a sushi chef after stroke

Mr. H. was a 63-year-old stroke patient in a rehabilitation hospital. Although 63 is a young age for stroke, it is unexceptional for a heavy smoker over 4 decades.  

The stroke was on the right side of Mr. H’s brain, so he had difficulty moving his left leg and left arm, and even his face and mouth were affected by the stroke. His situation is severe, but I have seen worse. When I first met him, he could get up and walk with a cane and help from  a single physical therapist. His arm is worse, and neither of his left arm or hand can be moved at all. Fortunately, although he had numbness and weakness in his tongue and cheek, he had a quite symmetrical face, and could articulate clearly. In addition, he had some difficulties with short-time memory. For example, at the beginning of his stay in the rehab center, there were a couple of times he could not recall the exercises he had 30 minutes ago.

Although I could feel his distress, he took an active part in therapies. Nevertheless, he was impulsive and impatient, and not always followed the instructions, which could be the results of cognitive impacts from the stroke according to his therapists. However, he still made significant progress after a couple of weeks staying in rehab. First, his cognitive function recovered pretty well. Not only could he answer the basic informative questions, but also easily solve the problems about daily life given by speech therapists, such as organizing medicines in a pill box or counting bills. But he still had difficulties on some challenging clock questions. Since he still had weakness in his mouth and cheek, the speech therapist focused on the training of his mouth muscle in the later sections of his speech therapy.

His walking was also remarkably improved. At the end of his stay, he could walk very well with a quadri-cane and a left leg brace without any additional help from therapists. He could also go up and down the stairs with no obvious difficulties. Not the training stairs, which only has 3-4 steps, but normal stairs of the building, which contains about 13 steps. The condition of his arm was still not very good. But he could move his left shoulder and elbow a little before his discharge.   

 Mr. H. has moderate height with a stature that could be considered to be well maintained for a man in his 60s. Based on his current appearance, I would guess that he was a good-looking man in his youth. He was a sushi chef in a Japanese restaurant called RaKu in Bethesda, MD before his stroke. It is a famous restaurant in Bethesda, and several hospital staff knew about it. Somehow, he reminded me of the role Chen Dauming(陳道明)  played in the TV series “The first half of my life” – a middle aged chef with many life experiences who doubled as a shrink for his clients.

After talking to him, I found out that Mr. H. is in fact a person with a lot of stories. He was born and grew up in Shehezi (石河子), Xingjiang Province, which is the northwest part of China. This area was occupied by ethnic groups other than Han for thousands of years and was only annexed by China in the 1700s in Qing Dynasty, the last feudal dynasty of China, so the culture of this region is vastly diverged from most other parts of China. But Mr. H.’s family was Han, and he was the oldest among his 5-6 siblings. According to Mr. H., he was a smart kid, but he did go to college because of the great culture revolution (1966-1976). After graduation from high school, he got a job in the government institute regulating electric power systems, which was considered to be a very good job because of its stability and decent salary.

Although he knew his wife at a very young age and grew up together, she was from a quite different family. Her parents were (支邊幹部), which means low to medium level government officials from inland China who moved to Xingjiang （or other frontier parts of China） in response to government’s call, and to help the development of these frontier areas. Therefore, she had the chance to move to Guangdong Province with her family later, which is much more developed than Xingjiang, and at that time they were already married. Thus, via the help of his wife’s relatives, Mr. H. was able to get a government job in a small city of the county seat about 40 KM north of Guangzhou. Therefore, Mr. H. moved to Guangdong more than 4000 kilometers away from his hometown, where he became the sport’s commissioner of the county officer with minimal compensation.  

In this position, he had the chance to interact with many local rich businessmen as well as persons from entertainment businesses, such as directors or screenplay writers of movie or TV series et al. He once told me that he was a good friend of a famous screenplay writer from these days. Nevertheless, his salary was too low, so he opened a restaurant in Guangzhou in an attempt to earn more money. But the restaurant failed. Also, from what I understood, it was banned for a government employee to be the owner of any private business, and I thought that it might cause some troubles for him. In the early 2000s, he felt he could no longer stay in Guangdong, and was looking for a chance for change. His younger sister who had already immigrated to the USA suggested that he could come to the USA. He agreed. So at his 40s, Mr. He forwent everything he had in China, his job and his family, and came to the USA via a B1/B2 visa, and stayed in the USA after the expiration of his visa. Several years after he came to the USA, he got his job as a sushi chef in Raku restaurant, and stayed there ever since.

He and his wife only had one daughter, who was basically raised by his in-laws. It must be more than 10 years passed before Mr. H. finally got his green card and was able to get his family, his wife and his daughter, to the USA. He told me that when he left China, his daughter was only 7-years-old, and when she came to the USA for the first time, she was already 20-years-old. Unfortunately, his wife could only get a nanny's job in the USA, which she really hated. Several years after moving to the USA, she divorced Mr. H., and moved back to Guangzhou. But the daughter stayed. I met his daughter almost every day during Mr. H.’s stay in the rehabilitation hospital. She was tall, thin and beautiful, and according to Mr. H. a very good student. She had already enrolled in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies majoring in English for a year before she immigrated to the USA with her mother. So she adapted to life in the USA pretty well, and got a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Maryland at College Park. During her study in the University of Maryland, she also met her boyfriend, now husband, a boy from China, who is a nice boy I met quite often in the same period. The young couple just moved to Seattle in Jan. 2022 because of the boy’s job, and they came back to Maryland because of Mr. H.’s stroke and stayed for a month.

Before the stroke, Mr. H. lived by himself in an apartment in Germantown, but it is impossible for him to move back because despite all his progress, doctors insisted that Mr. He cannot live alone. However, Mr. He did not have any relatives who could live with him in this area anymore. His sister died of advanced breast cancer 3 years ago, and the widower remarried and moved to the west coast. For her two children, her son moved to San Diego, and the daughter is still a college student. Therefore, his daughter and son-in-law arranged Mr. H. to be moved to an assisted living facility with a Chinese association after his discharge, so that he would have less communication problems. For Mr. H., he wanted to go back to his previous job if he could fully recover, although I thought the odds would be very low. If not, he wanted to go back to his hometown, Shehezi (石河子）, and lived in the apartment inheriting from his late parents. Sometimes, he even spoke about opening a fancy sushi restaurant like Raku in Guangzhou.

I am not sure what Mr. H. would be later, but I know if he wanted to make a full recovery, there is still a large amount of rehabilitation ahead of him. Good luck to Mr. He and his family!