My parents had been attacking me for years for observing that religion would once again become important in global affairs, that the post-Cold War division of the world would be into blocs defined by religion and culture, and that in particular the resurgence of Islam would have a large part to play in this. Their reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the way they began to treat me thereafter, perfectly illustrate the enormous gulf between traditional Chinese culture and the culture of science.
In science, progress is made through the elimination of faulty hypotheses which are discarded whenever they are shown not to agree with observations of reality. Science therefore demands certain traits of its practitioners: the readiness to alter one’s opinions, no matter how deeply held, when they are contradicted by incoming evidence; and the willingness to admit one’s errors. An individual scientist may be unwilling to abandon a pet theory, but for the most part, science celebrates the desertion of wrong ideas; when one studies the history of science, the really major discoveries have been hailed as such precisely because they overturned previously cherished beliefs. These traits are not only lacking in traditional Chinese culture — which values obedience, harmony, reverence for authority, and the concept of “face” — but are actually antithetical to it.
I think that it would be extraordinarily difficult to acquire these traits in one’s professional life without having them permeate one’s personal life as well. But I guess that at least some scientists of Chinese descent actually do adhere to completely different sets of values between their personal and professional lives. I don’t know how they can cope with the cognitive dissonance, but I know that I can never do it. (I suppose that the existence of palaeontologists who are also young Earth creationists shows that it is possible to study science while maintaining very some anti-scientific attitudes, but I think it must be rather schizophrenic.)
For me, it is quite obvious that when a person has been shown to be wrong, he should change his views accordingly, and perhaps even apologise if the context requires it. I suspect that almost everyone I know would agree with this maxim in principle (even if they might not actually put it into practice when they are the erring party). And I think it would also be fairly obvious to most people that the 9/11 terrorist attacks vindicated my side of my disagreement with my parents.
But that was not the way they saw it. For a while they remained silent, and I harboured a secret hope that they had realised how mistaken they had been; I misinterpreted their silence as a sign that they were too ashamed to apologise to me. How wrong I was. Instead, once their criticisms of my interest in the Muslim world resumed after some time, it became abundantly clear that during the period of silence they had actually been expecting me to apologise to them.
Their way of thinking is so alien to me that I am not sure I could ever do it justice. They have never made any effort whatsoever to actually explain it to me, because — of course — it is perfectly obvious that it was I who had wronged them in having been right about the geopolitical significance of the turmoil in the Muslim world. But as far as I am able to reconstruct it, the chain of “reasoning” which led to this conclusion was as follows: whatever my parents told me had to be right, merely by virtue of their being my parents; I had violated the sacred order of the universe by thinking for myself instead of obsequiously agreeing with them; the 9/11 attacks were a further sign of my impudence.
Now, one might object that my parents could not possibly have been so insane as to have actually held me personally responsible for 9/11. But whether they did so is actually completely irrelevant; the point is that they behaved as if they did.
In previous posts, I have described how my father would force me to act — at least publicly — the way he wanted me to by threatening to beat or actually beating me. Naturally, as I grew older (and bigger), this became less and less effective, and so the emphasis shifted away from the ineffectual physical threats of my father to the psychological blackmail of my mother, which had retained their power.
There are a number of expressions in Cantonese which don’t translate smoothly into English, but the sentiment expressed is basically “You’re angering your father to death” or “You’re killing your father by making him angry”. My mother used these on me quite often, and occasionally my father would use them as well (but with “mother” in place of “father”, of course). In a way, I actually preferred being beaten to being told that I was killing my parents. I had learned how to endure a beating, but what could I possibly do to not anger my father? Everything that I did to make myself more successful, or which reflected my success, angered him. I suppose that the only thing which I hadn’t tried was to be a failure, but I suspect that he would have been angered by that as well.
I have read that abusive behaviour is often inherited, and that many people whose parents were abusive towards them in turn become abusive towards their own children. For the life of me I cannot understand this — when I have children, I would never speak or act towards them the way my parents have towards me. But I have personally observed this inheritance in action: my maternal grandmother often spoke very harshly towards my mother, often telling her that she wished that she had never been born. And while I had never seen my father’s parents being abusive towards him, my paternal grandmother continually criticised my uncle — my father’s younger brother — in a way that was very similar to my father’s behaviour towards me. If I had to venture a guess, my father’s emphasis on obedience above everything else was the result of an ingrained lifelong habit of doing whatever was necessary to avoid the treatment that his brother had suffered at the hands of his mother. But my attempts to understand the roots of their behaviour did not really exonerate them; rather, it made them more even more culpable in my eyes. They should have been defending me from that kind of behaviour, not visiting it upon me.
In any case, my parents blamed me for 9/11 and all of the events that followed from it. Whenever I spoke on the phone with my mother, she would tell me how upset my father was because of some incident in the news involving Muslims or the Muslim world, as if I had been personally responsible for it. I had made him upset because of my interests in those subjects, which I had stubborned refused to relinquish in spite of his impeccable judgment that they were “worthless”. And what more evidence did I need that he had been right than to watch the news? Every time there was a terrorist attack or other violent incident involving Muslims, my mother reminded me of how right my father had been and how I should have obeyed him. They apparently considered the coverage of a subject by the news almost every night to be the most damning evidence that it was “worthless”. I don’t know how one can reason with such people; I think I would have had better luck reasoning with a brick wall.
My parents also attacked my friendship and association with people from the Middle East and Muslim countries, despite the fact that I had repeatedly explained to them that most of them were actually in Canada to escape from sharia-governed societies or environments marred by religious fanaticism. Many of them were former Muslims — usually atheists or Christians — and even those who self-identified as Muslims were of the kind who sought to better understand the historical and human roots of their religion, and appreciated the opportunities in Canada to do so which were unavailable in their countries of origin. To my knowledge, none of my friends held values which are incompatible with existence in a secular liberal democracy. But these things did not matter to my parents, who excoriated anyone who came from what they perceived as “Muslim” parts of the world. I don’t think it has ever occurred to them to ask themselves how unfair it would have been if someone had held them accountable for the actions of the Communist Part of China, whose takeover of Hong Kong had been their reason for immigrating to Canada. The definition of “terrorism” is the use of threats and violence as a means of coercion, and in my parents’ accusations that I was consorting with terrorists and in their threats to disown me if I did not dissociate from my friends, they fed me a steady diet rich in irony.
In the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, numerous career opportunities became available to me on account of the fact that I had managed to get away with doing so many things that my parents had discouraged, forbidden, or tried to prevent me from doing. But I could not take advantage of them — again, because of my parents. Every time I even mentioned certain career possibilities, my father would fly into a screaming rage, and my mother would beg me not to upset him. There are certain career paths that require a very supportive and understanding family because of the amount of stress involved, and I knew that I could never satisfy that pre-requisite because of my parents. They were basically using up my entire capacity for stress management by themselves, and I had nothing left to spare.
– davinci
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