I accompanied M to Berkeley for eye inspection last week. She had her LASIK at the Eye Center many years ago. That’s why we visit every year despite the long 60-mile drive. I don’t go back to Berkeley often not only because of the distance but also because of the psychological perplexity arises when I step into the campus. It was a place confused me the full extent of five years, during which I lost my direction. And it took another five years before I regain control on my life.
We arrived at 9:30am and M stayed for inspection. I walked westward and the Music Library was the first caught my attention. My friend, F, who is now an Ethnomusicology professor, was very impressed by this library when he visited me during a winter from UCLA. So I assume this is a very good one. Then I turned right and saw Morrison. I was only here once or twice. It was in a summer that I decided to take a class in Shakespeare but I dropped it very soon because I really didn’t understand. I would better spend time in the lab. When you lose control of your life and direction, you lose control of your time, and thus lose your time. A wanderer didn’t have the luxury to study Shakespeare.
I then ran into Faculty Glade. It was a placed I spent quite some time with M after we met with lot of memory. On the right was the Faculty Club. I only had meal there once. T’s husband was interviewing for post-doc position in biochemistry and we met there. I was planning to treat him but with his wife’s order, he managed to pay the bill. After that, I have not met them for many years. Sometimes you even don’t have chance to meet someone again for the rest of your life, as my roommate E told me before we left CUHK.
I turned west again and saw South Hall, the oldest building in the campus. There was a North Hall but demolished in a fire. Question to South Hall, how can you stay by yourself for so long? Answer from South Hall, compared to the scholars here in the last hundred years, I am not the loneliest.
I walked down the Campanile Way, from where I can see Golden Gate Bridge. On the right is the Bancroft Library. I spent quite some time there in the Physics Library. I tried to read many books and understood none. I was lost in the sea of knowledge. And reality told me I should go back to Engineering Library. What I learnt in the Physics Library did no good to my experiment. Reality was I needed to produce some good experimental data while explaining them in rigorous theory was secondary or even inessential.
On the left I saw Dwinelle. I spent a semester there to take Korean. I was hoping to go to Samsung Korea for internship. But I gave up and I didn’t find a Korean girlfriend neither. And before the final exam, I changed the grading option to P/NP because I knew I didn’t learn anything. Experiment was the demon occupying my mind every moment. And where did we take Peter Yu’s solid state class? Was it in Dwinelle too? Group theory, EPM, k.p are those I have yet to understand.
I turned north and on my left was the Valley Life Sciences. I spent two semesters here for German. That was the first year and I got A+. That’s because I received good training in CUHK on German already and the class I took was just beginner’s level. However, it provided no help to my research. I didn’t impress my advisor with that. No one needs to know German in order to understand Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. When I was taking QM class, the professor told us, his professors all went to Germany to study QM. The time-space is very different now with internet.
I also took a Genetic class there in Valley Life Sciences with M. I was very impressed by the “development theory” which resulted in Nobel Prize.
I climbed eastward and on the left is the undergraduate library. I remember I studied Esaki diode theory there and it turned out to be very helpful in the preliminary exam. I spent quite some lonely time there.
Then I see Memorial Glade. A place good for dating and we consumed a lot of sandwiches there for lunch. There was also a period I spent every Sat afternoon there reading books myself. I read a book with collection of laser processing publications by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had very pioneering work in this area. I was hoping to have breakthrough in my experiment after reading this book. Of course not, but I learnt a lot.
Finally I saw Tien Center for East Asian Studies. This is a new building after I graduated. I would have had spent most of my time there if it were built earlier. That day, I spent almost one hour there, walking from shelf to shelf. I had a lot of feelings. I took some pictures of the collections below.
After that I saw North Gate. A guy was trying to persuade me to join their fellowship when I just arrived Berkeley. The one thing I remember was about our discussion of 911 which just happened a week earlier. He sighed by quoting what Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic”.
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