Of course, I cannot speak of anyone else’s experience, but my sense is that other students of Chinese background were, like me, also pressured by their parents not to read any books outside of school. The ones I knew always seemed surprised that I was reading books all the time which were not required for school. But more importantly, their parents lead by counterexample: whenever I have visited the homes of my Chinese classmates, I have noticed that by far the majority of books on their parents’ bookshelves were of a serious technical nature. In contrast, whenever I have visited the homes of my university professors, their shelves were filled with books which, by my parents’ criteria, “had nothing to do” with their research. Similarly, the bookshelves in my non-Asian classmates’ homes were filled with fiction or books on subjects which were clearly unrelated to their parents’ work.
In my parents’ house, it was apparent which shelves belonged to my father and which belonged to me: his were filled only with technical books, while mine had popular books on various scientific and mathematical subjects, as well as history, literature, arts, and religion. I was continually criticised for “wasting money” on books which I “didn’t need”. Now, in a sense, this was true: I didn’t need to own any of the books I bought, because I could have read them at the library or in a bookstore. For that matter, I didn’t actually need to own any books at all.
The criticism that buying books is a “waste of money” is extraordinarily shortsighted. The fact is that reading the books my parents didn’t want me to read put me at an enormous advantage in school, and would later make career opportunities and scholarships available to me which would have been unattainable had I obeyed them. The books would have far more than paid for themselves. (I wrote “would have” only because when those opportunities did arise, my parents acted to prevent me from taking them.) I had friends who spent thousands of dollars on clothes or music CDs, and not only did their parents not criticise them for wasting their money, they would actually give them more of the same as gifts on their birthdays or other special occasions. I suspect that their parents would have been overjoyed if only my friends had spent their money instead on books.
There is also an aspect to buying books which cannot be quantified economically, and that is that the books you buy make you a member of a community. There have been numerous instances in my life where I have connected with someone because we have read the same books. In certain circles, being able to converse knowledgeably about certain authors marks you as a serious member and places you in a sort of inner circle. Based on my conversations with various people, researchers in a field seem much more likely to have read popular science books related to their field, especially as children, than people outside the field; I suppose this is also simply commonsensical. Repeatedly telling a child that certain books are “worthless” is therefore a pretty good way to ensure that he would not succeed as a researcher in the areas touched upon by those books. Besides depriving him of the necessary early exposure to certain subjects which is needed to develop a deep understanding of them, it also removes him from the cultural sphere of other researchers in the field and makes it more difficult for him to socialise with his colleagues (some of whom may even be the authors of those books).
Anyhow, I was simply incapable of not buying books. First, my teachers and friends would recommend books to me, and I treated each recommendation as an expectation that I would go read the book and come back to discuss it with them. Second, having popular books on science lying around allowed me to understand the subjects much more effectively. While you cannot learn a scientific subject just by reading popular books, what you can learn is how various ideas are related to one another, both in terms of their content and in their historical development. I noticed that, for whatever bizarre reason, the ideas covered in each of my high school science classes were presented more or less by the chronological order of their discovery. I could not understand why things should have been arranged in this way, other than a lack of imagination on the part of the people who designed the curriculum. Pedagogically, it was a terrible way of organising things. My classmates were forever confused about having to unlearn incorrect ideas they had previously accepted as facts, and I had to be careful not to be penalised for knowing too much (for example, I had to go along with the lie that protons were elementary particles despite already knowing about quarks and quantum mechanics). Reading a lot of books on the history of science clarified matters greatly for me. And finally, because these books gave me a very accurate intuition for what was coming up in the actual science classes themselves, I could study ahead. (I’ve always wondered about those students who seemed to spend all of their time studying but only from their textbooks. What do they do once they’ve understood the material — study it over and over again?) I had to buy a lot of books, because the textbooks assigned by the school were confusing; and, I would have been bored out of my mind otherwise, because I didn’t have the patience to wait for my teachers to tell me what I should learn next.
– davinci
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