The locations of some of the upcoming conferences and events at the time were also a source of depression for me. I wrote in a previous post that none of the people my supervisor worked with were Iranians, but one of his co-authors, whose papers I was studying, did have a connection to Iran. Dr. Barry Sanders of the University of Calgary, who shared my belief that it was very important for scientists from Iran and the West to interact with each other, was instrumental in playing a part in organising the International Iran Conference on Quantum Information, which was to take place in September 2007 on Kish Island in Iran. And the QIP workshop 2008, which was actually in December of 2007, was held in New Delhi, India.
Now these were countries that I had wanted to visit for personal reasons — Iran because I believed in promoting scientific exchange between that country and the West, and because it would have given me an opportunity to practise my rusting Persian, and India because it is the birthplace of Buddhism (although, technically, the birthplace of the Buddha according to tradition, Lumbini, is within the borders of present-day Nepal). Graduate students are often inspired to work to complete a paper for a conference because they wish to visit the place where it is held, which is why conference organisers are always trying to choose interesting venues. If it had not been for my parents, I would have had two reasons to be inspired to make significant progress in my research. Instead, they had turned these into disincentives, because I knew that if I had attended either of these conferences, they had ready denunciations to hurl at me.
If I had gone to Iran, my mother would most certainly have cited this as evidence that I had lied to her. And if I had gone to India, I would not have done so without making the “Buddhist circuit”, and my parents would have criticised this as a waste of time and money. This is yet another example of how counterproductive authoritarian parenting is. My parents were persistently ordering me to make progress in my Ph.D. degree, but were continually removing the natural incentives I had to do so and replacing them with disincentives instead. I dreaded the idea of being asked to go to these conferences, because it would again have put me into a position where my motivations are in conflict with what other people expect them to be.
For the next several months, I tried to work but couldn’t really concentrate. I thought it was amazing that Dr. Cleve had intuited the importance of the Nand tree evaluation problem for the development of quantum algorithms. (Why Nand trees and not some other data structure? I guess I had some understanding of this, but it was not enough.) I was disappointed that I didn’t make any progress on the question he had assigned me before it was solved by someone else. I suppose that this is not an unusual experience in graduate school. But it is very tough to go through that experience while being already depressed for other reasons. It is a privilege to work with the top people in a field, but there is also the danger of succumbing to the thought that “I would never be this good” when one is always in close proximity to the best.
My parents escalated their attacks on me. I have already written about my mother’s accusations that I was lying to her in a previous post. My father started yelling at me on the phone for my lack of progress, and insisted that I should be writing my thesis, while insulting my supervisor for what he perceived to be the insufficient application of pressure on me. My father was always playing armchair professor, and I’ve often wondered if resentment and jealousy of the fact that I was already working on research with university professors in high school were major factors in his animosity towards my interest in science. (He has a Ph.D., and was a lecturer in Hong Kong, but has not held any university posts since coming to Canada.)
I don’t quite know how to describe the feeling that arises from being attacked for not doing something by the same person who had forbidden and actively tried to prevent me from doing that very thing. My father is the man who had dismissed my interest in the physics of computation as “worthless” and a “waste of time”, screamed at me, beat me, and threatened me for refusing to abandon my interest in it, knocked my books off the table, thrown them at me, and hit me with them while I was trying to read, ripped up papers that I was reading, locked me out of the house for going to the university library to study, forbid me from attending university and blackmailed me by threatening the same of my brother unless I complied with his wishes, and told me that he would disown me if I ever studied the subject again. This is the same man who was now criticising me for not writing a Ph.D. thesis on the subject he had threatened to disown me for studying.
I suppose that, to be fair to him, the impossibility of simultaneously fulfilling all of his demands was not quite his fault. If I had stuck to electrical or computer engineering, chosen a “conventional” topic for my research which has already been studied to death (and especially if by researchers of Chinese descent), worked with a supervisor of Chinese descent in a research group with graduate students who were also only (or at least mostly) of Chinese descent, and gave boring and completely uninspiring lectures to my students, then I would have satisfied all of my parents’ demands, and they might not find anything to criticise. But there are already plenty of people who behave in the way my parents demanded of me, and the world will not miss one more; and if they were so desperate to have a child who was like this, they should just go and adopt one of them. And anyway, I have always known that even if I had done everything that they demanded of me, they would have criticised me anyway, and I would still have been depressed and unproductive.
Nevertheless, I will admit that it is entirely my fault that I had put myself into a situation where my parents’ demands had actually become impossible to satisfy simultaneously, when I switched into quantum computing. This was an act of mental jujitsu, of using the energy of their own attacks against them. They were simply too persistent for me to hold them back forever. By pitting their demands against one another, I became paralysed, but I guaranteed that I would not retrogress.
This state of affairs could not last forever. In May of 2007, I planned to give a seminar which was a part of my Ph.D. degree requirement. I had to let my parents know about it ahead of time, because it was required to be publicly announced anyway. They called to interrogate me about its contents, as well as who I was working with, but I refused to tell them. At first I deflected their questions with self-referential answers: “things I’m working on”, “people I’m working with”, etc. When this failed to satisfy them, I responded with silence. (To use an American expression, I pleaded the Fifth Amendment.) My father screamed at me and demanded answers, and I listened patiently but did not say a single word in response.
He hung up on me.
I called my parents back and my mother answered the phone. She told me that my father had threatened to no longer acknowledge me as his son, if I did not provide detailed answers to his questions. She also demanded that I cut off all contact with my colleagues, and said that if I did not do as they had ordered, then he would never forgive me. And she also urged me not to let anyone else know about their threats. (My father had been screaming so loudly on the phone that I think she was concerned my housemate would overhear.) I refused to comply with their demands, told her that I no longer wished to speak with them, and ended the conversation.
I felt very, very sick. But I also felt very liberated and relieved. I have had this axe hanging over my head ever since I came to Waterloo to study quantum computing, and it had finally fallen. My parents had resumed their threats to disown me for my academic interests. I have regretted ever since the end of high school that I had not run away from home when my parents had threatened to disown me then for the same reason. As far as I am concerned, I am not their son, and I haven’t been ever since I was very young. No parent should behave towards their child the way my parents have behaved towards me. Anyone who does does not deserved to be called a “parent” — “sperm donor” and “egg-and-womb contributor”, maybe, but certainly not “father” or “mother”.
My counsellor asked me why I had called my parents back. I didn’t have an answer then, and I still don’t have an answer now. But I guess nobody can accuse me of not having given my parents every possible opportunity to apologise to me for all the abuse they have heaped on me over the years.
– davinci
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