I had discovered, by the end of my first term in Waterloo, that while my father had maintained his negative opinion of quantum computing, it no longer seemed to enrage him consistently as it did before. This was a man who had screamed at me, beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for studying the components that make up quantum computing while I was in high school, but his reaction to the fact that I had resumed my studies — which he had expressly forbidden me to continue, under threat of being disowned — could only be described as mild irritation.
One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive authoritarian parents is the lack of consistency in their demands. It is a dictum of traditional Chinese culture that children should obey their parents without question. My parents have never explained to me why I should have been punished so harshly for my interest in science, and I was left to infer this from what they punished me for doing, as well as from their criticisms.
I was punished in high school by my parents for reading books and journals, writing papers, attending scientific lectures, meeting with people who shared my interests, and giving presentations — exactly the things that constitute the academic life of a scientist. At the same time, my parents insisted that they supported my education, and bragged about this to everyone they knew. I had no guarantee that altering my behaviour would have reduced their interference with my studies, and doing so would certainly have compromised my ability to succeed academically. I really had no idea what I was doing that was so upsetting to them, especially since my teachers and my classmates’ parents showered praises upon me for my activities.
When it came to my parents’ criticisms, there were really just two major ones. The first was that I was doing things that I wasn’t supposed to be doing, which is to say things that other Chinese students at around my age were not doing, such as making regular trips to the university library or meeting with professors. But this criticism was absurd, because the people that my parents expected me to imitate would not be going on to careers in science. Many of them might have ended up in university, but in applied areas such as accounting or engineering, and even then, their purpose was to “get a degree” to qualify for a job or to please their parents, and not to prepare themselves to do graduate research. And besides, some of them had personally told me that they wished that they were more like me. And yet my parents kept telling me that I should be more like them. So my parents were basically pressuring me to be more like people who expressed admiration for the fact that I had the courage to defy them, and who resented their own parents for forcing them to do things that they didn’t want to do. I found the situation darkly comical. As the saying goes, one should be careful what one wishes for.
The second major criticism was that the subjects I was intent on studying were useless or impractical[1]. I don’t know if this is more of a linguistic or a cultural issue, but my parents would invariably interpret “theoretical” to mean “worthless” or “frivolous”. My father would say things such as, “If you want to study theory, wait until after you’re retired”, which of course makes no sense whatsoever. This misinterpretation was not restricted to just my parents, but was quite common among my Cantonese-speaking classmates, who had presumably acquired it from their parents. I suppose that this partially explains the abundance of students from a Cantonese background in engineering and their paucity in the pure sciences.
I have already written much about my interest in religion as a geopolitical force, and about how I had turned my attention to Islam and the Muslim world after my parents had forbidden me from studying the physics of computation in high school. While I had been interested in these subjects since elementary school, I returned to them at the end of high school because I knew that information retrieval in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu would become important within a few years — and I turned out to be right.
Information retrieval was most certainly a topic within applied computer science, and — at a time when Google was becoming a common verb in the English language — its practicality could not be denied. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this was especially true for information retrieval in languages written using the Perso-Arabic script. I began my Master’s degree in computer science less than a year and a half after 9/11, and information retrieval in Arabic was a very hot topic. For obvious reasons, numerous companies, think tanks, governmental agencies, and private organisations were very interested in it.
I had planned to research information retrieval in Persian as the topic of my Master’s thesis while I worked on quantum computing on the side. Splitting my attention like this was less than ideal, but it was better than being prevented from studying what I wanted to study entirely. I was even prepared to research information retrieval in Arabic, even though I was less familiar with that language than with Persian, because it was in higher demand. (The two languages are not related, despite the borrowing of a large amount of vocabulary from Arabic into Persian. Arabic is a Semitic language, whereas Persian is Indo-European.) I thought that the relative lack of interest for research into information retrieval in Persian was rather shortsighted, because the invasion of Iraq by America and its allies had just begun. It was inevitable that Iraq would fall, and almost as certain that Iran would become a major regional power with the demise of its archnemesis.
If my parents’ reason for dismissing quantum computing as “worthless” was that it had not led to any practical applications, they should have had no objections to information retrieval in either Arabic or Persian. Instead, it was now these topics which would send my father into a screaming rage. When I casually mentioned that I was studying Persian while having dinner at my parents’ house, my father immediately became very angry and yelled at me that he forbid me from continuing. After I had gone home, my mother telephoned me to tell me how upset my father was and begged me not to upset him any more. And she would remind me of this every time she called me thereafter.
What could I possibly do? My entire purpose behind studying information retrieval in Persian was so that I could use it to deflect my parents’ criticism that my research interests were “not practical” while studying quantum computing which my father had repeatedly declared to be “worthless”. And now I was basically not allowed to study information retrieval in Persian, despite the fact that it was eminently practical, without being given any reason. (I suppose that my mother had given me the reason that the topic “upset [my] father”, but since apparently everything upset him, this essentially conveyed no information.)
I had no choice but to change my academic plans once again on account of my parents. Many parents sacrifice their careers for the sake of their children; but in my family, I was always the one who had to sacrifice my career to appease my parents, and especially my father, who was continually throwing temper tantrums like a two-year-old child. (In the literature on developmental psychology, this phenomenon is called “(parent-child) role reversal”.)
In my efforts to thwart my parents’ continual attempts to destroy my scientific career, I had been operating under the assumption that they were acting under a consistent if incorrect set of beliefs. They had repeatedly told me that my interest in quantum computing was “not practical”, and I actually took them at their word. But when I turned to a topic that no sane person could possibly deny was practical, they attacked me for it anyway, for essentially no reason whatsoever.
In retrospect, I had given them far too much credit in terms of their motivation. Now I think that their intention was simply to punish me for demonstrating creativity and initiative, values which are necessary for science but which are completely antithetical to traditional Chinese culture. They would have punished me no matter what I was interested in, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with quantum computing per se, but rather with the fact that I was not a mindless automaton like they believed my Chinese high school classmates to be. They punished me because they could not legitimately lay claim to credit for the accomplishments that I had achieved by behaving in a manner completely contrary to their wishes. The only way to escape their punishment was to obey them completely and submissively, with no will of my own.
I suppose that this possibility was always on the back of my mind, but I had to act as if it wasn’t true. I had to believe that there was some way I could complete a graduate degree in computer science without their interference causing my failure. And so, in spite of the frustration and pain it caused me, I changed my research topic once again.
– davinci
Notes
- ↑1 My parents had dismissed my scientific interests variously as 「無聊」,「無用」,「唔正經」,「唔實際」,「唔三唔四」, etc.
The literal meaning of 唔三唔四 is “neither three nor four”, correct? I gather that the idiomatic meaning is “useless” or “impractical”, but what’s the story behind it? How are three and four more practical than other numbers?
Actually, I have no idea.
「唔三唔四」 is what you would say in Cantonese and a number of related dialects. A Mandarin speaker would say (and I guess a Cantonese speaker is supposed to write) 「不三不四」. But the expression loses a bit of its charm when spoken/written in this way, because the Cantonese character for “not” 「唔」 contains the character for “five” 「五」 as a phonetic element. In fact, young Hongkies use “5354″ in text messaging to represent 「唔三唔四」.
I tried doing a search for the origin of the expression, but came up with nothing definitive. One theory has it that the expression has to do with the similarity in sound between the characters for “three” 「三」 and “life” 「生」, and “four” 「四」 and “death” 「死」. There are actually quite a few Chinese expressions involving numbers based on this kind of near-homophony, but I don’t think this is one of them.
See here for a modern example from Shanghainese, which I had found by searching for an explanation of 「不三不四」.
There are quite a few other Chinese expressions involving numbers where the numbers seem to have been chosen somewhat arbitrarily. For example, 「七七八八」 is literally “seven seven eight eight” (or “sevens and eights”), but means something like “odds and ends”. My impression is that this idiom is related to the association of “ten” 「十] with “completion” (in expressions such as 「十足] and 「十分]). But if that’s the case, why “sevens and eights” and not “eights and nines”?
I just remembered another expression used by my parents, which is 「古靈精怪」. Its literal meaning refers to a kind of mythological creature, like a hobgoblin. Its idiomatic meaning is “silly” or “frivolous”.
– davinci