This project of writing out my autobiography is taking a lot longer even to get started than I thought it would. I had intended to post something months ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, even after I had written a considerable amount of material. The writing process itself took a long time, because I had to re-live the experiences that I was writing about, and some of these have been extremely painful.
There are several things holding me back from posting what I have written, the primary one being that I suffer from a pathological perfectionism — I cannot bear to let anyone else know about a project that I’m working on until after it has been completed, for fear that someone would deliberately act to sabotage and derail my efforts. I was not always like this; in fact, once upon a time, I used to drag everyone I knew, and even many people whom I didn’t, into anything that I was involved with. The reason for this drastic change in my behaviour will become crystal clear as I tell my story. The gist of it is that I was punished so severely by my parents for being talented and popular that I no longer wished for my talents to be known in public. And this of course has been very damaging both to my professional life as well as to my personal life.
I have a lot to say about gifted children and bad parenting, and what it is like to grow up as a gifted child with abusive parents. I think that I have some very important insights into why some people who were supreme overachievers in their youth end up being mediocre or even underachievers as adults. There must be many, many people like me, people who were gifted children and who as adults have been prevented from achieving the fullness of their potentials by the selfish actions of the people around them — and who are suffering in silence because the steps that are necessary to recover from their situation are too painful to take. I can certainly speak to this myself.
Besides having to fight the irrational fear that other people are working against me to prevent me from accomplishing my goals — it is irrational because the only people who have ever opposed me have been my parents, and in fact everyone else have always been very supportive of me — there is also the concern for privacy and the apprehension about being judged. There is simply no way that I can talk or write about my current situation without telling my life story, and no way to tell my life story without revealing private details about not only my life, but those of the people around me. And because those are some of the very people whom I specifically do not want to inform about this project while it is still under way, I cannot really ask for their permission, nor is that something I would want to do. I will give whatever private details are necessary for the telling of my story. If some people are upset by this, then too bad for them.
It is much more difficult to overcome the apprehension about being judged. The people who are the most prone to being in the kind of situation in which I find myself are precisely those who come from authoritarian cultural backgrounds, where the taboos against defying authority — and especially the imperative to honour one’s parents and to uphold the family name — are the strongest. Growing up in Hong Kong, these ideas and values were repeatedly drilled into our heads. It was certainly nowhere as stereotypical as in some Western representations of Asian culture, such as found in some movies, television shows, and comic books, where you had to duel to the death to defend your family honour. But there was a very strong sense in which there were certain things you must do, or must not do, because it would tarnish the reputation of your relatives. And many of these imperatives and prohibitions are in direct conflict with modern Western values. Of course, the very idea that anyone should have to bear the consequences of an individual’s actions other than that one individual in and of itself goes against the principle of individual liberty.
I think I must have had it worse than most other people of a similar background. On the one hand, I am the firstborn and a son, as is my biological father; my paternal grandfather had one elder sister, but he is essentially also a firstborn son. So I am supposed to carry on the family name and be responsible for behaving in a certain expected manner. On the other hand, I was recognised as a gifted child in elementary school, at a time when I was living away from my parents, and my teachers always encouraged me to explore my creativity and give freely of the outputs of my talents to the world. My grandparents, with whom I was living at the time, basically allowed me to do more or less what I wanted to do, which was to live up to my teachers’ expectations to the best of my abilities. They really didn’t have a choice, as their English was limited and thus they could interpret what was happening at school only through my and my brother’s explanations. Once my parents re-entered my life, however, they began to insist that everything my teachers had taught me was wrong, and that I should not do what my teachers had specifically encouraged me to do. I found this especially heinous and hypocritical, because they would at the same time brag to others about how their children were enrolled in the gifted program.
The chief cardinal virtue of Confucianist Chinese culture is filial piety, and many of the things I shall write will viciously violate this so-called virtue. I am not supposed to criticise my parents, and especially not in public. This is considered to be a very shameful thing to do. The way I see it is that it is their own actions in and of themselves which are shameful, not the fact that I am publicising them. But I think that this apprehension about being judged to be unfilial keeps a lot of people in my situation from doing what is necessary to recover from it. I am really ashamed of my biological parents, and this is something that I have to live with every single day of my life. This fact will not change whether it is kept private or made public.
For me, a larger part of my apprehension about being judged comes from the worry that I may sound very immodest in some of the things I write in relating my personal experiences. I cannot help this. In elementary and high school, everyone routinely called me a “child prodigy” and a “genius”. Even during my undergraduate days, I met plenty of people who told me that I was the smartest and most talented person they had ever met. I have always thought, whenever anyone said that to me, that that person must not know very many people. If it helps to give a little balance, things like that haven’t happened very often for a number of years, and I feel that I haven’t accomplished very much with my life given the potential that everyone except for my biological parents attributed to me as a child. I consider my biological parents to be the sole and exclusive reason for my lack of success relative to the high expectations that everyone else had of me, and I believe that if they had died while I was in high school, I would be spectacularly successful today. If that is immodest and unfilial — so be it.
My parents are by far the most selfish and despicable people I know. At the same time, they are probably not all that atypical for parents from authoritarian cultural backgrounds. This may sound contradictory, but the fact is that how other people raise or abuse their children has no effect on me. Furthermore, I suspect that most other people who have parents like mine end up acquiescing to their demands and expectations; probably very few have fought for as long and as hard as I have, and thus faced the reactions that I did. Even so, I wish that I had defied them much more than I had actually done — in retrospect, I gave in to them far more often than I should have. My single biggest regret in life is that I did not run away from home as a teenager in high school.
Now that I have openly written about the things that I was the most apprehensive about making public, the rest are just details. Of course, some of these details will be difficult to write about; some will transform internal conflicts into external ones, which may bring me a lot of trouble, but I will deal with those as they arise.
I had originally wanted to write my autobiography in chronological order, but there are certain themes which thread through time, and in some cases it turned out to be better put those in their own dedicated posts. But I am going to try to keep things in more or less chronological order as much as possible.
Even though I am going to post the pieces of my autobiography in public as I finish them, I may not reply to, or even look at, the comments right away. I apologise in advance for this. As I explained in the beginning, I don’t want to be derailed, and so I don’t want to be exposed to anything that might change my mind about what I intend to write or have already written. But I do want to know what opinions other people have of my predicament, so please do leave comments, and I will read and reply to them when I feel that the time is appropriate. I would especially like to hear about the experiences of other people who may have had a similar upbringing. There are probably many such people out there, who may feel that they are alone and that no one else can relate to their experiences. This is something that I have often felt myself.
Before I continue, I would like to thank Mina for her love, support, and encouragement. Without her, I would not have overcome the initial hurdle of telling another person — anyone at all — about many of the things that I have written and will be writing about. And that was a very important first step in my decision to write this autobiography. I would also like to thank Dr. Neil Gibson at UW Counselling Services for his assistance. And finally, I would like to thank everyone who has helped me throughout my life. There are many people to whom I feel I owe an explanation and even an apology for my decisions and my actions. Many of you may be wondering why, when I had been blessed with such good opportunities to accomplish great things, I let so many of them slip by. In every single instance, it was because my parents had forced me to do so. Nevertheless, I feel responsible for what I have done and for what I have failed to do, and I will feel a little bit redeemed when I am finished telling my story.
– davinci
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