The past can bring us all closer My letter to Brock Purdy

By Lulu Zhang Special to The Enterprise

When I came to the United States in 2011, to attend UC Davis, I expected to encounter miscommunication with Americans. After all, my first language is Mandarin (Chinese). American English is my second language. Ironically, I experienced language barriers while coming into contact with Cantonese (Chinese) speakers.

Twelve years ago, when I first tried ordering fried noodles at a Panda Express restaurant, I found myself embarrassed and unwilling to say chow mein. It was because that was not how I would say fried noodles in my native Mandarin language. I could imitate the sound of chow mein. However, I was extremely reluctant to say the word coming from a language in which I was not fluent. I understand that Americans and many people around the world assume that Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually intelligible.

After all, both are Chinese dialects. That cannot be further from the truth, as a matter of fact. Born and raised way up north in mainland China, I do not understand a word in Cantonese; I still insist on saying “fried noodles” in English in place of “chow mein” when ordering fried noodles at Panda Express. Thankfully, Panda Express uses the phrase “fried rice” to mean fried rice!

A few years after “the panda incident,” I had a roommate who was from Hong Kong. Through her, I met several more Hong Kong students. Most, if not all, Americans would imagine I had a smooth time befriending them. After all, we were all Chinese, well, supposedly. Quite the reverse, I had a not-so-smooth encounter with my Hong Kong counterparts. For one thing, I could not bring myself to see them as my type of Chinese. It was primarily because I did not understand a word they were saying in Cantonese.

Moreover, they gave out a vibe that implied to me that they were from Hong Kong, not China. I thought to myself, “It does not matter, because I do not see my kind of Chineseness in you anyway.”

Hong Kong may be part of China, but was more of a distant, historical and mysterious place.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, Hong Kong appeared much more often in my history books than in real life. For that reason, I could not emotionally or mentally shake off the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s from my impression of Hong Kong.

I visited Hong Kong in 2010 for the first time. When the vehicle was driving through a Hong Kong residential area, when the wind was blowing through my hair, when my eyes were glancing at a few schoolchildren who looked similar to me but spoke an entirely different language, I could not help but wonder:

“When the first British colonist set foot in Hong Kong, blue-eyed and blond-haired, were Hong Kong people curious, confused or scared?” “Did British colonists treat them with kindness and respect?” “How did British settlers and Hong Kong people gradually come to learn one another’s language?”

My person was traveling in the present, yet my mind was trotting through time. I became fixated on the moment when Hong Kong became a pawn in the imbalanced power struggle between an industrialized empire and a still agricultural empire.

As a result of me being absorbed into historical Hong Kong, I asked the very first Hong Kong person to whom I personally talked if she thought of herself as British. She firmly denied seeing herself as British. At that moment, I could not keep my mind off colonial Hong Kong. The Hong Kong person was more like a living fossil that could potentially tell the story of the British-Sino Opium Wars than a potential friend.

Now let us go back to my interaction with my Hong Kong roommate and her friends. What made both sides feel more alienated from each other came down to two factors. On the one hand, I did not understand Cantonese as a native Mandarin speaker. On the other hand, Hong Kong was spared the Communist push for “Mandarinization (To mandate all mainland Chinese learn Mandarin regardless of their regional dialect).” Thus, Hong Kong people communicated with Mandarin speakers more easily in English than in Mandarin.

For example, some Hong Kong guy once wanted to borrow a pillow from me but he struggled hard to find the proper Mandarin word. He eventually burst out the English word “pillow.” At the time, he and my roommate’s other friends were sleeping over at our apartment. None of his Hong Kong peers came to his rescue by reminding him how to say pillow in Mandarin. I genuinely believed that none of them knew how. “We are so not the same, are we?” I thought to myself. That changed, however, when the same Hong Kong guy asked for hot drinking water at an event my roommate and I were also attending. I was genuinely baffled.

I scratched my head and inquired, “Why hot water?” To my surprise, he responded with an affirmative acknowledgement of his “Chineseness.” I still remember what he said word for word, nearly a decade later: “I am Chinese.” Though he asserted his Chineseness in English (ironically), I immediately felt much closer to Hong Kong people at that juncture. Yes, it was such a quintessential Chinese thing to consume hot water. At that moment, it was as if Hong Kong brushed off its 156 years of British rule and reverted back to an ordinary Chinese village.

Speaking of Chinese, I recently discovered a fantastic restaurant called Dah Bao in East Davis. I initially thought that it was a Vietnamese restaurant. It was because the letter “h” at the end of the word “Dah” sounded Viet- namese to me. Then you can guess how astonished I was when I discovered that Dah Bao actually served Chinese food!

According to man’s new best friend Google, Dah Bao was a Chinese word which was not initially supposed to be understood by mainland Chinese. Interestingly, we now frequently use the word in mainland China. Using my native Mandarin phonetics (Pinyin), Dah Bao would be spelled as Da Bao. Da Bao means to “pack up leftover restaurant foods and take them home.”

Da is a verb that describes multiple hand movements involved to put leftovers into a takeout (or togo) box. Bao is a noun that means box or bag. I remember my parents used the word Da Bao quite often when I was a young child. Therefore, Dah Bao is a Chinese restaurant called “To Go.” What is funny about the name Dah Bao is that you can dine in as well as take out Amusingly and very merrily, I later came across an American eatery called Togo’s Sandwiches in North Davis; I genuinely believe that Togo is the long-lost American cousin of Dah Bao!

The funny discoveries led me to notice a similar occurrence in French. At our Hattie Weber Museum of Davis, I found a piece of balcony railing taken from a demolition site near the LaRue farmhouse (2727 Russell Blvd., Davis, CA 95616). While it has not been definitively concluded that this fragmentary railing was part of the original LaRue farmhouse, it did remind me of LaRue Road on campus. I always had a question mark in my mind about the word “LaRue.” I was excited to find out LaRue meant The Road in French, thanks to our co-director, Merrily. LaRue Road was named to honor Jacob LaRue, one of the founding advocates for the University Farm School (the presentday UC Davis). LaRue Road intersects with Russell Boulevard and immediately connects with Anderson Road. Anderson is a last name. LaRue is a last name. Therefore, it makes perfect sense. What does not make sense is that LaRue Road literally means The Road Road.

The balcony railing comes from a demolition site close to the historical LaRue farmhouse built and expanded between 1867 and 1918. 1867? Does it remind you of something? Queen Victoria was still living! The railing surely represents a distant yet remarkably real piece of history. Have you been intrigued to view it in person since I told you the story about The Road Road? If so, we welcome you with open arms. When you gaze upon the historical balcony railing, you are getting on a time machine and traveling back to the tumultuous yet pioneering years of California. Who can say history is boring? :)

— Lulu Zhang graduated UC Davis with a bachelor’s degree in history. Her passion for history and writing led her to volunteer at the Hattie Weber Museum, where she hopes she can spark more interest about the museum among Davis residents and UCD students.

By Lally Pia Special to The Enterprise

Ihave a sign by my fireplace that reads “We Interrupt this Marriage for Football Season.”

Most people think it’s for my husband, but it’s for me, the wife. I’ve been a diehard 49ers fan since the ’80s, and like many, I thought this year was our chance for the Super Bowl.

And then there was that fateful day, Jan. 29, 2023, when you, Brock Purdy of the 49ers, took that hit. I couldn’t believe it. Simply couldn’t believe it. My world came crashing down. Everything clouded over, because like millions of other fans, I was devastated — and so scared for you. Nothing seemed real.

But minutes later, when the edge of the television screen got blurry, life got weirder still.

A quick call to my daughter, a child neurology resident in Rochester, N.Y., confirmed my worst fears. I was having a stroke.

I found out later that my left internal carotid artery had jammed up. In an instant, the blood supply to the left side of my head was gone.

Like someone thumbing through a flipchart, only fleeting memories remain. In the ER, everything was cloudy and jumbled. My words tripped over each other. I’ll never forget my absolute terror when I stared stupidly at the clerk and blanked on my birthdate. There was the stinging jab of a clot-buster. Everywhere they took me, the comforting, sanitizing aroma of alcohol was in the air.

I said yes to everything I was asked. Like a nodding taxi doll, every option sounded absolutely perfect. If someone had suggested head removal, I’d likely have acquiesced. The shock and disbelief on my husband Tim’s face played back as I was loaded into an ambulance to Sutter in Sacramento.

I’ll never forget the concern and kind words of the young man who sat with me in the ambulance as the siren blared. He did his best to keep me engaged and awake. On that terrifying ride, he would never know just how much I appreciated this intense connection with another human, while everything I knew to be true or real was gradually slipping away — vanishing from my consciousness.

Other vivid images remain — the solemn faces of the team of blue-coated doctors who faced me at the hospital. Their voices were hushed, but they did their best to reassure me. A smiling nurse shaved my left thigh and I learned that a tube was going to be placed into my femoral vein. The speech therapist asked me to repeat, “Babababa... kakakaka”. She smiled back at me, so I knew I must be doing it right.

A short time later, I was profoundly relieved to hear that I didn’t need my skull cracked open and emergency brain surgery. Hallelujah to that!

Miraculously, I learned that my collateral vessels—a bunch of other blood vessels— jumped into action to nourish the poor starved brain cells on the left side of my brain. This intrepid collection of fetal blood vessels and other “spare” vessels, was recruited to play their part for my recovery. They blazed through triumphantly, in a symphony of support, without hesitation. There were casualties. I’m pretty sure several million brain cells keeled over and called it quits.

But thank goodness we’re endowed with a few billion spares!

Three weeks after the stroke, I couldn’t figure out what a cup was, except that it was something used to measure flour. I had to ask where jam would be stored, finally deducing that it was made of fruit so would probably be in the refrigerator. Simple computation such as subtraction was difficult and digits such as “9” somehow morphed into other numbers. For example, 9:30 somehow became 5:30, making scheduling my patients tricky (yes, I’m a physician). The notes on the open page of my Mozart sonata had morphed into hieroglyphics. I now played piano like a kindergartener with tears rolling down my face. That was hard. It was like I lost a part of myself, Brock. Lost part of my identity. Like I was suddenly stripped of a skill I owned — that no one had but me. Brock, you tore your ulnar collateral ligament, and shortly after that, my left internal carotid artery clogged up. But this world we live in is a caring world inhabited by beautiful, skilled, selfless people with hearts full of love. They are our collaterals. Like my hardworking vessels, our collaterals stepped forward without hesitation in our time of greatest need. Isn’t it wonderful that we both benefitted from the wonderful collaboration of hundreds of skilled humans, all waiting in the wings to help out?

Everyone from my ambulance driver to the neurosurgeons to the hospital dietician, who made sure I had a lowsugar menu, to the cheery man who swept around my bed daily. Those are my heroes. They jumped in without hesitation to put me back together and support me. I can play piano again, Brock, thanks to my collaterals. You know what, Brock? I think we’re going to make it. — Lally Pia is a Davis resident.