The first thing that had an impact on my academic attitude that I can remember happened when I was just beginning school. In Hong Kong, report cards came not only with grades, but with a rank. Initially, I thought that the higher the number, the better — that’s just obvious, isn’t it? I wanted to see how high the number would go, so I studied really hard and, to my complete bafflement, my rank began to drop. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was somewhere between 1 and 10. So I asked my paternal grandmother what I should do to get to number 10. I thought that 10 was a really impressive number — because it had two digits! She laughed and explained that the best number is “number 1″. So I told her, “okay, from now on, I’m going to be number 1.” And I was! This is the first instance that I can remember of being really motivated to do something. I did it because of the reward — making my grandmother happy. I have always tried to keep my promise to my grandmother to be the best that I can be at what I do.

I begin with this story because authoritarian parents, such as my own, believe that children can be impelled by the threat of punishment. I have never observed this to work in my entire life, and I do not believe it is possible. My parents were very strict, and my father used to beat us when he felt that we had misbehaved. For example, once my maternal grandmother gave my brother and me some money, and we spent it on a comic book and a set of jigsaw puzzles. When my father came home, he screamed at us that we were wasting money and beat us with the back end of a feather duster. Even then, I understood that this was unjust. It was our money, and we could have spent it on far worse things. But it was always like this — whenever we crossed some boundary we weren’t supposed to cross, he would beat us, and we never had any prior warning.

I was born in Hong Kong two decades before its handover to the Communist government of mainland China (incidentally, on the birthday of Alonzo Church). Like many Hong Kongers, my family wanted to immigrate to the West. My paternal grandparents came to Canada before us, and settled in Whitby, which was a small town at the time. I visited them when I was two — my first trip abroad. When I was eight years old, my younger brother and I left for Canada to live with them while my parents remained in Hong Kong.

Of course, as immigrants, the first thing we had to do was adjust to the new environment. Fortunately, English was the official language of Hong Kong at the time, and we had learned it in school. Unfortunately, it was the Queen’s English, and I learned very quickly through embarrassment that the words “rubber” and “toilet” had different meanings than what I was used to! My parents had tried to control our television viewing in Hong Kong, but I had sneakily watched some American television while they weren’t around: “The Amazing Spider-Man”, “The Incredible Hulk”, and a few others. If my parents had known, I’m sure my father would have beat me. But here’s why punishment doesn’t work: I was motivated to watch television because I wanted to improve my English, so that I would be “number 1″ in my English class and to impress my grandmother in Canada, where I knew English was spoken. My disincentive was that I would be punished if I was caught. But this didn’t deter me — it only meant that I was careful not to get caught!

When my brother and I used to play in Hong Kong, he always insisted on being “the good guy”, and I accommodated him. It turned out that this actually worked to my advantage upon our arrival in Canada. “The Transformers” was all the rage among our Canadian classmates, and everyone else had the toy of Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots. Naturally, my brother wanted one as well, but it was sold out everywhere. On the other hand, I asked for and received the toy of Megatron, the leader of the opposing faction, the Decepticons, as a Christmas present. Now, Megatron transformed between a gun and a robot with a giant cannon mounted on his arm that is powered by a black hole — and of course his toy is the most awesomest toy ever made.

Incidentally, I also went to the library and got everything I could get my hands on about black holes. I had heard of the “theory of relativity” before from television or wherever, but I didn’t know what it was other than that it was some big important scientific concept. From then on I became interested in astrophysics and cosmology, and I started reading books on popular astronomy. I was eight years old at the time.

Anyways, in those days the laws on toy guns were quite lax, so I would bring Megatron to school every day. (Never mind the law — nowadays the school would get locked down and you will get arrested or maybe even shot!) It was an enormous hit and made me very very popular, because the twenty Optimus Primes on the schoolyard had no one to fight against. So I was always in demand. When my teacher told me to “put the toy gun away” after recess, my classmates immediately came to my defense: “Miss, that’s not any toy gun — it’s Megatron!”, “yeah, that’s right”, “it’s really cool”, etc. Even the girls! So of course I gave the teacher a demonstration of the transformation, and she agreed: “That is absolutely incredible!”

Now, normally, you don’t find something that pleases everybody. If kids liked something, it was a mystery to adults; and if adults thought something was cool, it was immediately uncool to the kids. And typically girls weren’t interested in “boy toys” like guns or transforming robots, but for some reason a gun that transforms into a robot really got their attention. (Make of that what you will — I’m sure Mr. Freud would have something to say about it.) So I learned that it actually pays to be different. You could be cool by doing what everyone else was doing — or you could be even cooler by doing what nobody else has done! This idea made a huge impact on me, and I think I was extremely fortunate for that epiphany. One of the traits which is commonly associated with gifted people is social awkwardness, and I never had it as a child, because I have never associated being different with rejection by my peers.

Actually, there were a few incidents where other kids tried to bully us, some racist taunts and so forth. But I think it was mostly the fact that we were new to the school. If we had been fat or had a lisp or whatever, the bullies would probably have made fun of that instead. So we got into a few fights, but we tried to avoid that whenever possible. Now, one time these two kids were following us during recess and calling us names. I think we were in grades three and two at the time, and they were in grade five or six, and in that age range there is a considerable difference in size. But these kids just would not leave us alone. So finally my brother and I jumped them and pummeled them into the ground. I mean that quite literally — it had been raining and the ground was soft and muddy, and after the fight the shapes of our opponents were imprinted into the ground, like in a cartoon. We were both pretty injured ourselves and got into trouble, and I broke my glasses, which got me a lot of flack at home, but the teachers understood that we were being bullied and were only defending ourselves. After that we had everyone’s respect in the schoolyard — we were heroes! And I also learned that bullies were really cowards, because once the fight started they wailed like babies, and I was never afraid of bullies after that.

Since we were away from our parents, my brother and I could watch television and read comic books. As new immigrants, we had to attend ESL classes. Most language textbooks are very poorly written: “this here is a verb, this is its past participle, yadi yadi yada”. I thought, “well, this is certainly a really stupid way to learn a language!” How we really learned English was by watching television and reading comic books, and talking about them with our friends. We were also really lucky to have had an enthusiastic ESL teacher, Ms. Graham, who read Robert Munsch to us. I realized then that most textbooks were useless — they were written for people who had no interest in a subject but were forced to learn it. But I wanted to advance my English. From then on, whenever there was a better way to learn something, I’d ditch my textbooks — and I soon found myself outpacing the rest of my class in every subject.

And I had an enormous head start in mathematics already. When I left Hong Kong, we had just learned multiplication, and I had deduced division based on the analogy with addition and subtraction. One day, my teacher asked the class to collect those little tabs that you get when you buy a bagged loaf of bread. She told us that we were going to learn some exciting mathematics in a few days. I really looked forward to it, and when the day came — we were going to learn how to count! This was in grade three. So the Hong Kong school curriculum was much more advanced in terms of mathematics. I also caught the attention of a teacher, Mr. Twilleger who was an amateur mathematician, and given additional personal tutelage.

Another thing that really helped us was that we had a personal computer in the house, which belonged to our uncle. This was a big thing back then — it was an IBM XT. He would allow us to use it when he was at work. I learned about telecommunications from spending a lot of time on BBSes, and a lot about programming by reverse engineering games with a debugger and assembler, and of course Boolean logic and binary hexadecimal numbers and so on. So I was already learning a lot about computer science even before computer science was commonly taught in schools.

Because my brother and I were so far ahead of our classmates, we were tested and diagnosed as gifted. I was transferred to another school, where coincidentally Mr. Twilleger had become principal. But it didn’t last very long, because our parents arrived shortly afterwards in Canada, and we moved to Mississauga to join them.

– davinci

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