There were a couple of things which helped me cope with my parents’ continual attempts to prevent me from studying what I wanted to study in high school. I found great inspiration in the writings of M. K. Gandhi (popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi, an honorific which he did not like). Gandhi believed that the way to resist an unjust law is to break it with a full awareness of the consequences and the willingness to suffer the attendant penalties, while remaining firm in one’s convictions. A line spoken by the title character in Richard Attenborough’s biographical film on Gandhi in particular steeled my resolve: “They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body — not my obedience.” I recalled this line whenever my father beat me for reading books on science. I also read the works of Henry David Thoreau, who inspired Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., one of many people who put Gandhi’s words into action.
But what really saved me and my career in science from my parents was the protection and assistance of Mrs. Mallo, the mother of one of my best friends in high school. When my father told me that books and papers on science were not welcome in his house, Mrs. Mallo made a space for me in her living room to store my things. She was very proud of being associated with me, and would show off my books to visiting relatives. When my father told me to stop “wasting time” going to the university library, she arranged for her husband, who worked at the university, to drive me there on his way to work and pick me up on his way home.
One night, her husband exchanged shifts with someone else and so picked me up very, very late. When I came home, the handle of the screen door had been tied to the door frame with a thick twine, and it was impossible to open the door without cutting it or untying it from the other side. I called Mrs. Mallo and, despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, she prepared her guest room for me and told me that I was welcomed to stay there whenever I needed to do so. And finally, after my parents forced me to abandon my original plans for university, and I turned my attention to information retrieval and processing for languages written in the Arabic script in order to circumvent my parents’ efforts to prevent me from getting a head start on graduate school for computer science, it was Mrs. Mallo who supplied me with instructional materials and personally tutored me. She was the one person (other than myself, of course) most responsible for my success in high school, and subsequently in university — not either of my parents.
However, this did not deter my parents from taking credit for my accomplishments whenever possible, despite the fact that these were the direct result of getting away as much as possible with doing what they had discouraged or forbidden me from doing. At the time, I didn’t think to publicly contradict them; as long as I continued to be able to function, I didn’t care what they took credit for. Later, I would regret not having done something about it then, because I was subsequently touted as an example of the “effectiveness” of their style of parenting quite often. (When Chinese parents get together, they would re-inforce each other’s delusions about parenting by repeatedly emphasising how “obedient” their children were and connecting that with how well they did in school.) I felt very guilty about this, because of course it was complete bullshit — and it was being perpetrated in my name. And furthermore, who knows how much damage had been done to other people’s lives because their parents had followed my parents’ advice or example? Although, I suppose that the only people who would have taken my parents at their word would have been those already predisposed towards an authoritarian style of parenting anyway. But still, my “example” served to re-inforce their prejudices, and perhaps made it more difficult for their children to do what they wanted to do with their lives.
This guilt would later be very damaging to my career, because it meant that I did not want to be in the public spotlight, despite having been very social and even somewhat (in)famous in high school. I avoided situations which would have made my name very public, which meant that I did not apply for scholarships that (I think) I could have easily won, passed up opportunities to give talks, and published minimally — the very opposite of what most people in academia try to do, and certainly the opposite of the most obvious way to become successful in academia.
– davinci
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