After a brief East
Coast stint, I spent my formative years in Sunnyvale, CA,
“The Heart of Silicon Valley”TM. You can take a virtual tour, but
don’t be misled by the techie glamour of the dot-com boom/bust and the
newly hip(-ish) Murphy Street. The Sunnyvale of my halcyon youth was
all about public parks, the cherry stand (now supplanted by a
pseudo-Chinese yuppie chain), the mall, and the public library (still
a highlight). It was only much later that I began to suspect that my
hometown was not exactly typical. In fact, my first inkling of our
place in the cultural universe came from the mention of Sunnyvale as
the location of a computer game company in the movie “Wargames” (the
entire hometown audience cheered). (I think the bad guys in
“Octopussy” were also planning to blow up Silicon Valley.)
Highlights of my early education include the usual trials/-bulations of the classroom and playround: recess in the age of Star Wars (the version with 6 Princess Leias and 4 Luke Skywalkers); some tense spelling bee showdowns (I continue to harbor unreasonable prejudice against ‘adobe’, ‘cardigan’ and their ilk); and the fateful diced-chicken-with-corn recipe incident (the scars have mostly healed). Later I crossed the rough ’n’ tumble Sunnyvale/Cupertino border every day to attend Homestead High School, Home of the Mustangs as well as the student paper The Epitaph.
If you care to visit the site of my undergraduate toil, don’t miss lunch at possibly the only mobile food distributer in the world with its own Web page, the Chinese Food Truck, or CFT, as it is fondly known to some, which used to be parked conveniently in the lot by the Harvard University computer science buildings (my (least) favorite of which has been razed -- moment of silence for Aiken, please; I have such less-than-fond memories of trudging there through rain and snow all the way from Winthrop House). Other affiliations include brief summer stays in the computer science department at Washington University in St. Louis (woo woo! or WU WU!) and Bell Labs in New Jersey (fortunately, New York was nearby).
The severe bout of reverse culture shock I experienced upon starting at Berkeley had everything to do with my two years abroad, in mostly England and China, from fall 1994 to summer 1996. In brief, I spent 1994-1995 in Cambridge, England, where I walked daily by the ducks in Emmanuel College’s lovely gardens while a student on the M.Phil. in Computer Speech & Language Processing, followed by a few months as a post-graduate research student in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. After that, I studied Chinese in Beijing for half a year before admitting that it was time to come home. Snapshots (mostly but not all verbal) of this ever-more-golden-seeming time abroad can be found in:
- a life update I wrote just before returning to the States
- a few notes from Cambridge
- beginnings of a probably-never-to-be-finished page on my time in Beijing.
Since then, I have been ensconced in the Berkeley area, working on the Ph.D. and living with various housemate assortments, first on a series of plant-related locales north and west of campus (Spruce, Vine, Rose) and then across the border in Albany, and now back to Berkeley again. Can’t say as I can complain.