The next several posts were especially difficult for me to write, but they are also the most important in my autobiographical series. Every post in the series up to now had been written for the purpose of setting up these ones.
In the previous posts, I have described the damage caused by my parents’ anti-intellectualism and their hatred of science to my scientific career. They have been persecuting me for my interest in science, and more broadly for my intellectual interests in general, ever since they came to Canada. They kept up their attacks on my scientific research throughout high school, right through university, and even into graduate school. By the time I entered the Ph.D. program in computer science and switched into quantum computing as my research area — which my parents had forbidden me to study under pain of being disowned — the regular day-to-day activities of a scientific researcher, such as reading papers or having discussions with colleagues, would cause me to experience physical pain.
Obviously, this prevented me from focusing on my work or making any progress in my research. A question that naturally arises is, “Why would you put so much effort into doing something that is so painful to you?” Or, equivalently, “Why not be doing something else?” I am not a masochist, and like most people I prefer to avoid pain whenever possible. And, with a “prestigious” engineering degree, I could have been making a lot of money, which was one of the main reasons my parents had forced me to enter the Engineering Science program in the first place. But no matter where I went or what I did there would have been no escape from the pain they had caused me.
I have seen for myself what happened to some of my elementary and high school peers who were diagnosed as gifted and who have authoritarian parents who suppressed their talents and creativity and forced them into careers that they did not enjoy. Today, they may have high-paying jobs or what appear to be successful careers, although it’s obvious that they’re not happy and resent their parents. But they are unable to express this, because they’re constantly bombarded, primarily by their parents, but also by their relatives and community, with the message that they owed their every success to their parents and ought to be eternally grateful to them.
This was a point that I understood clearly in high school, and had vaguely intuited even in elementary school. Even if I became very depressed as a result of being prevented by my parents from achieving my own goals, I would still be no worse off than if I had allowed them to bully me into submitting to their wishes and then became depressed anyway. Or, to quote the words of my allusion to Gandhi in the previous post:
The way I saw it was this: if the British were going to maintain a tax on salt that was so heavy it would eventually bankrupt you and lead to your arrest for the non-payment of taxes, then you might as well make salt illegally and be arrested for doing that instead.
And so, in spite of the crippling disadvantage of being continually attacked by my parents for my academic interests, I continued my struggle to succeed in academia. I could have been doing something else entirely, but I think that I would have suffered from about the same level of depression and about the same degree of pain anyway. Nevertheless, I did occasionally falter, as I wrote about in the previous post.
Dr. Cleve and I began to work on developing quantum algorithms. At the same time, I tried to find a way to justify my studies to my parents, or at the very least to disguise it from them. They had never retracted their threat to disown me for studying the physics of computation, and obviously my research fell within its scope.
I tried to tie my research in quantum computing to an “acceptable” topic. My first presentation in quantum computing was titled “Quantum Programming Languages”, but I didn’t really follow up on that. While many graduate students are eager for opportunities to give presentations and publish papers, and generally to “get their names out”, I had to be very careful about what my name was associated with whenever it appeared in public.
My father had actually been displeased when my name appeared in my last year of high school as a co-author on a paper in the Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the outcome of my participation in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program. He had insisted during the entire course of the project that it was a “waste of time”, because according to him I would never encounter astrophysics again in my career. Even though Dr. Percy wrote the text of the paper, I contributed to the analysis and generated some of the graphs, and so it was my first “real” scientific publication, intended for an audience larger than just my teachers and classmates. A good parent would have praised it as an accomplishment, but my father took it as an affront: it was a symbol that I had ignored his opinion that the entire project was “worthless”.
I did not have any scientific publications during my undergraduate years, partly because I was so busy, but mostly because I had been criticised and punished so heavily for science writing in high school. But I did write and publish some articles on subjects other than science, and when my father found them, he again criticised me for “wasting [my] time”. From the perspective of advancing my career, I suppose it’s true that it would have been a better use of my time to have been writing scientific papers instead. But he was the one who had turned me away from doing this with his attacks on my science writing in high school. In graduate school, I got one paper out of each of my Master’s theses, which is basically the bare minimum.
When I joined the Institute for Quantum Computing, I was asked to provide a short biography. I kept it very plain, because I knew that my father would find it. By that time, it had become clear that he was actually searching the Internet for my name on a regular basis. He e-mailed me shortly after the profile appeared to criticise it, and to tell me what he thought should have been on it. It was too “plain” — but of course, the entire reason it was so plain was because I had written it that way so he would not have anything to criticise. All the interesting things that I have done in my life were things that upset or angered him.
I wrote in a previous post that, shortly after I came to Waterloo, my father suddenly suggested to me that I should write an article for Scientific American. The reason it was so puzzling to me was that he had always attacked me for writing about science before. (And if I had acted on his suggestion and actually managed to publish an article in Scientific American, it would not have surprised me if he criticised me for it afterwards.)
It’s extremely difficult for me to understand how some people can be such bad parents. Is it not simply common sense that continually attacking someone for doing something would cause him or her to lose interest in doing it? When I started my Ph.D. program, my parents criticised me for not having enough publications and presentations on my résumé, but they had been attacking me for writing about science and giving presentations since I was in high school.
It may not seem that way to anyone else, but I took a big risk in giving a presentation on “Quantum Programming Languages” and in allowing my name to appear on the Institute for Quantum Computing’s web site (although I didn’t really have a choice about the latter — I couldn’t very well have asked to be removed from their members list). I was fortunate that my father only criticised me and did not resume his threats to disown me — that would come later.
I actually tried very hard to connect my research to control systems, or at least to engineering. This was important to me, and was about much more than just connecting my research to a topic acceptable to my parents. I had disappointed a lot of people by leaving engineering who had expended a lot of time and effort to teach me skills that they believed I would be putting to use. I felt that I was letting them down by not doing this. I tried to cheer myself up with the thought that quantum control would become an important field once it became clear which technologies are the most suitable for building scalable quantum computers, and that I would be in a better position to evaluate these technologies than researchers with a background in only computer science (and especially theorists).
The most sensible way to make use of my engineering background would have been to learn about some of the experiments which were being carried out at IQC, and to summarise them for my computer scientist colleagues. But I could not do this, because my mother kept insisting that I should not work with any Iranians. Many of the Iranians at IQC are engineers, and since I refused to discriminate on the basis of nationality, the only way to satisfy my mother’s demand was to avoid all engineers at IQC altogether. This was, in fact, what I did, much to my regret, as I have already written about.
– davinci
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