Hall at Davis is under new renovation (see above pictures) and will house a Graduate Center. Slowly, the name of DAS will be forgotten.
In our time, Asian countries were much poorer and most students could not afford to come here without some financial aids. Most tried to work outside in summers to make money to pay for the tuitions and shared rooms outside the campus and cooked themselves to save money.
The first year I lived with 2 Indian students and a local graduate student in an apartment in the west side of campus. The Indians cooked curry almost every meal and they were good. After a while I started cooking curry too and they did not complain.
In summer, the contract renting the apartment expired and I moved to some fraternity where students had left for summer in the north side of the campus. Someone got me in and I cannot remember I paid rents. I got a painting job on campus.
Unfortunately I suffered from having a kidney stone and received a surgical operation in the university clinic. The cut seemed big in today’s standard and my body could not stretch straight for months. It was strange that seeing me walking bended when school started.
In second year, I lived with 3 students from Hong Kong, including Martin Yan as my roommate, in a 2-bedroom apartment on F Street in the east side of the town. From Monday to Thursday, each person cooked a dinner for everybody (see left pictures). On Fridays and weekends, we were on our own or got invited to eat at someone’s house.
Once a while, we went to Sacramento to eat because it had better restaurants. Very few occasions, we organized a group to go to San Francisco to eat more authentic food at SF Chinatown. I still do not know how Martin felt about my cooking. During this time, Martin found a position teaching Chinese cooking classes in the University Extension so he could make some money.
After I secured my financial aids in DAS, I took an educational leave in the spring of 1974 to go back to Taiwan and Malaysia. I married my wife at the city court in Taipei. It was a simple wedding without any direct family member present. I needed to go back to Malaysia to see my family and inform them about the marriage.
I stayed more than a month there and made up my long time away from home in the US. My step mother gave me some jewelry to bring back to Taiwan for my wife and she really wanted to have our wedding ceremony to be held in Malaysia. However, this was not possible because my wife had to finish one-year teaching before she could apply for a passport and leave Taiwan. We have a big wedding ceremony at Gangshan, the hometown of my wife’s family (below pictures).
I went back to US before summer because I could work full time in summer and got paid more. My wife joined me in the October of 1974 after she obtained her passport.
In UC Davis, we were qualified to live in the Orchard Park, the married student dormitory which costed $130 a month. It was a very nice 2-bedroom apartment (see below pictures) and had some empty land outside the complex for students and spouses to do gardening. That sounds very cheap nowadays, however my monthly pay was $300 and we only had $170 to live on. My sister, Cheng-fun, also had came to the US and lived with us. She was going to Davis High School.
Before my wife came, I bought an old Ford Custom for $250 (see below picture) and she had to learn driving in stick shift. However, the gasoline price rose to more than 50 cents per gallon compared to 36 cents at the time I came. I rode bicycles most of the time because Davis is a bicycle city and is flat.
With that old Ford, Der-ying also went to teach Chinese cooking to some private groups recommended by Martin Yan. I remembered the first group was the gathering of the wives of the medical doctors in the nearby town Woodland. The first day we were an hour late because we did not know that there was a summer Daylight Saving Time change. At later time, we owned a more reliable Volkswagen station wagon (see below picture) and we could go farther places.
Worried about we would not be able to stay in the US, we applied for immigration to Canada and got approved. At the end of 1975, Martin Yan and we drove up to Vancouver and entered Canada as landed immigrants.
We stayed for a few days and came back to Davis and asked my professor to help us to apply for the permanent residency of the US. Martin stayed in Canada and later started his TV cooking shows in a very cold Calgary.
Left side shows my pictures taken after my PhD commencement in 1977 even though my official date getting my PhD in Physics was 1978.
In 1978, there were a group of houses for sale in more remote east of the city and many friends bought one or more. With my sister and we put down a few thousand dollars as deposit and we got a 2-storey house on Grinnel Drive. There is a big park with swimming pools and a big slide that the kids remember very well. This place is very close to Sacramento, the state capitol, and Xinru was born in 1979 and Youxi in 1980 in the Kaiser Hospital in Sacramento.
In 1982, my sister got married and moved out to San Francisco. In 1984, I found a job in San Leandro in Bay Area and our whole family moved out in 1985. We settled permanently in Piedmont in the east side of the bay and over the time, our Davis memories become vague.
No comments:
Post a Comment