When I entered graduate school to study discrete-event control systems, I once again put up a web site with my interests and my writings. As a part of that, I experimented with automatic translation, but the state of the technology was pretty poor at the time, and so it didn’t work out. What I ended up with was a web site with sections in four languages — English, Chinese, Klingon, and Hindi — and different content in each.
I featured a number of projects on the web site which had nothing to do with school. I posted articles on Buddhism and in Klingon, discussed the design of a really “old school” computer game, and reviewed books. The book reviews page was particularly interesting because I used it to hint at some parts of my life and some of my interests without being explicit; for example, Evelyn Lau’s Runaway was the autobiographical account of a Chinese Canadian girl’s escape from her abusive parents, and V. S. Naipaul’s travelogues recounted his observations about the malaise in the Muslim world.
When I was at the Systems Control Group at the University of Toronto, about half of the graduate students (at least those who showed up in the lab regularly) were Iranian. I learned Persian very quickly by listening to their conversations. So a rumour started about me that I could learn a language just by listening to other people speak it for a week. The rumour was very amusing to me, and I wish it were true. But the reason that Persian was relatively easy for me to pick up was that I had learned (and forgotten) how to speak Urdu previously, and had been writing software to parse Urdu, Arabic, and Persian texts for a number of years. Also, I could memorise songs and poems and recite them without, at first, understanding their meanings. My Iranian friends were very impressed by this, and taught several songs to me.
Some time in the summer of 2001, I added a Persian section to my web site. At around that time, my father criticised me for a web site filled with “frivolity”, and told me that any employer who saw it would laugh at me and not hire me. I knew that was nonsense, because my web site was in fact getting a lot of attention. People e-mailed me about various things on it from all over the world, so at least some people found it interesting, and perhaps these included my future employers. But I took it down while I planned a way to put up a “serious” web site — presumably one that looked as bland as everyone else’s — while still featuring the content that I wanted to showcase.
Then the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened. And V. S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature. My parents were unusually quiet for the next little while.
– davinci
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