The University of Waterloo is run on a system of three terms (or semesters) of four months each per academic year. The first term actually went very well for me, right up until near the end of the term, when I made the mistake of consenting to a visit from my parents.

The first thing that I did right away was to sign up for the Introduction to Quantum Computing course, which coincidentally was scheduled for the very first morning after I arrived in Waterloo. It was taught by Dr. Michele Mosca and Dr. Raymond Laflamme, the latter of whom was a graduate student under Stephen Hawking. I felt very embarrassed around him, because my father had insulted both him and his former supervisor. One of the comments he had made about Dr. Hawking when I was in high school, after he had discovered my interest in his books and papers, was the rhetorical question, “What idiot would want to study under him to learn such frivolous things?”^[1]

So my father had indirectly called Dr. Laflamme, who was now my professor, an “idiot” (傻瓜), and had also dismissed his research as “frivolous” (無聊). This made me very self-conscious around him, despite the fact that there was no way he could’ve found out about my father’s aspersions, nor was my father ever likely to notice that I was in a class taught by a former graduate student of Dr. Hawking. My embarrassment was therefore quite irrational, especially of course since I disagreed with my father’s sentiments; but then again, I suppose that my depression itself is completely irrational. Nevertheless, this was the first of many instances in which my parents had placed me in a socially awkward situation since my arrival in Waterloo. Dr. Laflamme was also the director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, in which I would later work, and so my father had effectively insulted my future boss while I was still in high school.

Another course I took was Formal Languages and Number Theory, taught by Dr. Jeff Shallit. Besides wanting to learn more about the topics covered by the the course (topics which my father had dismissed as “worthless” and having “nothing to do with computer science” when I was in high school), I had also wanted to meet Dr. Shallit, who is a well-known critic of creationism and the intelligent design movement. To explain why I had wanted to meet him, I shall have to make a digression.

My own interest in creationism stems from a broader fascination with historical negationism by religious believers, and with the role of this revisionism in the downfall of civilisations. Creationism is only one aspect of a much larger complex of myths held by certain Christians who attribute all of the accomplishments of Western civilisation to Christianity. These Christians maintain that the United States was “founded as a Christian nation” and that Christianity is the cornerstone of modern science. The infamous Wedge Document, a manifesto produced by the Discovery Institute, a major American creationist think tank which aims to replace the methodological materialism in science with a theistic paradigm, exemplifies this view. It begins:

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

While it is true that all of the Founding Fathers were nominally Christian, several prominent ones were Deists or Unitarians (and vociferous ones), and the founding documents drew inspiration from sources other than Christianity, such as Freemasonry. Most of them were not the kind of Christian that a modern evangelical might imagine them to be. And while modern science indeed originated in Christian Europe, and all of the early modern scientists were Christians (and many of them quite devout), the rise of modern science was the result of a combination of many factors including, for example, the freedom to question religious doctrine and authority.

It cannot be denied that one of the pre-requisites for the Scientific Revolution was a belief in an orderly and rational universe which can be comprehended by the human mind through reason, and that historically it was Christianity which had supplied the basis for this belief. But clearly the belief can and does exist independently of Christianity, and a large number of scientists became inclined towards Deism or atheism once they had the option of formulating their own religious opinions. To me, the suggestion that science should “return” to Christian theism (or turn to a belief in some unspecified intelligent designer) is as misguided as a proposition that all books should be printed in Chinese, on the grounds that papermaking was originally motivated by the needs of the Chinese imperial court and spread through the transmission of scriptures by Buddhist missionaries.

But this sort of historical negationism is nothing new. The Golden Age of Islam came about because the early Muslims conquered lands which were already ancient centres of learning, and assimilated and further developed the knowledge of their vanquished Persian, Byzantine, and Indian subjects, as well as Chinese and other foes. Some Muslim scientists during this period might be considered orthodox, while many were agnostic, skeptical, or even heretical, but they were nevertheless sponsored by liberal patrons. The decline of science in the Muslim world started with the tightening of the grip of a newly minted orthodoxy, and the creeping acceptance of the myth that all pre-Islamic and non-Islamic societies were in a state of ignorance and had nothing to offer to Muslims. And yet, when I discussed the history of science with university students from Muslim backgrounds, they had inevitably been taught by their religious authorities that Islam was the true source of science, and that the scientific prowess and the political and economic might of the Muslim world began to fade only when Muslims started to stray from orthodoxy and introduced innovations. This is the exact opposite of what is evident from the historical record.

When I observe the creationist movement in the United States and Canada, I cannot help but compare it with the anti-rationalism which centuries ago put an end to the development of science in the Muslim world, a setback from which it has never recovered. Both offered a pat and simplistic explanation of their respective societies’ ascendence and decline, explanations which appealed to the emotions of religious believers by affirming their membership in a higher civilisation without actually requiring them to make the difficult effort of contributing to the sustenance of one. (One can go to any number of Internet forums where the theory of evolution is discussed to witness the number and intensity of attacks on it from people who can barely string together a sentence, let alone make a coherent argument. They are certain that evolution is wrong, quite apparently without having studied the subject at all, because their religious leaders had told them so. If only they would put that energy and time towards actually advancing real scientific knowledge.) I don’t think too many people have remarked on this similarity. It amazes me that the followers of each of these two major world religions seem oblivious to what they can learn from the history of the other: Muslims that intellectual freedom, including religious freedom, is a necessary condition for scientific advancement, and Christians that the attribution of all good things to a rigid adherence to orthodoxy is a sure sign of a civilisation’s demise.

While Dr. Shallit’s criticisms of creationism focused on the misuse of information theory, complexity theory, and other ideas from computer science and mathematics by its proponents, my interest was mainly in creationism as a part of a larger reaction by certain Christian groups to the perceived eviction of Christianity from a pedestal of privilege in Western civilisation. But in any case, we shared a concern in the problem of how to effectively communicate science and rational thinking to people who might be priorly prejudiced due to their religious beliefs, and I was curious to hear his views. This was the sort of question my father had always dismissed as “worthless” and told me to stop asking in high school, because — accordingly to him — I would not do well in university otherwise, since it was “irrelevant”. But Dr. Shallit is both interested in these questions and a respected professor of computer science, and it was good simply to be in the company of someone who reminded me that once again my father had absolutely no clue about the characteristics of the kind of people who are successful in academia.

I did very well in both courses throughout most of the term. (I also had a third course, Artificial Intelligence, but that wasn’t a subject that my father had objected to, so I wasn’t worried about it.) I actually felt that I should have known the material much better, considering that I had been studying both subjects since high school. But of course, there were gaps of months or years during which I didn’t, or couldn’t, touch them. I was very much encouraged by a classmate who was in both courses with me. She called me a “genius”. Actually, she told me that someone else had called me a “genius”, but in a way that implied that she agreed with the assessment. A lot of guys had called me that while I was at the University of Toronto, but I hadn’t heard it from many girls (or more properly, young women) since high school, and it made me very happy. (I guess that makes me a sexist.) Incidentally, she’s also Iranian, adding yet another Iranian to the tally of those who have encouraged or supported me in school. She also inspired me to learn more Persian poetry.

I had been putting off any visits from my parents since the beginning of the term, because I thought that once they realised what I was studying in Waterloo, they would try to stop me. They had already chastised me for switching out of engineering into computer science instead of continuing with a Ph.D. in engineering, because I would have to “waste time” establishing myself in an entirely new field. But from my point of view, it was the last half of high school, my entire undergraduate degree, and a lot of things that followed from that which had been the waste of time. There was quite literally nothing in the Engineering Science program that I would later need for graduate school except for things that I either had already studied in high school against my parents’ wishes (and enduring their dismissal of them as “worthless” as well as their threats and beatings while doing so), or would have learned on my own anyways, and in a far better environment. The things that would be of central importance to my graduate research were precisely the very things that my parents had derided as “worthless” and had tried to prevent me from studying in high school and in university. I had, by that point, wasted close to a decade of my life trying to get back into what I had wanted to study in high school in the first place. And yet these very people who had derailed my career through the use of violence had the gall to complain to me that I was unfocused and wasting my time. If it hadn’t been for their interference, I could have been doing what is now my graduate research while I was still in high school.

Naturally, I did not want to see them, but they insisted on coming to visit me, and I relented towards the end of the term when there was nothing left but projects and final exams. I needed to know what I would be able to get away with in the coming terms. I was determined to study quantum computing, which my father had explicitly forbidden me from studying since high school on pain of being disowned. I was perfectly prepared to do research on information retrieval as my main area while working on quantum computing on the sly, and the most sensible topic would have been information retrieval in languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, which was both very topical and something I had been working on for a number of years. The problem, of course, was that since 9/11 my father would become extremely upset at the mention of anything having to do with Muslims or the Muslim world. So I had to strike this delicate balance between secretly studying something that my parents had threatened to disown me for studying while publicly studying something else that would cause my father to scream at me and my mother to continually nag me to stop. In retrospect, my success was quite unlikely, but I never thought about that at the time.

Whenever my parents asked me what I was studying, I would leave the answer very vague because I didn’t want to hear what they had to say about it. I would just tell them that I was studying “computer science”. I really didn’t want to hear them tell me that what I was studying had “nothing to do with computer science”, especially since I was actually enrolled in a computer science program. I had also kept a very low profile since arriving in Waterloo, for example essentially abandoning my web site. I just didn’t want to give them any excuses to criticise me. I think that a large part of the purpose of their visit was to determine what they believed I must have been hiding from them.

I could have continued to hide what I was studying from them when they came to visit, but I chose instead to reveal everything in a dramatic fashion. I deliberately put “Mike and “Ike” (the textbook used in the quantum computing course) on a table in the middle of the room, surrounded by materials on formal languages, finite automata, Arabic, Persian, and Islamic studies. (I should have taken a photograph, but I suppose that the significance of the arrangement would not have been apparent to anyone but myself.)

The climax of this story is not as exciting as it might have been. When my father saw my display, he picked up “Mike and Ike”, flipped through it a bit, then asked, rather flippantly, “What’s the use of your studying this kind of thing?”^[2] I didn’t answer his question, and he didn’t notice the rest of my display. I suppose that I should count myself lucky that he didn’t scream at me or threaten to disown me, but I became very depressed after my parents left, and couldn’t focus on my studies for weeks afterwards. I think that I actually became depressed because he didn’t threaten to disown me. He had been screaming at me and beating me throughout high school for studying basically exactly the topics covered in that book, and insisting that they had “nothing to do with computer science”. And here I was, taking a course on quantum computing in computer science (actually, it was cross-listed in physics, computer science, and combinatorics and optimisation), and there was even a textbook on the subject. His reaction was much less severe than I had anticipated. I don’t know if it’s quite right to say that I was disappointed with his reaction — I obviously didn’t want to be screamed at or threatened. Rationally, I should have been happy that he hadn’t reacted more violently, but in fact I felt just the opposite.

Coincidentally, the outbreak of SARS happened at around this time, and because I was feeling very sick and had recently been to some places with a high concentration of people from Hong Kong and China, I used that as an excuse to stay away from school for a couple of weeks. But I knew that my condition was due to my parents’ visit; and from then on, I would become physically ill whenever I saw them.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people

I should perhaps go back a little and explain why the demographics of my graduate school labmates was noteworthy. Throughout my undergraduate years in Engineering Science, my father had been harassing me about my supposed inability to compete with students from mainland China. This was, of course, complete nonsense. I don’t recall many students from a mainland Chinese background who didn’t drop out by second year. The majority of them had formed a clique, and worked and socialised only with each other. As soon as a few of them started dropping out, most of them dropped out because they no longer had their support group. The only ones who made it past second year were those who did not restrict their coalitions to classmates from a similar background — in other words, those who adapted to become more like their Canadian and Westernised classmates. I had only one classmate of Chinese descent who had comparably high marks, and he was fairly Westernised (and I think he might have been born in Canada or the United States).

In any case, my father held what he imagined to be the typical student from mainland China to be the epitome of the university student: someone who had no goals aside from maximising his grade point average and spent all his time on only that and nothing else. Never mind the fact that I could clearly see for myself that those of my classmates who actually had his kind of mentality were all struggling to even pass, and failing — he insisted that I should behave more like them. Furthermore, he declared that, while I did not believe him now, I would soon find out in graduate school how right he was.

I had actually thought a lot about the demographics of my future colleagues while I was in high school, but at that time I had wanted to study what would now be called quantum computing, and had no intention of entering into engineering. I believed that my future colleagues would be mostly white, largely secular, and with a somewhat disproportionately high number coming from Jewish backgrounds — these were the typical demographics in many cutting-edge fields of science. On the other hand, those of Chinese descent would be underrepresented, especially in comparison with their general overrepresentation in more established areas of science and engineering. The reason for this is the Chinese cultural preference for staying away from anything deemed novel or risky, and sticking with things which are seen to be traditional or safe. My father was the perfect exemplar of this attitude. He refused to accept the rationale I offered for my interest in theoretical physics, namely that there is a deep connection between quantum mechanics and computer science which was largely unexplored, on the grounds that he “had never heard anyone say that”. (The implication that I was not anyone did not go unnoticed, either.) Clearly, if I wanted to do cutting-edge scientific research in certain areas, very few of my colleagues would be from a Chinese background, except for those who were highly Westernised. And yet my parents kept pressuring me to restrict my social circle to those of Chinese background only.

I could see for myself, both in high school and as an undergraduate in university, that every single one of my classmates who behaved according to my parents’ ideal did very poorly in school. I had no reason to believe that it would be any different in graduate school, whether it was in computer science or in engineering.

The top students in Engineering Science in my year came from a variety of backgrounds, but those of Chinese descent were underrepresented, while Iranians and Jews were overrepresented. In fact, the two students with the highest averages were a pair of Iranian guys who were cousins. The highest average in the class that was two years ahead of mine also belonged to an Iranian. This overrepresentation of Iranians among the best students in one of the top engineering programs in the West did not surprise me; it reminded me of the preponderance of German-American physicists during World War II, or of Russian-American scientists and mathematicians during the Cold War.

As I have written about previously, I chose to focus on control systems because this allowed me to study several subjects that I wanted to learn more about in a context that was acceptable to my parents. The demographics of my graduate school labmates was a bonus, because it meant that I could also learn Persian within the same environment. My Master’s thesis was based on previous work carried out by an Iranian former member of the lab, and I received a lot of help on my research from my Iranian labmates. Incidentally, my supervisor, Dr. Raymond Kwong, has a similar background to my parents. I had thought that, because of this, they would not criticise him — but they did anyway.

I had been studying information retrieval in languages written using variants of the Arabic script on my own, but my focus had moved away from Urdu because I was no longer in touch with Mrs. Mallo. Because of my labmates, I redirected my focus towards Persian. As I have mentioned previously, I added a section on the Persian language to my web site, but took it down just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks at my father’s insistence.

Despite the fact that my web site was unavailable, I continued to receive e-mails about some of the projects on it. Apparently, it continued to show up as one of the top results on text processing in the Perso-Arabic script in several search engines, and naturally there was now a lot of interest in this topic. After I restored the site (but without the non-English sections), I put up a page on processing various languages in LaTeX because it was one of my most popular requests.

Many people remarked to me at the time how marketable my skills had become, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was told that I would be the perfect candidate for many career paths and job openings which had suddenly become available. It reminded me of what people said to me in high school about my suitability for studying the physics of computation. But I had no formal qualifications in information retrieval or Islamic studies, though I did have some attributes which people with only book learning did not have: I had first-hand experience of fasting through Ramadan, and I had spent the past four years counselling students from Muslim backgrounds who were trying to reconcile their inherited beliefs with what they learned in university. Furthermore, my background was neither European nor Middle Eastern, and I was not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. The fact that the historical conflict between Christianity and Islam and the current turmoil in the Muslim world were “none of [my] business” was seen by everyone as something that worked in my favour.

I knew that there would only be a small window of time to take advantage of the opportunities which had become available to me. Others would soon act to fill the niches which had been opened, but I had a head start. Furthermore, I was studying Persian, rather than the too-obvious Arabic, which would buy me some time. After 9/11, I predicted that Iraq would fall and that Iran’s regional status, which had been kept in check by its archnemesis, would be elevated as a result, and that therefore knowledge of the Persian language would be in demand in a few years — a prediction that turned out to be correct. However, my actions were also constrained by the crippling restriction that whatever I did, it would have to be a part of “school”. Furthermore, I was in the middle of my degree, and I wanted to finish it first. But I planned my switch into computer science — which I had wanted to study in university in the first place — around my skills in information retrieval in Persian.

In graduate school, I started becoming a social hub again. Besides hanging out with Iranians while they spoke Persian to each other, I also went to see Bollywood movies in Little India with labmates and friends from South Asia. I had actually started watching Bollywood movies in high school to learn Urdu, and since I had studied Sanskrit (and hence Devanagiri) in university, it meant that I could also read Hindi. (If the previous sentence was confusing to you, see here.) My interest in Sanskrit was shared by Dr. W. Murray Wonham, Professor Emeritus, who remained quite active in the lab in spite of his official retirement.

I socialised with everyone without regard for cultural or linguistic barriers. Many graduate students seemed to socialise mostly with those from their own cultural backgrounds, not necessarily out of any prejudice towards anyone else, but mainly out of convenience and laziness. But because I wasn’t inhibited by either of these factors, I knew a lot of people and a lot of people knew me. I had an international reputation: whenever there was a visitor from Iran or India, I was someone they “had to meet”.

Now, one might argue that being able to recite Persian poetry and knowing a bit of Bollywood trivia are the wrong reasons for being famous in graduate school — but this didn’t matter. (For all I know, maybe Richard Feynman became such a famous physicist because he played the bongo drums.) The point is that I had opportunities to meet and potentially work with people which I never would have had if I had obeyed my parents and acted like a student from mainland China. The only reason that I didn’t take advantage of those opportunities was because I knew that my parents would simultaneously criticise me for associating with my colleagues while taking credit for any work I did with them. I suppose that this was a form of self-sabotage, and this kind of thing would become increasingly common throughout my career. (Having a harsh inner critic and acting in a self-injurious manner are traits common to people with abusive parents.) Meanwhile, my labmates who actually came from mainland China would express to me that they wished they were more social and had more connections, but lacked the proficiency in English and the confidence to make themselves noticed.

My busy social life in graduate school did not escape the notice of my parents, who once again began to attack me for being too popular. Considering that they had been attacking me throughout my undergraduate years for socialising primarily not with my classmates but rather with people who had nothing to do with my schooling, one would think that they would be happy that my social and academic lives had become re-integrated in graduate school.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in my life in that I kept encountering people who, for whatever reason, decided that I was extremely talented and volunteered to do whatever they could to help me make the most of my abilities. In the long term, I think that my parents’ continual efforts to separate me from these people have been far more damaging to my scientific career than their depriving me of any specific career opportunity. In elementary and high school, they always criticised my teachers, my friends, and my friends’ parents who supported and praised my interests, while demanding that I behaved like my Chinese classmates who had submissively allowed their imaginations to be suppressed and destroyed by their own parents. They accused Dr. Percy of diverting my attention to astrophysics which had “nothing to do with” computer science, when in fact he gave me an enormous head start with my scientific research. They continually blamed Mrs. Mallo for distracting me, when she was the one who enabled me to continue my studies after they had made it impossible to do any work around them. When I entered university, it was my affiliation with people who shared my interest in religion that allowed me to acquire the skills I would later need in graduate school, but my parents insisted that they were wasting my time. And in graduate school in engineering, it would be my Iranian friends who prepared me for my return to computer science by teaching me Persian. Ironically, it was my parents who had put me into an environment with so many Iranians to begin with when they forced me into an engineering program, but this didn’t stop them from criticising me for making the best use of this fact.

When I completed my Master’s degree, both Dr. Kwong and Dr. Wonham asked me to stay for the Ph.D. program. I felt very guilty about turning down the offer, but I had never intended to be an engineer in the first place, and I wanted to return to computer science as soon as possible. My parents had insisted that I obtained a postgraduate degree in engineering, and I had hoped that they would leave me alone to pursue my own interests once I had earned one — but I guess I knew that this would not be the case. My decision to leave was made easier by the fact that my father had started to really dislike my supervisor for no discernible reason (but my guess would be jealousy), and began to insult him and criticise my association with him. I knew that even if I had wanted to pursue a Ph.D. degree in engineering, there was no way I could do so while sustaining a continuous barrage of insults against my supervisor by my father. But I disappointed a lot of people by leaving engineering.

I searched for a way to switch into computer science and to do research into both information retrieval and quantum information theory. My parents had always accused me of being distracted and of dividing my attention, but this was my defense mechanism against being prevented by them from studying what I wanted to study. I knew that, at any moment and for no reason whatsoever, they could put an end to my research by forbidding me from continuing, and if I refused, then by continually criticising and threatening me until I was no longer able to continue. They had done this to me in high school, and I had compensated for my inability to continue studying theoretical computer science and physics by turning my attention to informational retrieval and religious studies. Every time my parents prevented me from being able to focus my attention on one subject, I would turn to another. This was how I survived their continual attempts to destroy my scientific career.

Incredibly, one university was a leader in both information retrieval and quantum information theory, and it was in Canada to boot: the University of Waterloo. Even more incredibly, the city of Waterloo was also home to two research institutes devoted to the topics that I cared most about. The first, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), was established by Mike Lazaridis, the founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM), to be a world class research facility devoted to theoretical physics. It fit the description of “a building full of astrophysicists” that I had predicted to my father I would one day be studying computer science in. The second, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), was founded by Jim Balsillie, the other co-CEO of RIM, to be a think tank on issues of international relations. (In fact, after the Perimeter Institute moved to its new location in late 2004, the two institutes were located just across the street from one another.)

I felt that it was an incredible stroke of good fortune that everything I wanted to study happened to converge in one place. Therefore, I came to Waterloo.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 2: my high school predictions about the future
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
3. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science

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

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
3. The causes of my depression, part 4: the Mentorship Program

But since that option was not yet available, I turned my attention to control systems. This allowed me to learn more about finite state automata and computational complexity, as well as certain topics in mathematics and physics, in a context which was acceptable to my parents. I was concerned that if they realised I was going to study some of the subjects which they had previously dismissed as “worthless” and “irrelevant” to my future, they would continually distract me with their criticisms and prevent me from continuing my studies. Fortunately, that did not happen — at least for a while.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 9: rolling with the punches
2. The causes of my depression, part 11: nothing in common with classmates
3. The causes of my depression, part 8: a “prestigious” degree

I set out to unofficially rectify this situation by engaging in conversations with a lot of people of various religions. I learned a lot of things through these conversations, and I think many others also learned a lot from me. I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of my activities, but I think that I played a rather vital and necessary role that nobody else could have filled. As a convert to Buddhism of Chinese descent, I was very different from just about everybody else. I could say and do things that would have been very inconvenient for anyone else to do. For example, political correctness more or less prevented those coming from mainstream European Judeo-Christian backgrounds from really intellectually challenging the religious beliefs of those from minority religions. On the other hand, believers in these religions were also somewhat defensive about what they perceived as attacks on or misunderstandings of their religions. I, however, could introduce ideas from the secular and skeptical but respectful scholarship of these religions to their followers without being automatically assumed to be some sort of imperialist or “Orientalist” (which, of course, would have been quite ironic).

I think that by far the most important thing I did while I was an undergraduate was to introduce the idea of secular critical scholarship of Islam and the Qur’an to the students of Muslim background with whom I spoke. Of course, I did not single out Muslims and discussed ideas about the academic study of religion with everyone. But this was a few years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and I think that no sane person can in retrospect deny that the world would probably have been a much better place if more engineering students in universities in free societies had spent less time trying to optimize their averages and more time learning about the rest of the world and helping to spread the hard-won culture of skeptical scientific inquiry. Years from now, nobody will care if my grade point average was slightly higher; but whether skepticism of religious authority takes root in the Muslim world will have an enormous impact on the future of the world.

At the time, however, my parents continually criticised my belief that it was important to introduce skepticism and ideas about the critical scholarship of religion to the Muslim world; among other things, they asserted that it was “none of [my] business”. I was encouraged, however, by my girlfriend at the time, who came from a Muslim background herself. She also believed that what I was doing was very important, and told me that I was “very brave” to have been doing it. Of course, when you’re a young man and your girlfriend keeps telling you how brave she thinks you are for doing something, you don’t stop doing it. So once again I ignored my parents’ wishes.

My purpose in telling the story above is to demonstrate that the belief of my parents, and others like them, that the only path to success is to do what is expected of you is utterly wrong. I have had numerous opportunities to contribute to the intellectual life of the university that I would never have had if I had obeyed them and did nothing but “study”. I think I still ended up with the highest or second highest average of all the students of Chinese background in Engineering Science in my year, in spite of “wasting my time” doing all sorts of “frivolous” things of which they disapproved.

One of these things was the processing of documents written in various languages, and specifically those written in some form of Arabic script. Things were really complicated, because Unicode had not yet become the norm. Furthermore, many of the people who produced documents in Arabic script were doing so from countries which were not as technologically advanced, and thus used older software formats which were obscure and difficult to parse. My father became very upset whenever he saw me with any books on the languages used in the Muslim world, and so I had to work on my project pretty much in secret. He kept saying that my interest in those languages was a “distraction” that had “nothing to do” with my studies. Of course, if he hadn’t expressed such vocal opposition to my interests, I could have participated publicly in projects such as Unicode, which I could have then added to my résumé. This is just one of many examples of how my parents’ efforts to discourage me from spending time on things they considered irrelevant to my studies actually prevented me from doing things which would later be important to my career.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 17: my “frivolous” web site and how I learned Persian
2. Being socially active is important to academic success
3. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 6: communications technologies and their effects on global politics

Because of my association with Buddhism, I began to meditate regularly. In fact, I took part in organising regular meditation sessions at the university. The practice gave me the strength to cope with my parents’ abuse. Naturally, as soon as they discovered what I was doing, they started to attack me for (what else?) “wasting my time”. Of course, it was not a waste of time, because without it I would have been unable to function entirely. But this was a pattern that would be repeated over and over again in my life: whenever I discovered any tool or method which helped me manage their abusive behaviour towards me, they would strive to take it away or neutralise its effectiveness by continually attacking me for using it.

In Toronto, I had a community that provided me with emotional support, and re-affirmed that support at regular intervals — and I had become a member of this community before my parents found out about it. When I was about to come to Waterloo, however, my parents pre-emptively ensured that I would not have such a community by harassing me about it before I even arrived, ordering me not to “waste my time” with such activities. Furthermore, while there were meditation sessions in Waterloo, groups of experienced meditators were few and far between, in comparison with Toronto, and so I never practised regularly. I think that one of the main reasons that my deterioration proceeded so rapidly once I became depressed in Waterloo was that I did not have the support of a community that met regularly for meditation.

I have written previously about how I had used desktop publishing software to put together my high school’s handbook and literary magazine. I have tried to keep abreast of the technology at each stage of the electronic publishing evolution, and so in university I put up a web site with some of my writings and a description of my interests. But I took it down almost right away because my father had somehow found it; I don’t know if he had searched for my name or if he had seen it on my computer. Nevertheless, I did experiment with publishing the newsletter of the Buddhist Student Association electronically, after I joined its publishing committee. Before that, it had been printed and distributed only physically. So my involvement with the Buddhist Student Association allowed me to continue to think about electronic publishing when it had nothing to do with my degree program.

And finally, being the President of the Buddhist Student Association meant that I took part in a lot of multifaith activities, such as interfaith dialogue and religious counselling. (There was no Buddhist chaplain at the University of Toronto when I started, though such a position would be created by the time I left, due largely to the efforts of some of my friends.) I have already alluded to this in a previous post. At that time, there was no secular humanist association at the university, or at least it was not very active, so I was the de facto “atheist” voice at multifaith religious events, which made for a lot of interesting incidents. (I have heard that nowadays the University of Toronto Secular Alliance is quite active.) I put “atheist” in quotes because there seems to be a lot of confusion about the relationship between Buddhism and atheism; I will probably write about this in later posts.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates
2. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
3. The causes of my depression, part 18: my parents blamed me for 9/11

Whether engineering students should have to take courses in non-technical subjects was a question that was often debated in the engineering department. Some of the professors and administrators believed that engineering students should be more “well-rounded”, and the department required so many non-technical electives as a pre-requisite to graduation. Students, on the other hand, often balked at this and complained that non-technical electives were a distraction from an already heavy workload, and that furthermore, many of them would never see the non-technical subjects they took ever again. There were certain “bird courses” which alleviated this to some extent.

I found that sitting in on non-engineering courses actually allowed me to better focus on the engineering ones. My theory is that this was due to a sort of “mental crop rotation”. I saw many of my classmates completely exhaust themselves trying to understand some bit of mathematics; whereas when I became stuck, I would, for instance, go and decipher a Sanskrit poem, and return to find that I had become mathematically unstuck in the meantime. I think that this was because the engineering courses really engaged only one part of the brain, and rather than stress out that one part, it was a better strategy to distribute the load more evenly. In any case, I managed to study a lot of linguistics, history, and religion, all the while maintaining decent marks in engineering.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
2. The causes of my depression, part 8: a “prestigious” degree
3. The causes of my depression, part 10: “the Machine”

I was taking Stephen Cook’s course on Computational Complexity and Computability at the time. In high school, when I was studying the exact same topics covered by the course, my father had called them “worthless” and had told me that if I didn’t stop “wasting my time” on them then I would never get into graduate school. And when I had defended myself by telling him that Gödel’s theorems and the P vs. NP problem were among some of the most important ideas in computer science, he screamed at me, “Then why haven’t I heard of them?” (The answer is obvious — but I held my tongue.) During my undergraduate years, however, my classmates and the upper year students were in agreement that a course on computational complexity theory was something one had to take if one wanted to enter graduate school in computer science.

This upset me in several ways. First, it was yet another instance of my parents having prevented me from studying ahead. Second, nobody seemed to care about whether the contents of the course were interesting or not; everyone spoke only in terms of whether it was needed for graduate school. This accentuated my belief that I was in the wrong environment. Third, I felt terrible about the fact that I was in a class taught by Stephen Cook himself, who of course is one of the big names in the field, but was unprepared to ask him any really intelligent questions. I felt that I would have been, if only my studies had not been continually disrupted by my parents. All of these things had already made me very bitter and concentration quite difficult.

The final straw came when my grandmother became very ill during that term, and passed away just days before a major test in that class. I asked Prof. Cook before the test not to count it towards my final grade, and he agreed. But I wrote it anyway, and because I had been studying ahead, I actually obtained a perfect score on it. The next test, however, I failed miserably. I went back to Prof. Cook and asked if I could drop this test instead of the previous one. He answered in the negative, which was quite reasonable, of course — he couldn’t very well allow students to choose which tests to drop after the fact. So not only did I drop a perfect test and end up lowering my final grade considerably, my only interaction with one of the major researchers in the field had been to haggle about marks. And, my grandmother had passed away. I couldn’t touch computational complexity for several years afterwards, and the topic still makes me somewhat depressed.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 11: nothing in common with classmates
2. The causes of my depression, part 8: a “prestigious” degree
3. The causes of my depression, part 7: my mother’s selfishness

While there were a few guys at the top of the class who were actually passionate about some specific subject, most of the rest of the class wanted only to memorise enough equations, and for long enough, to pass their tests and do well on their assignments. More than once, I have heard, “What are you still studying that for? We don’t need to know that any more (or, until the final exam).” I suppose that this isn’t a problem specific to engineering, but is a flaw inherent in the customary manner of dividing up the topics in a course into units, with an assignment or a test focusing only on the topics in that unit after it has been covered.

But the problem was exacerbated by the rapid succession of topics, due to the nature of the Engineering Science program; I think it would have been much less severe in a program focused on only one subject. In defense of the program, though, this “flaw” could actually be a feature: the ability to absorb new ideas rapidly, while being willing to discard or put aside ideas which are no longer of immediate relevance, is a useful skill in many careers.

But I think that the program provided a very poor environment for training someone who wanted to focus on theory. The theoretical parts of the computer science classes brought bitter complaints from my classmates. Their comments about Scheme and the λ-calculus reminded me of my father’s dismissive remarks about theoretical computer science: that they were “useless”, “silly”, and so on. I suppose that from their perspective they had a point, as most of them would be programming in C/C++ or Java when they graduated, if they continued to program at all. So even though we may have covered some of the same content taught in the computer science program, the environment was not socially conducive to studying those subjects, and I had a much more difficult time with them than I should have.

A large part of the reason I did so well in elementary school and high school was that I was surrounded by people who shared similar interests, whether it was classmates, older students, or teachers. In university, that advantage was removed from me by the fact that I was in a program that was completely unsuitable for someone with my interests and background.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. The causes of my depression, part 8: a “prestigious” degree
2. The causes of my depression, part 9: rolling with the punches
3. The causes of my depression, part 10: “the Machine”

Our friend was the most efficient person my brother and I had ever seen. We nicknamed him “the Machine”. He was absolutely methodical in everything he did, and his composure remained completely steady regardless of any deadlines or pressures. He also had one of the highest averages in the program, and his marks in many classes were higher than mine.

This actually worked to my advantage. Prior to this, my mother would continually criticise me for socialising with my classmates and claimed that they were just using me to improve their grades. But she spoke nicely of him, and would even ask after him, which was especially unusual since he wasn’t Chinese, but Indian.

Both from my personal experience and from conversations with my friends, it seems to be quite common for Chinese parents to criticise their children’s classmates who did not do as well in school as they did while praising those who did better. Presumably this is intended to encourage their children to improve their grades, but I think it actually has the opposite effect. I actually had a disincentive against raising my marks any higher, because I did not want my mother to go back to criticising me for associating with people who had lower marks than I did. So this is yet another example of something that authoritarian parents do which is completely counterproductive.

Most students try to maximize their marks, but I had this delicate balancing act. I had been forced into the program and therefore wasn’t particularly interested in most of the classes, and I had a disincentive against getting higher marks as mentioned above. So I didn’t put a lot of effort into my studying or homework. On the other hand, I couldn’t allow my marks to slip too much or I would risk drawing the ire of my parents; that, and my ego, forced me to make at least some amount of effort. But I felt very guilty about getting pretty high marks when some of my classmates who obviously worked a lot harder than I did were barely passing or even dropping out.

– davinci

Related posts:

1. My depression in Waterloo, part 9: exposed
2. The causes of my depression, part 9: rolling with the punches
3. The causes of my depression, part 11: nothing in common with classmates