I simply did not want my parents to be able to take credit for my achievements. They attacked me continuously throughout high school for doing the very things I needed to do in order to succeed in academia. I have already written about how my father beat me for reading books on science, dismissed my scientific writings as worthless, and locked me out of the house for going to the university library.
But my mother also played a role in destroying my academic abilities by attacking me for collaborating with others and for teaching. I used to organise study sessions and hold unofficial tutorials for my classmates in high school, and she used to always criticise my activities as a “waste of time” and claimed that my classmates were just “using” me. Not only was this a very selfish point of view, but it completely misses the fact that a teacher-student relationship benefits not just the student, but the teacher as well. One of the main reasons I understood the material in my high school science classes so well was precisely that I had spent a lot of time teaching it to others. The Chinese students who associated only with each other, on the other hand, had atrocious presentation skills, and spoke English with an incomprehensible accent despite having been in Canada for years.
I think the following incident perfectly illustrates both her utter selfishness and her dislike of the fact that I was teaching. Because I attended a Catholic high school, religious studies classes were a part of the curriculum. The school (or actually the Church, I suppose) tried to encourage volunteerism by requiring so many hours of community service as a component of one of these classes. I thought that the idea was rather daft myself, because the few students who actually enjoyed helping people would have been doing it already, and a sizeable portion of the rest of the class would be lying, faking, or exaggerating their way through the required hours. (This was in fact what happened — among some of my classmates, it became a sort of game to see who would be the most brazen in counting towards their hours activities which clearly had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with serving the community.) So what began possibly with good intentions was carried out through a sort of bribe, and ended up making liars out of a large number of people. (I suppose that’s as apt a summary of “religion” as any.) I had a pretty easy time with this, because everyone knew that I tutored whomever asked for my help. My mother had been nagging me to stop giving help to other students, but for this one term I had a “legitimate” reason for doing it. When I explained to her that I would be receiving academic credit for tutoring this term, she asked me whether I would also be receiving credits for the time I had spent helping others in previous terms. When I answered in the negative, her reaction was: “Then why didn’t you wait until this term to help people?”
Another thing which my mother repeatedly told me to do, and which really annoyed me, was to withhold information when I was teaching or giving a presentation. And she didn’t mean “give the people you’re helping just enough guidance to let them figure out the answers for themselves” — she meant “leave out something important, so you’ll have an advantage over them”. I could see how someone raised by such parents might become a very successful businessman — maybe even a ruthlessly, spectacularly successful one. Perhaps it’s why Chinese people seem to excel in business. However, I could not imagine anyone succeeding as a scientist who behaved in the way that my parents wanted me to behave. So naturally, I ignored her “advice”. But she would continue to harp on this from the time I was in high school all the way through graduate school, until I could no longer enjoy teaching or giving presentations.
Most researchers develop the skills that they would need to succeed in academia through practice during their undergraduate years and in graduate school. For me, it was the complete opposite: I was already an accomplished writer, researcher, and public speaker by the time I was in high school. My skills would deteriorate throughout university as my parents continued to attack me for doing the things I needed to succeed.
– davinci
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