Joseph Ku

Joseph Ku September 22, 2009

Chapter 1: Going to Berkeley

It was exactly 50 years ago, in late September of 1959, that the old Lockheed Super Constellation, with all its 4 propeller engines going full power, roared down the runway of Kai Tak Airport, which extended out into the harbor. Before that new runway was built, to accommodate the new jet-liners coming into use then, take offs and landings at the Hong Kong airport were abhorred by the pilots, which involved flying just yards over the rooftops of the nearby apartment buildings.
The old Super Constellation was chartered by some enterprising Hong Kong merchant, to carry students such as my brother and I, at fares lower than commercial airlines.

Although I was a class ahead my brother at St. Joseph’s, and took my school certificate examinations in 1958, my parents wanted me to stay and see if my brother and I can go away together, so that we can take care of each other. That was why I spent a year in lower six. Luckily we both got accepted into U.C. Berkeley and my parents finally relented to let us go. Many of our parents’ friends came to see us off, so did our classmates. In retrospect, later in life, I realized that my parents’ friends did not come for my brother and I, but for my parents, especially my mother, to render her moral support, who was distraught at losing the remainder of her children. My sister was already in England by then.

This was the first time my brother and I left to go somewhere on our own, and it was the first time we flew in an airplane. Our sense of adventure overrode our concern for our mother’s sadness. We were brave young men that knew how to take care of ourselves and adventure lies ahead. Again, only later in life, when I was myself a parent, did I realize how callous we were.

The flight hopped across the Pacific. First Wake Island, then Okinawa, then Hawaii, then Seattle and finally San Francisco. It may have gone on further but my excitement at arriving wiped out all other thoughts.

The plane was air conditioned, which was nice. We didn’t have air-conditioning in our bedrooms at home, and sleeping with air conditioning was a new and pleasant experience. The stewardess served us dinner in trays. My brother and I shunned the raw vegetables. The graduate student sitting next to us told us that later on, we would learn to love these things, and he was right. We had tea bags on our tray. My brother, not having seen those things before, tore open the bag and scattered the tea bits into the cup of hot water. More worldly I, having seen it done in a movie, showed off to him how it should be done. I remember one of the boys in the dorm always made it a ritual to empty the cup after the bag was dipped in the hot water for the first time, claiming that the brownish color that first came out was all artificial coloring chemicals. Then he would fill the cup a second time and drank that. I think it is in the movie Stalag 17, with William Holden, that one of the prisoners had a tea bag hung around his neck that he sold by the dip.

The stop at Wake was very short. We hopped on to Okinawa. After we landed, we were told that a typhoon was nearby and we needed to stay overnight till they were sure it was safe to fly on. That layover lasted three days. We were herded into a local hotel, two to a room. We were given three dollars allowance per meal. Ten of us pooled our money and had a banquet every meal. Thirty dollars was a lot of money in those days. We also took local guided tours and must have seen seems like a hundred bombed sites, sometimes caves, where hundreds of natives hid during the second world war and died inside when the Americans invaded. Okinawa is also where we first learned that tap water in America is safe for drinking. We kept asking the room boy to bring us drinking water, and it was not till later that we realized why he always brought us ice water, for why else would we be asking him for water.

That flight was quite a party. Young boys and girls from all different schools were crammed in the small plane. Pretty soon, card games broke out. A few of the better looking girls always had many boys surrounding them. A few of the graduate students held court and handed out advice to our eager novice ears.

We landed in Honolulu and passed through immigration and customs. It is there that I first encountered a drinking fountain and trash cans with one of those triangular swing tops. It is there also that I first encountered polite public servants. Unexpected politeness would be one of the major recurring themes of my new experience. After I arrived at Berkeley and spent three dollars buying an electric alarm clock at Rexall’s Drug Store on Telegraph, I discovered that one of the hands was stuck. When I brought it back, preparing for a big negotiation, the clerk just handed me a new one without even verifying that the old one was truly broken. One time on a bus, I rode way past where I was supposed to have gotten off. The driver, made the entire bus wait, while he waited for the bus coming the opposite way. He flagged that bus down, put me on it, and told the other driver exactly where to drop me off! I understand that in some remote small towns in the U.S., such courtesy still exist even now.

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Chapter 2 Berkeley

We were met at the San Francisco airport by Albert King, James’ older brother, and my baptismal godfather. Albert was studying at Wayne State in Detroit, but his fiancée was in San Francisco and he came often, and we were lucky that he was in town. He had made arrangements for my brother and I to stay at the International House and took us there after collecting us at the airport.

International House was a huge Moorish styled structure at the edge of the U.C. Berkeley campus, built with funds donated by the Rockefeller family. It houses foreign students from all over the world. So that we foreign students can get acclimated to the United States, the I-house also houses some U.S. graduate students so that we can interact and learn from these older local students. I suppose that was preferable to putting us with some immature undergrads, such as those residing at the fraternity houses nearby. Those frat boys refers to the I-house as the "Zoo", as in their eyes the I-house was filled with all sorts of strange and exotic creatures. We, on the other hand, were intrigued by their rowdy weekend beer parties and their loose carefree ways. Every year, at the week of the "Big Game", the annual football contest between the archrivals Stanford and U.C. Berkeley (known familiarly as "Cal"), those frat houses will be decorated with colorful and animated scenes showing the Cal "Bear" slaughtering the Stanford "Indians", and lots of partying would be going on. Stanford later changed their mascot name from "Indians" to "Cardinals" in the 70’s in deference to political correctness.

Dining at the I-house was in a large mess hall, cafeteria style, all you can eat. I must have put on twenty pounds the first year. There were no meals served on Sunday evenings. That was our chance to go out and try some of the restaurants in town. There were two Chinese restaurants, "Wing Kong" and another one whose name escapes me now. A Singapore Chinese boy from a wealthy family, studying business administration, owned a big new Oldsmobile and six or seven of us Chinese boys will pile into his car to go to one or the other of the Chinese restaurants. The Chinese food in those days were still of the "Chop Suey" variety but those were quite a treat for us still, after a whole week of American food. We were amazed by the thick chinaware used in those restaurants, which we later learned, working as waiters and busboys in our summer jobs, is so that they don’t break as easily in handling and machine washing. Rice always came heaping full, which the waiter must have squeezes two full bowls together and then removed the top bowl, forming a rounded dome over the bowl served. Also, the food dishes were always jumbo sized, which most Chinese restaurants now, especially those that cater to non-Chinese clientele, still maintain this jumbo serving practice. For us growing boys, of course the more the merrier.

For eating outside of the regular 3 meals, there was a small coffee shop in I-house where you can order hamburgers, sandwiches, and other American snack foods. To this day, I still think their hamburger is the best I have ever tasted. Perhaps any hamburger would taste great at 11:30 at night, after booking it the whole evening, but the memory of those I-house hamburgers has not been topped to this day. That coffee shop sits directly over the eastern end of Bancroft Way, at the top of a slope. Sitting at one of their window tables, you can look down Bancroft, which stretches straight down until it ends at the San Francisco Bay many miles away. I used to wonder what lies at the other end. At the end of the second semester, when I bought a second hand bicycle, I rode downhill all the way, to satisfy my curiosity. Unfortunately it took several hours for me to peddle and walk the bike uphill back to I-house.

The first week, we went through the process of registering for the different classes. That took place in a large gym with roped off pathways and many stations where you were given all sorts of forms, which were filled and then collected at other stations down the line. It was quite an assembly line. In fact, hundreds of upper class students earn some extra spending money working the line during reg week. I did that in my upper years also. One year, several fraternity boys working at the line printed up a bunch of official looking forms asking for name, address and phone number and handed them out to select good looking incoming freshman girls and which was then collected by accomplices further down the line. They ended up with quite an impressive dating file.

The freshman classes were huge, mostly held in large auditoriums holding many hundred students per class. Those theatre sized auditoriums were in columnated buildings with names such as Wheeler, Dwinelle, Life Science, and Engineering; they became our regular haunts. The professor lectures using microphones and projectors. Then, at some other time, we split up into smaller study groups of 10 to 20 students, headed by a Teaching Assistant, who then gave us the more detailed treatment of the subject, when we can ask questions and have discussions. The homework assignments were corrected by Readers, who were paid assistants to the Teaching Assistants. I worked as a Reader for some years and when at graduate school, worked as a Teaching Assistant and also as a Teaching Associate. Teaching Associates actually get to lecture same as a professor but you get the not so desirable 7 a.m. classes and the classes were much smaller. Being a Teaching Associate was, for me, a real blessing. It normally took 4 hours to prepare for an one hour lecture. You have to know the subject thoroughly in order to be able to answer the questions that your students may come up with. This is how I got to know the subject which formed the basis for my Ph.D. research. When I was doing the teaching, I realized that I only got maybe 20% of what the professor was trying to teach me that first time around.

Those four years at Berkeley went like a blink. Later on, many of my St. Joseph’s classmates came to Berkeley also and we became quite a social group. Dominic Kam, Robert Yan, Reginald Mak, Philip Tom, Levi Lee, all lived at one time or another in that now infamous Hearst Street apartment. The time spent there was still the highlight of those younger years!

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HIGHER EDUCATION	B.S.@U.C.Berkeley; M.S.@M.I.T.; Ph.D.@U.C.Davis (All mechanical engineering)
PROFESSION	Engineer, specializing in computer peripherals. Switched to China import 1990
WORK/BUSINESS	Xerox, Apple Computer, Two Computer Printer Startups. One China Import Co.
ACHIEVEMENTS	Expertise in small computer printers. Many patents. Established activated carbon import business.
MOST MEMORABLE	Seeing my children getting their degrees, MBA (MIT) and MS (Genetics)
FAMILY	Married, Wife Tina. 2 children: 1 son (grand-daughters: Carolyn 14 and Natalie 10) 1 daughter (grand-daughters: Audrey 5, Meghan 3)
INTERESTS	Audio, Video, Web publishing and Web marketing.
HOBBIES	Inventor & Tinkerer.
SPECIAL TALENTS	Karaoke. Tai Chi.
KNOWLEDGE TO SHARE	Tai Chi (35 years),
NEED ADVICE ON	Some electrical engineering and chemistry input on some invention ideas. Other Useful Contacts (Ask me why this SJC site is named lookcare.com)