My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath

I scrapped my plans for the seminar, and in fact, I essentially did not go to school for several months. Anything that was related to quantum computing became very depressing to me. A series of events related to research into quantum foundations and information, collectively called “Taming the Quantum World”, was scheduled to take place that summer at IQC and PI. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of being surrounded by people who would have told me what a moron my father was, if they had known about his opinions on their research, even though I had had wanted to be there. I also had to avoid the other graduate students at IQC because I didn’t want to hear any discussions about QIP and their plans for going to India.

One of the activities that I undertook to cheer myself up was a hiking trip to the Bruce Peninsula with several people, including Mina, who became my girlfriend over that summer. My parents had thoroughly destroyed my ability even just to be in the presence of my academic colleagues by continually attacking them and their research throughout my life, but despite their persistent efforts they had not managed to eradicate my social life entirely, and I still had friends who supported me.

In the meantime, I applied to have my surname legally changed to “Yonge-Mallo”, after my friends’ mother who had saved my academic career from my parents’ efforts to destroy it in high school. I was determined that, no matter what happened, my father would never again be able to take credit for anything that I did, nor to prevent me from doing whatever I wanted to do. I also started going to counselling.

My parents tried to contact me, but I blocked their telephone number and set up filters to send their e-mail messages directly to the trash (or “/dev/null” in geekspeak), where they belonged. However, my father used different e-mail aliases and a few messages did get through. Every time this happened, I would send the message to the trash without opening it. But merely seeing their invasion of my inbox even for an instant caused me a tremendous amount of pain, and I would not be able to check my e-mail for several days or sometimes weeks afterwards. Naturally, this caused me enormous problems — being in regular e-mail contact is a necessity of modern academic life, and so I essentially could not function. I tried to cope with this by changing my e-mail address several times, but I had to set up e-mail forwarding from my old accounts, and despite the multiple layers of filters the occasional attack from my parents would get through. I became very stressed whenever I checked my e-mail, regardless of whether I had actually received anything from them. So, even after I tried to cut off all contact from my parents, they still managed to completely disrupt my ability to work, just as they had done for so many years before.

At some point, my grandfather visited me with my mother — my father had come with them, but had waited in the parking lot because he was too much of a coward to show his face. My grandfather said that I was bringing shame to the family and that if I did not obey my father, then people would say that I was “ignorant”^[1] even if I had a Ph.D. This was, of course, complete nonsense. And it was yet another example of how authoritarian parents (or grandparent, in this case) focus on negatives rather than positives and use shame rather than encouragement to motivate behaviour. Contrary to his claim, I could see for myself that if other people only knew how my father behaved towards me and what his opinions (if one could even affix such a label to his angrily incoherent rants) were on various scientific and political matters, they would undoubtedly say that he was a complete and utter moron.

What kind of a man, upon hearing from his son’s elementary school teachers that his son was uniquely gifted and that he should encourage his interests, upon learning that university professors wanted to involve his son in scientific research while he was still in high school, upon coming home to find his son with a stack of scientific papers and university textbooks, upon discovering that his son’s skills which he had previously denounced as “worthless” were in fact considered very important by a great many people, would not only fail to demonstrate any gratitude whatsoever for his undeserved good fortune, but react instead by visiting a furious rage upon his son, by using violence and intimidation to prevent his son from making the most of his talents and abilities? If the label “ignorant” is not applied to such a man, then the term has no meaning.

But to a traditional Chinese mentality, it is simply impossible to even entertain the idea that complete submission and obedience to authority is not the highest virtue or an indispensible sign of erudition and culture. In comparison, no one with any familiarity with the Western canon can fail to see its emphasis on individuality and personal autonomy. When one contrasts the foundational literature of the European and Chinese cultures, it is easy to see why modern science originated in Europe rather than in China.

My mother told me that my father had been saying that I was merely “throwing a temper tantrum”^[2]. My father — the crybaby — accusing me of throwing a temper tantrum! It’s comedy gold. It’s almost as absurdly funny as my mother’s threat in our last telephone conversation that my father would never forgive me if I did not obey him and allow them to completely wipe out what I had managed to save of my scientific career from their persistent efforts to destroy it. I had already sacrificed my career numerous times throughout my life to appease my crybaby of a father whenever he threw one of his frequent temper tantrums, and I have never received so much as a word of thanks or even acknowledgement for all that I have had to relinquish because of his wants and needs. What exactly have I ever done to require his forgiveness? Did I need him to forgive me because I had allowed him to get away for so many years with taking credit for my accomplishments which were the direct outcome of my activities that he had opposed? Or was it because I had managed to do so well in school despite the fact that I had to endure his beatings just to study? Besides placing the blame for the situation entirely on me, and minimising the pain and suffering I have had to endure on account of them — two actions which, by the way, are very typical of abusive parents — my mother’s only other concern was that my housemate did not find out about my fight with my parents. I listened to my grandfather and my mother rant at me for hours without saying very much in response until they became exhausted and finally left.

My grandfather called me a few times afterwards, but I could not tolerate being told that I should be ashamed for having disobeyed my father, and cut off contact with him as well. I didn’t really want to do this, because unlike my father, my grandfather had always been kind to me, but our values are simply too incompatible for me to maintain any contact with him.

I came back to school in late 2007, and explained the gist of my situation to Dr. Cleve, but I didn’t give him a lot of details. He gave me a lot of encouragement, and I know he wanted to help me, but I guess he didn’t know how to do so. We worked on a quantum algorithm for evaluating Min-Max trees, which was a very neat extension of the algorithm for And-Or trees, with his former graduate student Dr. Dmitry Gavinsky. I presented this algorithm in January 2008 at TQC^[3], under my new name.

Incidentally, at that time, Pakistan was constantly in the news because of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the country’s upcoming general election. When I was studying Pakistani history and politics in the early to mid-1990s, my father had said that “Nobody will care about Pakistan in ten years.” The fact that I was being constantly reminded of what a moron my father is wherever I went was somewhat depressing, but while I was working I could put this out of my mind.

Over the next several months, I worked with Dr. Cleve on the discretisation of continuous-time quantum algorithms. One outcome of this research was a poster^[4] I presented at the Quantum Computing and Quantum Algorithms Program Review, in Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia, in August of 2008.

But more importantly, it was there that Dr. Cleve personally introduced me to Dr. John Preskill. I began to tell Dr. Preskill how it was his papers that had inspired me to become interested in quantum information when I had read them in high school — and then I didn’t know how to continue the story. What was I supposed to tell him? That I had to hide his papers from my parents like they were contraband because my father thought that cosmology was nonsense and insisted that quantum mechanics had nothing to do with computer science, became enraged whenever he saw any papers on quantum information, and had banned Dr. Preskill’s papers from his house? I should have told him that. I actually think that my father’s insanely inappropriate reaction to physics papers is outrageously funny. But I thought that Dr. Preskill might have reacted with horror, and so I couldn’t the story. This was yet another example of how my parents had put me into a socially awkward situation which would otherwise not have been awkward.

When I thought about the meeting afterwards, I became very depressed. A “normal” person would have followed up “your papers inspired me when I read them in high school” with a story of how he went to university to study the subjects which would enable him to understand deeply the ideas presented in those papers, and then built a scientific career starting from the foundation of exploring those ideas. I felt that for my story to have continued in any other way was to have let Dr. Preskill down. But I had no control over my parents’ behaviour, and I had managed them as best as I could.

Another thing that was very depressing to me at the time was the U.S. presidential primaries. When the candidates were asked what they believed would be the most challenging foreign policy issue the elected President would have to face, they were nearly unanimous in answering Pakistan or Iran. Newspapers and magazines carried articles and commentary on America’s previous dealings with and current policies towards those countries. I couldn’t go anywhere where newspapers, magazines, or books were sold without seeing something about Pakistan or Iran. I couldn’t even read any news web sites online. It was already bad enough that I couldn’t spend any time around scientists without them continually telling me that my father was a moron, but now this sentiment was being echoed by everyone else. I just couldn’t go anywhere or do anything at all without becoming very depressed.

This contributed to a writer’s block that I had already been developing for many years, because when I had been writing about the exact same topics in high school, my father had kept pressuring me to stop and had told me that I was “wasting [my] time” and that “nobody will care about” the things that I wrote. But evidently, a lot of people are interested in them now. The fact that I had spent so much effort on something only to have that effort dismissed as a “waste of time” and the product of that effort disparaged as “worthless”, and then to have been coerced into giving it up only to witness so many people coming to realise its importance, was extremely painful to me. And this had happened not once but twice — first with my interest in the physics of computation, and then with my interest in the social changes happening in the Muslim world. And it was on the verge of happening for a third time before I finally put a stop to it.

I was supposed to be writing my Research Proposal. But every time I sat down to write, all I could think about were all the things my parents had done to hold me back and to prevent me from becoming successful. Despite having cut off contact from my parents, I still behaved as though my father was watching me over my shoulder. I simply could not write.

For the most part, I could not work either. I was still doing research with Dr. Cleve on discretising continuous-time quantum algorithms, along with several other colleagues. But I felt very depressed whenever we had a meeting at the Perimeter Institute, or even in the Institute for Quantum Computing building, where I still could not do any work in my office because of my mother’s previous attacks on my colleagues.

Because checking my e-mail made me very stressed, as I have described above, I could not really participate effectively in research with my collaborators. I was very involved with the research in the beginning, but as things progressed, I fell further and further behind, until I couldn’t catch up. Much of the collaboration was carried out through e-mail, and by the time I had downloaded a draft of the paper and read through it — the content made me depressed as well — several other drafts had already passed through my inbox with numerous changes. My inability to focus made me very depressed, which of course only further eroded my concentration, leading to a vicious circle. When I continued to receive e-mails from my parents, I became unable to touch my e-mail inbox at all, which meant that I basically stopped participating in research altogether. The paper^[5] was eventually posted to the arXiv, but by that time I hadn’t had anything to do with it for several months.

Besides the difficulty I personally had with checking e-mail, and the fact that my role in the collaboration was not as large as I felt it should have been, another aspect of the collaborative process that depressed me was that it reminded me of my writings in high school about how technology would change the way scientific research was conducted and communicated. The fact that papers were being written through e-mail and were posted to publicly accessible archives was interesting, but these practices had already existed when I was in high school, although they had become more widespread since then. I thought that much more could be done with recent technologies, but it would require a change in the culture of scientific collaboration. However, the person or people who led this change would have to be already well-established, and thus be in a position to convince others to join them — and that person wasn’t me.

Other than joint paper-writing, another collaborative task that I thought would benefit from more recent technologies than e-mail was group discussions. The graduate students at IQC, or at least some segments thereof, would often engage in scientific discussions through e-mails with long lists of recipients. I also knew that some of the researchers at the Perimeter Institute engaged in a similar practice. Clearly, e-mail was not the best medium for group discussions, for various reasons. For one, there was no common archive that everyone could refer to later. Anyone who joined a conversation after it had already begun would have to be forwarded all of the previous messages. Furthermore, some of the questions that people from different fields asked one another were probably quite common, and I think it would benefit the quantum computing community to have an archive of these along with their answers. There had been attempts to use other technologies for group discussions, such as mailing lists, newsgroups, and bulletin board systems, but none of these seemed to have caught on. Of course, all of these technologies have actually been around for a long time, but a modern bulletin board system solves one problem (in addition to a shared archive) that I have always found made scientific discussions through e-mail very difficult: the ability to write and display properly formatted equations.

Since I couldn’t work on any research related to quantum computing, the places where I worked — the University of Waterloo, the Institute for Quantum Computing, and the Perimeter Institute — all made me very depressed. I also didn’t want to be around anyone, because I didn’t want to have to explain to people why I had changed my surname or what my situation was, or why I couldn’t focus on my work. The fact that I could neither check my e-mail nor come to work created a feedback loop — I would be out of contact for days, and then I didn’t want to come back because then I would have to explain to people where I had been. I tried to work by myself at home, but this was basically impossible.

– davinci